No matter who you are or where you are from, one thing is for sure, you were born on a specific day. And this means that every year, you have a birthday. But birthdays aren’t just that day in the year that you get cake and presents. Birthdays hold both meaning and power. They are a profound spiritual event. Today, I am going to share with you this little-known aspect of birthdays. And because information is easier to digest this way, I’m going to break it down into points.
A birthday is actually a portal of extreme vulnerability and sensitivity for a person. Due to a great many factors, it holds the frequency of the moment your soul chose to fully cross from the non-physical realm and from a state of shared vessel into individual existence in the physical world. Spiritually, the veil between your nonphysical self and physical self, the physical realm and the spiritual realm is thinnest on this day. This means you are very sensitive on this day. To the positive, this means you are highly receptive to inner knowing, intuition, divine downloads, ancestral messages, otherworldly contact etc. To the negative, this openness also makes you vulnerable to the taking on of collective suffering, negative influence, unconscious negative projection from others, stress absorption, being drained by energy vampirism, absorption of unresolved ancestral lineage trauma, identity confusion and total ungroundedness. It disrupts your everyday defense mechanisms.
The days leading up to and immediately following your birthday are a kind of energetic liminal space. It is a yearly death-rebirth cycle. You are dying to your old self before the new version of you is fully integrated. This tends to make a person feel a backdrop of disorientation and exposure. By sitting with the discomfort, tenderness, and raw emotion of your birthday, you allow yourself to shed past-year stuff and receive the blueprint for your next evolution. Because your personal "veil" is so thin on your birthday, you become a sponge for both positive and negative forces. Certain cultures around the world actually understood this. In fact, in early European and Pagan traditions, a birthday was not a time of triumphant celebration like it is today; instead, it was viewed as a highly dangerous transition day. So much so that they held symbolic rites to ward off darkness and predatory negative entities around a person on their birthday.
This extreme vulnerability portal and with it, the fact that you are a sponge to energies on your birthday is the main reason why it is so important to be so very intentional about how you spend your birthday. It is not “just any other day”. You can take advantage of this thin veil/thin skin moment in time. Your internal and external walls are down. It is a golden moment for bypassing the usual blockages that your own ego presents. You can receive direct universal guidance. You can shed what no longer serves you in a dramatic way. You can really get in touch with your personal truths. You can choose who you want to become. You can program new habits, beliefs, and identities into your psyche because your old psychological defenses are temporarily offline. Prayers, manifestations, and intentions set on this day act like a direct cosmic broadcast. This is why making a wish on a birthday candle is no symbolic act. It is supercharged intention, which sets you and everything around you on a track to manifestation. And just as you are vulnerable to drains, you are equally open to receiving massive influxes of love, abundance, and positivity. Caretake this vulnerability on your birthday. Be intentional about what you do and who you are around at this time. Especially the three days before your birthday, the day of your birthday and three days after your birthday.
Your birthday is your solar return. A birthday marks the exact moment the Earth completes one full loop around the sun from the day you were born. It is an astronomical milestone, not just some human created calendar date. Your body has internal clocks tied to this planet that you live on and tied to the celestial bodies in this universe. On your birthday, there is an exact moment that the sun returns to the precise degree it was at your birth. This creates a recurring energetic alignment that is unique to your personal geometry. This cosmic alignment also floods your energetic field with intense, raw solar power. When you are flooded with this specific energy in such a personal way, it creates a purge. It is a major spiritual purifier. It essentially burns away non beneficial energy. It forces old, dense, and unexpressed things from the past year to rise to the surface to be cleared. This is often why people feel emotionally flooded before and during their birthday. The solar energy acts as a magnifier of what needs to be changed and purged. Unfortunately, this means if you are feeling disconnected from a meaningful purpose, or maybe unsupported by the people in your life, your birthday will magnify that sense of separation. You may feel a sudden, unexplainable urge to retreat, stay quiet, or weep. This is not a bad thing; it is the soul clearing things it is carrying from the previous year.
The intensity of the solar energy you are receiving overpowers your everyday psychological coping mechanisms. It dissolves the ego defense matrix. This enhances the vulnerability we talked about in our previous point. Your armor drops, leaving you completely exposed. This influx of solar energy also positively re-sets your solar plexus chakra. The solar plexus chakra is the center of personal power and personal identity. Because of this, it is directly related to personal willpower, ego/personality, personal freedom, confidence, proactivity, responsibility, reliability, self-esteem, authenticity, personal honor and integrity, ethics, confirmation, a sense of personal control and personal choice. It can transform inertia into movement.
The solar return is also when the “cosmic new year" begins specifically for you. Your personal universe operates on its own axis and this day is your personal January 1st or your personal Vernal equinox if you go by that calendar instead. This means your personal timeline resets. The day you were born, the planets stamped a specific energetic geometric blueprint into the fabric of space-time. Every year on your birthday, the sun retriggers that exact initial geometric code. This creates a massive influx of life force energy that triggers a new cycle of expansion. And that cycle of expansion usually brings with it a specific theme. A theme which will play out over the coming year. To give you just a few examples of thousands of potentials, maybe it’s designing a life according to what is truly good for you rather than following societal templates or mastering intimacy in relationships or building financial abundance or cultivating introspection and inner insight or destruction of what no longer serves or achieving a state of health etc.
Given that your birthday is your solar return, your personal new year, it is literally the ideal time to do what you would do on a new year. Why? Because your birthday naturally initiates (or shall I say forces) a spiritual audit. It is a time to reassess your life. To re-orient. To re-define. To shed past limitations, to clear out the old, to clean your physical space, to get a new look, to settle debts, to release emotions that you have been suppressing, to burn regrets, to set new intentions, goals and resolutions. It is a time to intentionally set the energetic blueprint for the new year cycle you are stepping into. It is a time to orient yourself with the north star of your personal purpose for being. What you want to do with the minutes, hours and days of your life.
Human attention creates real energy. When you and the people around you pause to recognize your existence, it creates an energetic, psychological, emotional and physical focal point. This is a really big deal when you combine this with the last two points we touched on. When people gather specifically for you, that normally scattered individual consciousness energy consolidates. This combined focus builds a temporary energetic field centered entirely on your existence. Now it is easy to see that this could go one way or the other or anywhere in between in terms of the effect it will have on you. It depends what energy, what thoughts, what behaviors and what actions are coming towards you. From you towards you and from others towards you. If you have a mother who cannot tolerate you having all the attention or who is triggered by the fact that your birthday is a reminder of her own advancing age, the way that she will be contributing to this energetic grid around you, is going to have a negative effect on you. It is going to be like being energetically poisoned on the day you are most vulnerable and are being re-set. To the contrary, if your mother goes the extra mile to make sure to sentimentally declare how much she adores you, the way she is contributing to this energetic grid around you is going to have a positive effect on you. If you have a friend who puts in minimal effort to send an obligatory text or who forgets your birthday completely, it is going to have a negative effect on you. If you have a friend who sends a text because they really want you to know that you matter to them and they remember the importance of this day or if you have a friend who gives you a gift that says “I really know you and your pleasure matters to me”, it is going to have a positive effect on you.
A birthday is personal. It impacts you on a very personal level. You are actually being impacted by every element of this cocktail of focused energy. To be as intentional as possible about this and to be around people who are also intentional about this, is important. The good news? A birthday is an epic opportunity in this regard. We can use it as a day to literally shower a person in positive energies and establish an energetic grid around them that nourishes them, that cradles them, that pulls them in, that protects them, that makes them feel good, that charges their self-concept, that strengthens their relationships, that shows them their own importance and the list goes on. They then carry this energy into the next year and into their life in general over the course of their life.
Conception brings you into physical existence, but birth brings you into a form of separation and individual existence. Birth is the severing of a shared vessel. Taking that initial independent breath anchors your soul into an individual existence on earth. The severing of that shared vessel allows you to develop an independent ego, unique desires, and the personal agency required to traverse your own destiny. This primal separation (depending on how your birth went as well as your initial experiences with being separate in this way) was more or less shocking. For many of us, this could be a wound or a trauma. This initial shock sets a baseline template for how you handle transitions, endings, and sudden changes later in your life. Birth can also be what plunged you into the existential weight of human loneliness. Whatever the case may be, there is an echo of this initial experience of coming into individual existence that resounds on every birthday. Your body and being holds onto the somatic memory of this experience.
Your birthday also naturally forces you to face your own individuality. And in turn, it triggers an unconscious assessment of your current attachments and connections. It causes you to re-evaluate your relationships. This assessment will naturally happen on its own. Everything that happens at this time will become part of the testing process of your bonds. All this said, celebrating your birthday in an intentional way can anchor a sense of existential security, by reconnecting to the truth that you are intentionally here, you have a purpose for being and you are held by a larger cosmic plan. Every birthday, you revisit the specific vibrational frequency of your soul's incarnation. This pushes you to recommit to and re-align with your life's mission.
Your birthday is not just a day that has impact on you. It especially effects families. Your birthday triggers and energetic ripple across your entire ancestral line. Both those that are physical and nonphysical. Before you were born, for nine months, your entire family line held you in a state of internal preparation. When you were born, your ancestors and living family members switched from carrying the promise of you to the manifestation of living legacy and to the manifestation of a new relationship. The moment any baby is born, including you, the entire structural matrix of the family changes instantly. And this new child introduces the new frequencies, perspectives, and healing necessary for the progression of that family’s consciousness.
Your birthday each year, effects your entire family line. The primary mechanism for this, is that your own personal frequency is amplified. Given that a new child introduces the new frequencies, perspectives, and healing necessary for the progression of that family’s consciousness, you could see a person as a kind of medicine. On your birthday, the medicine of you is activated within the web that is your family tree. Your energy is for lack of a better way of putting it, forced to throb out into the family line, which can dose the family line (and specific family members) with much needed medicine and/or which can trigger resistance to that medicine. As such your birthday can activate negative or positive loyalty patterns in your family. It can open the door for healing opportunities where there were closed doors before. It can break transgenerational cycles. It can activate trauma holdovers. It can create existential crisis amongst specific family members. It can reveal family patterns that are no longer serving. It can enhance family bonds. It can re-shuffle or re-establish the hierarchy within a family line. It can magnify systemic pressures within the family line. And so much more. This means birthdays are actually a very powerful portal for transgenerational and ancestral healing.
But let’s continue. A mother’s body retains a physical ledger of pregnancy and labor and is connected to you in ways that modern science has not yet fully discovered. Your mother physically carries you inside her forever in some ways. For example, during pregnancy, fetal cells cross the placenta and nestle into the mother’s organs, including her heart and brain, staying there. From one perspective, your mother is literally a chimera containing your physical DNA. Your birthday serves as a biological checkpoint where her system reacts to the ongoing expansion and evolution of you. Even when you are outside of her as a separate being, she experiences you inside of her for the rest of her existence. This is a big reason why you hear so many stories about moms knowing exactly what is going on with their child, even when they are nowhere near each other. As your birthday approaches, her nervous system and cells undergo an involuntary, somatic birth anniversary reaction. She also experiences an internalized reflective event of whatever is going on with you on your birthday. On top of this, it can trigger the experience of the trauma of separation and also loss of you in her. As you grow older, each birthday represents you taking a step further away from the shared vessel experience. Because of this, your birthday can trigger a subtle grief and vulnerability in her. She is forced to grapple with her changing level of relevance in your ever more independent life. She is also forced to come to terms with her own aging timeline. All this is to say that your birthday is a big deal for everyone in your family line, whether they are conscious of it or not and whether they act like it or not.
Your birthday is a day when YOU are amplified. Your unique self. Your energetic signature. Your “self” is a combination of a great many things. Your personal energy, thoughts, perspectives, feelings, strengths, aptitudes, talents, intentions, qualities etc. Because you are amplified on your birthday, the words you say and actions you take have a bigger ripple effect on people around you. Your thoughts and intentions bring about manifestation much faster than usual. This means there is a seldom recognized outflowing or giving dimension to your birthday. It is actually one of most potent days for you to project your energy outward. And to give. For this reason, many mystics often spend their birthday doing the reverse of what you might expect. Rather than receiving presents, they give them. Rather than soaking in blessings, they offer them. Rather than consuming, they create. Rather than being on the receiving end of kindness, they practice charity. They make use of the fact that the volume is turned up on their personal energy and they channel that energy outward towards others. To use a metaphor, because your personal cup is overflowing with amplified energy on your birthday, you naturally radiate power (the power of your personal medicine) outward. And a little-known fact is that giving from a place of amplified power causes an even greater level of abundance to flow back to you in the coming year. The question on your birthday is: What do you want to do with your energy? What do you want to do with the medicine of you?
Hopefully now you understand why despite all the social pressure to feel blissfully happy, you often don’t feel blissfully happy on your birthday, nor “should” you necessarily feel this way. Hopefully now you understand that your birthday is just the peak of a whole transition period that you undergo every year. Hopefully now you understand that changing your age by one digit can actually change alot about your day-to-day reality. It is a special day and time and it absolutely warrants doing something differently, doing something special. It is important to celebrate your existence. You are a completely irreplaceable data point in the history of the universe. A unique creation that will never be replicated. That (and therefore you) deserves to be honored in some way that does not make your birthday just any other day.
What does it mean to be functional? Commonly, it means that a person is capable of independently managing their day-to-day life, personal care and work. That they can maintain normal daily behaviors. We tend to judge the severity of how ok or not ok a person is (even how healthy they are) by their level of functionality. But with this, we are in the dark ages. Functionality should not be used as the metric for how ok or not ok someone is and it should not be used as the metric for how healthy someone is. In fact, functionality is blinding us to the reality of ourselves and the reality of others.
Let’s start this discussion with two truths. The first truth is: Just because someone is functional, doesn’t mean that they are using healthy strategies to be functional. The second truth is: Many people remain functional despite being really bad off. Even potentially worse off than other people who become nonfunctional.
Let’s dive deeper into truth number one. Just because someone is functional, doesn’t mean that they are using healthy strategies to be functional. Just because someone is functional, doesn’t mean they are actually doing what is good/right/what actually works for them and others. We so often think that someone is doing something good and right (something that works), because at face value, they are high functioning. They can perform daily activities, they can live independently from others, they can hold down a job, maybe even a difficult job and they can keep their emotions under control, all despite fill in the blank with some factor that challenges a person’s capacity to do so. Such as despite losing a loved one or despite being ill or despite being harmed by others. But here is the thing, functioning is not about thriving. It is about surviving. And as if this were not bad enough, surviving is often accomplished through dysfunctional means.
A nervous system that is severely out of whack can get stuck in fight or flight mode and push someone to power through and stay functional, bulldozing past internal red flags and depleting energy reserves to the point that illness manifests. Cardiovascular strain, burnout, systemic inflammation, gastrointestinal distress, serious decline in mental health etc.
People often use functionality as a mask to hide what is going on with them from the world. When they do this, they rely on demonstrations of functionality such as high performance or non-reactivity to hide underlying physical, emotional or mental health problems. By doing this, they consciously or subconsciously deflect attention away from their difficulties. Over time, this intense pressure to look "fine" causes a disconnect from the authentic self and often leads to a particular type of collapse of functionality which we know as burnout.
People often use functionality as an avoidance mechanism in and of itself to avoid facing the actuality of what is going on with them. When people do this, they tend to focus all of their energy into executing highly controlled, productive behaviors so as to get away from the distress they are experiencing. This creates the illusion of stability. For example, a person may immerse themselves entirely in a job to avoid confronting personal grief, relationship issues, a serious health issue or loneliness. This tangible functionality acts as a shield. It makes the person appear highly driven rather than escapist or emotionally overwhelmed. It means they can avoid the reality of themselves and no one will be reflecting to them that anything is off, rather they will be praised and commended.
Often times functionality requires a kind of internal detachment. It often means disconnecting from one's own internal cues. If someone is constantly overriding their body’s need for rest, boundaries, or emotional processing, they are not doing what actually works for them long-term.
Functionality is SO often accomplished through unhealthy and dysfunctional coping mechanisms. Here are some examples of what I mean. A person may suppress their emotions so as to be functional. A person may use toxic positivity and reframe everything, so that they are wildly out of reality so as to be functional. Meticulous scheduling, constant organizing, or controlling external environments provides a false sense of security that everything is "handled," allowing the person to be functional at face value but to ignore deeper emotional vulnerabilities. A person might over-analyze their feelings or read endless psychology books in order to mentally distance themselves from actually feeling the emotional pain they are in, but it makes them appear very functional. A person may channel all of their available time and energy into fixing the problems of others or even on focusing excessively on a partner, child, or pet. This outwardly noble behavior, which makes someone seem very functional serves as a distraction; keeping the focus away from their own unmet needs. A person may stay busy constantly. When someone is busy, thy are functional by definition, even overly functional. But they are dismissing uncomfortable thoughts and feelings and truths by constantly staying busy. While this protects their ego in the short term, it creates additional stress, keeps them stuck in the wrong situations in life and prevents their personal growth. A person may totally disown their temporal self, identifying entirely with a spiritual persona which appears not only functional, but enlightened. Way more than ok. But really, it is an extreme form of self-abandonment. A person may doom scroll every day, which causes them to slip into a mild shutdown state to avoid overwhelm. Each swipe delivers a small surge of dopamine, keeping the brain in a state of perpetual anticipation. This chemical reward feedback loop keeps the individual hooked on their device in a way that mimics productive activity. These strategies may get a person to the next day but it leads to issues and you can’t truly call it functional or healthy. We need to get in the habit of looking at the strategies that a person is using to appear or even to be functional and question whether that strategy is actually in alignment for them and for the people around them.
Now, let’s dive deeper into truth number two. Many people remain functional despite being really bad off. Even potentially worse off than other people who become nonfunctional. It is actually not true that the person who has a full collapse and becomes nonfunctional is the person who is in the most amount of pain, was the most damaged and is worse off. There are a lot of factors that play into a person being nonfunctional vs. another person being functional despite what they are struggling with.
When overwhelmed by chronic stress or trauma, the nervous system enters different survival states. Some people’s nervous systems completely shut down to protect itself. Other people’s shift into a high energy sympathetic dominance state. If the brain thinks that stopping, collapsing and becoming nonfunctional will result in immediate destruction (e.g., a terrifying parent's wrath, abandonment, loss of something dear, starvation), it will force a functional freeze to keep the body moving. If the brain thinks that no amount of effort can change the outcome, it gives up and drops into a full collapse. Even the specific nature of a person’s crisis and what emotions it gives rise to changes whether the person remains in hyper arousal or collapse.
Each person has drastically different conditioning and childhood experiences, which really play a role in how their nervous system in conditioned and which dictate their responses to challenges, distress and functionality in general. These early experiences shape how a person handles stress and therefore how functional they behave. For example, if a person was only praised for achievements, good grades, or being "the strong one," their brain views non-functioning as an existential threat. They will destroy their health to maintain their functionality. Also, some children experience high functioning trauma. Say a child grew up in a home environment that was structurally or financially unstable with an explosive, unpredictable, or highly critical parent. They learned to read micro-expressions and anticipate needs to prevent an emotional blowout. In adulthood, this person enters relationships (both romantic and professional) where they act as the therapist and fixer. They are highly functional at managing crises, reading rooms, and de-escalating tense situations, no matter how they feel or what they are going through. This adult is praised for being incredibly organized, detail-oriented, and excellent at project logistics. However, their functionality is fueled by terror.
If a child grew up in an environment where they needed to be the “strong one” because failing to be strong meant the situation becoming worse, they learn over time to handle immense amounts of pressure and pain without crying or flinching. However, they possess a severe inability to ask for help, receive care, or show vulnerability. They view their own tears or needs as a dangerous weakness that will cause everything around them to collapse. So, they will remain functional where others would buckle under the ½ the pain and ½ the struggle.
If the childhood home was one of dysfunction, chaos, violence, immature parents, role reversals between parents and children or high-needs siblings. A child may realize that adding any demands (like expressing sadness, needing school supplies, or being sick) caused the system to break. They learned that the safest way to exist was to require zero maintenance. In their life, they are the employee who gets all their work done flawlessly, never complains, never asks for a raise, and never creates conflict. While highly functional, they often remain functional despite being a complete mess.
It is important to remember that people who grew up feeling they could only rely on themselves often become high-functioning adults. They link their safety to functionality and force themselves far past limits to maintain functionality.
To the contrary, if a child frequently tried to stand up for themselves, voice their needs, or fix a problem, but was repeatedly overpowered, ignored, or severely punished for doing so, the brain learns that mobilization equals danger. This means, even when faced with far less difficulty, pain and struggle than perhaps another person, their brain skips fight/flight entirely and goes straight into a helpless, non-functional collapse because it assumes effort is futile. In families where parents are emotionally absent or checked out, a child's cries and bids for connection go completely unanswered. Without an active, responsive caregiver to help co-regulate, the child's nervous system learns to handle overwhelming stress by numbing out and shutting down to save energy. As adults, they run out of energy very quickly and default to a collapsed state, even in response to comparatively very little. When parents are hyper-controlling, overprotective, or constantly tell a child, "You can't do anything right," "Let me do it," or "Why are you so stupid," they systematically erode the child's sense of self-efficacy. Because they never developed internal trust in their own capability, even relatively mild adult stressors trigger a massive wave of shame and overwhelm. And this instantly impacts their functionality.
On top of this, people experience different levels of support. It is a reality that certain people face privileges others do not which influences how much they feel they MUST function at all costs. External resources often dictate how long someone can afford to keep forcing functionality. Some people have access to resources others do not have, which takes pressure and distress off of them. This acts as a buffer that allows them to remain more functional than those without these resources. To the opposite, because some people have access to resources in the form of some kind of support, they can actually afford to collapse and be non-functional. In fact, these individuals have never been in a position where the stakes are so high, they are forced to “do or die”. They can fall apart at level six or seven and experience that as their absolute limit because they never HAD to reach level ten and stay functional. For others, the financial or social stakes of collapsing and becoming nonfunctional are too high. If pausing or collapsing means immediate homelessness, losing custody of children, or total abandonment, the survival instinct will force the body to function long after it has run out of fuel. They will push past level ten. Any resource that acts as a buffer for a person can add to a person’s ability to stay functional and to the opposite can allow for a person to collapse when under stress, rather than push through to stay functional.
People who cannot function hit a visible breaking point that forces them to get help. Functional people keep pushing forward, allowing internal damage, chronic stress, or trauma to accumulate long past safe limits. Because a person still goes to work, pays the bills, and cares for others, society assumes they are fine. This lack of validation leaves them incredibly isolated, with friends and family missing the warning signs completely. This is all too common with people who commit suicide, especially when the people around them say they “never saw it coming.”
When someone is non-functional, the struggle is outward. It is disruptive, but it signals an immediate need for intervention. Their crisis is visible, forcing them or others to seek support. When someone remains functional while being really not ok, the struggle is entirely inward. It allows the underlying issues to quietly rot away at a person's well-being while everyone around them thinks they are thriving. Their struggles stay invisible and they do not get the support they actually need.
There is another dimension to this that must be mentioned. We often assume that if someone is functional, they are a thumbs up. I see this all too often when it comes to parents. We get that a parent that is nonfunctional due to illness or cognitive impairment or drug addiction or severe poverty is not able to be a good parent. But we think that a parent who is functional (even more so if they are successful) is able to be a good parent. When this is the case, we are using functionality as our metric for whether someone is a good parent or not. Many parents are functional. They hold secure jobs, they keep up appearances, they have success habits, they can provide their children with food and clothes and toys and a roof over their head. And yet, this functionality is hiding profound dysfunctionality, destructive patterns, neglect and abuse. Super functional people can be horrible parents. But it becomes a gaslight where no one can see the damage being done to the children because the parents appear to be so functional.
The moral of the story is just because someone is functional does not mean they are ok. Just because someone is functional, doesn’t mean they are healthy. Just because someone is functional and another person is not, doesn’t mean that the functional person is better off than the one who is not. Just because someone is functional, doesn’t mean that they are using healthy strategies to be functional. Functionality tells you that a person is successfully meeting the external demands of their environment, including human society. How functional someone is tells you absolutely nothing about the internal cost, suffering, health or sustainability of how they are meeting those demands. Just because you are striving to be like that functional person you see online doesn’t mean they are actually doing well in life. Just because someone is functional, doesn’t mean they are actually doing what is good/right/what actually works for them and others. The moral of the story is throw away functionality as your metric for wellbeing. And most of all, don’t let functionality be your blind spot.
Words have power. One of the powers they have is the power to make someone feel loved. Words of Affirmation is one of the ways that human beings express and receive love. And certain individuals feel especially loved when they are given words of affirmation. So, let’s look at words of affirmation in depth and learn how to express love through words.
Expressing love through words is about verbal compliments, praise, encouragement, reassurance, validation, appreciation and speaking well of a person to others. It is also about written (especially hand written) messages of the same nature. With words of affirmation, you are using language to demonstrate love. But with this way of expressing love, it can be very helpful to stop thinking solely about demonstrating love. Love is one of those words that is used to represents a whole host of different things and so it feels quite nebulous for most people. With words of affirmation, you are looking to say positive things to them or about them that make them feel good. Words that make them feel valued, appreciated, wanted, secure, safe, trusted, believed in, seen, recognized, encouraged, empowered, esteemed, special, energized, included, relieved, supported, like they belong, comforted, cherished, committed to and admired etc.
When the meaning behind words matters a lot to someone and so, the primary way they receive love is through words of affirmation, negative words are the great un-doing of a relationship with them. Negative words to them (or about them) tend to make them feel unloved, deeply anxious, not valued, unwanted, pushed away and horrible about themselves. To give you some examples of what the antithesis of this love language is, think criticism, insult, silent treatment, sarcasm, withholding of positive verbal response, empty flattery, manipulative flattery, passive aggressive comments, robotic and automatic scripts, broken promises, distracted listening, forgetting what they say, unattuned verbal responses, backhanded compliments, complaints, jokes at their expense and failing to express love verbally because you assume they should know how you feel about them.
There is a real vulnerability when it comes to receiving and expressing love. When a person receives love in a specific way, their heart is open towards that way of receiving love. And this open door can be used to manipulate someone through that specific way of showing love. With words of affirmation, when someone is starving for praise, validation, affirmation and to feel valued, it is as if their emotional tank needs those specific words to feel full. Because of this, they are often much quicker to believe them. They want and sometimes deeply need the words to be true, so they swallow them, even if those words are laced with poison. Their desperation for words of affirmation can make them blindly trusting and easy to mislead. When you give them the exact words they want to hear, their defenses instantly drop. The good feeling that they get from a compliment or an apology can easily blind them to actions that don't match up with the words being spoken. They place a high value on what is spoken, so they assume other people do too, which just isn’t always the reality. It is critical to caretake this vulnerability rather than exploit it. To be in alignment expressing love with words of affirmation, you need to hold yourself accountable to never manipulating or misleading the person you care about just by saying the right things to them.
Now, here are some tips for how to show love through words of affirmation.
If you find that you have any resistance to expressing your love through words of affirmation, instead of bulldozing that resistance, resolve that resistance first. If there is some part of you that is in opposition to expressing your love through words, you are likely to just not do it, effectively starving the person on the other side. Whatever the reason is that you may have resistance to expressing your love with positive words, you need to become aware of it and work to resolve it.
Don’t wait for special occasions. Think about sprinkling deposits into the emotional bank account throughout every day. These little ‘throughout the day’ deposits can be things like leaving sticky notes with loving things written on them for them to find, sending them texts at random times, giving them compliments, noticing and verbally appreciating little things they do and saying I love you with real intention, not just casually like most people do.
Switch from generic praise to specific praise. Name the exact detail that you appreciate instead of using broad, everyday phrases. This will make the words hit harder. Generic praise usually comes in the form of common, autopilot phrases like "You look great" or "Good job." Specific praise describes the exact action, trait, or moment that made you feel positive towards or about them. For example, instead of saying "you look nice," say, "That color looks absolutely amazing on you." Instead of saying “Thanks for taking care of the house”, get specific by saying “Thank you so much for watering the plants and organizing the mail today.” Instead of saying “You’re supportive”, say “I love how patient you are when things get stressful.” Anyone can say "You look nice," but saying "That shade of blue makes your eyes pop" shows you really, really looked at them.
Remember everything they say. Remember old conversations. And then bring up those exact details they said in later conversations or actions. Circle back to previous conversations. Reference their ideas. Quote them. This is the ultimate proof that 1. You were listening, which proves to them that you care. 2. You get that what they say matters. When words matter to a person, their own words matter and they need those words to matter to you. Let the details they share today become a part of the specific compliments you give them tomorrow. Remembering that they told you they love a certain food or fear a certain thing lets you support them well in the relationship. A pro tip is to keep a log of the things they mention. People share dozens of details a day and it is hard to remember everything. So, keep a log of things to remember. Write down things like their favorite foods, things, places, and people. Experiences they love or would love to have. Things they want to do. Their shoe size, bad things that happened to them, their fears, the names of their childhood pets, upcoming stressful dates etc. And do so right after they mention them. This will serve as a great reference for you to use.
Use words to establish a sense of relationship security for them. They want to hear words that say that their relationship with you is safe, solid, and secure. This means use “we” language, remind them of your commitment to them, express words that make them feel that you want them, value them, need them and choose them. And when anything happens that might make them fear a loss of security in the relationship, such as an argument or if they make a mistake or fail, reassure them of the security of the relationship and/or that you still see them in a positive light. For example, if they fail, say, "I am still so proud of you, and this one mistake doesn't change how talented you are.” Or if you get into an argument, say "I am upset right now, but I still love you and we are going to fix this."
Use words to encourage and empower them. To do this well, you want to think of yourself as being their cheerleader when they are pursuing goals, facing challenges, or are feeling insecure. Celebrate their wins. Be the loudest, most enthusiastic person in the room when they achieve something. Push them toward their dreams and verbally demonstrate your belief and faith in them. Say, "You are incredibly talented, and you should absolutely go for that new opportunity." Be their anchor when they are in doubt. When they say "I can't do this," look them in the eye and say, "I know for a fact that you can." Praise them in any way that puts them in touch with their own power, significance, confidence, excellence and capability.
Speak well of them to others and in front of others. Pro tip: Let them overhear you. Hearing that you spoke well of them or better yet, directly hearing you praise them in front of other people, gives them a massive boost of confidence. It publicly validates their worth and it builds a beautiful cocoon of loyalty around them. Brag about them. Talk them up. Compliment them to your friends. Post positive social media posts about them. Defend them. When you speak well of them in front of others, it makes the praise feel twice as real. When you praise someone in private, they might think you are just being amicable. When you do it in public, they know you truly mean it. You are telling the world, "I am proud to be associated with this person." It shows that your private relationship matches your public one, especially your public loyalty.
Master the art of the hand written letter. While any kind of letter, be it over text or e-mail counts as love and goes a long way with people, a hand written letter is the ultimate, tangible proof of love for someone who receives love with words. It demonstrates effort. You took a long moment out of your busy day just to think about them and communicate to them. The fact that you wrote it by hand means you intentionally set aside a time of no screens and no distractions, only pure focus on your positive feelings about them. Your unique handwriting makes the letter feel intimate and close and deep. It lasts forever because they can save the note in a box, a drawer, or a book and pull it out to re-read it on a bad day.
You cannot always give positive feedback in a relationship. Every healthy relationship requires negative feedback, hard conversations, corrections, uncomfortable truths, boundaries and arguments. For someone who feels loved especially through words of affirmation, this can feel like a train crash. The way to handle this is to wrap the negative thing you are sharing inside a thick layer of safety, reassurance, and respect. Give explicit reassurance of the security of the relationship and of their value. During an argument or fight, their brain tells them, "They are yelling at me, which means they don't love me anymore." The key is to get out ahead of them regarding the terrible thing they could be making things mean and to actively speak against that terrible meaning or fear. For example: I am really mad right now, but I want you to hear me say that I am not going anywhere." Or “we are having a really sucky conversation, but we are still a team”. One of the low hanging fruits you can use for this is the sandwich technique. This is where you put the negative feedback in the middle of two strong pieces of positive reassurance. For example: "I love you so much, and you are my favorite person to spend time with. That being said, lately when you seem to want to spend more time with your friends than you do with me, I feel unimportant to you and hurt. I want us to stay close, so can we try to schedule time for just us during each week?
Another important thing is to prepare them before you deliver potentially painful words. Blindsiding a person with a complaint when their guard is down, makes the painful words penetrate deep. It can also make them feel attacked. Preparing a person verbally gives them time to brace their emotions. To do this, you can ask permission to share something that won’t feel so good. You can tell them that you need to share something with them, but are afraid about how they are going to take it. You can also decide on setting aside a specific time together for negative feedback, so it happens in a container. For example: I need to share something that has been bothering me, when is a good time for this to happen?
Be careful of your tone and volume. For people whom words of affirmation really matters, a harsh, sarcastic, or shouting tone of voice hits just as hard as the actual words you use. A calm, soft voice signals to their brain that they are not in physical or emotional danger. Sarcastic jabs feel like cruel emotional bullying. If this is a problem, try writing your feedback in a letter or a long text. Doing this allows you to carefully choose more deliberate, tactful and even more gentle words. It gives them time to read your feedback, process their emotions in private, and respond calmly instead of reacting instantly out of hurt.
Rebuilding and repairing words matter a lot. Saying the things that bridge the gap creating distance between you and that heal the wounds are very important. Apologies go a long way! So does acknowledging positive change and creating a clean slate.
With all that in mind, here is a collection of ideas for ways to express love through words of affirmation: Hide your words of affirmation in places they will accidentally find them during a normal day. Write a sweet message on the bathroom mirror with a dry-erase marker. Create a custom image on your phone with a quote about why you love them and set it as the lock screen background on their phone when they aren't looking. Fold up a sweet letter and tuck it inside their umbrella. When it rains and they open it, the note will drop out. Create "Open When Envelopes” by writing a series of letters for specific moments. Put them in labeled envelopes that say things like: "Open when you miss me," "Open when you have a bad day at work," or "Open when you are feeling insecure”. Create a stack of affirmations where they get to tear one off and read it each day. Write them a love or affirmation letter. Put them up for an award. Fill a large glass jar with tiny rolled-up notes. Tell them to pull one note out at the beginning of every day. Create an affirmation journal. To do this, buy a blank notebook and write one line in it every week about a sweet memory you shared or something great they did. Give them the completed book on an anniversary or special date. Create a customized crossword puzzle. Use a free online tool to build a crossword puzzle where all the clues and answers are things like inside jokes, favorite memories, or compliments about them. Create a music playlist for them. But find songs where the actual titles of the songs, when read from top to bottom, spell out a hidden, sweet message. Take a photo of the two of you and use a computer tool to recreate the image using rows of repeating words of love and affirmation. Create a puzzle message. Write a deeply meaningful letter on a blank piece of cardboard. Cut the cardboard into jigsaw puzzle pieces and put them in a box. They have to build the puzzle to read your message. Record a series of short, sweet audio files on your phone. Send them throughout the day with clues about where to find small treats you have hidden around the house. Create a shared page in your phone's Notes app. Dedicate it to listing things you love about each other, and watch the list grow in real-time as you both add to it. Secretly record short video clips of yourself over a month saying one thing you appreciate about them. Stitch them together into a longer video and send it to them out of the blue. Buy a blank wooden dice block. Write a category on each side (e.g., Looks, Kindness, Intelligence, Memories). Roll the dice during dinner and give words of affirmation based on what side of the dice it lands on. Make the very first thing you say to them in the morning, something positive. Set a weekly reminder on your phone to send a meaningful message so you never forget. Figure out what their traumas are and what deep, emotional need they had during those traumas and then cater your words of affirmation to meeting that need or those needs. Speak about the things you are looking forward to about your future with them. Put a note in the current page of the book they are reading or somewhere hidden amongst the project they are doing. Create a list of all of the things you love about them and give it to them. Tell complimenting, flattering stories about them with others. Dedicate a toast to them at a party. Do a whisper pass by. What I mean by this is: walk past them in a busy kitchen or hallway at a party, lean in, and whisper something lovely like "You are easily the smartest and best-looking person in this room tonight," and then keep walking. There are for sure many more great ideas. But hopefully now, you have a good understanding of how to express love in this way.
Think of this way of sharing love as something to be done consistently. It works like an emotional battery that needs to be consistently charged. When people feel loved through words, they need a steady, consistent stream of positive, good feeling communication. Make sure that your words are sincere. When you are saying things just because you have to or when your affirmation is lazy or routine it can feel worse to a person than no affirmation at all because it feels fake or forced. When words matter this much, silence is not neutral, it is negative. It is loud and impregnated with negative meaning. But knowing all this, words of affirmation can be a powerful emotional and psychological stabilizer. It can quiet painful inner turmoil. It can act like a shield in an often hard and cruel world. It can create emotional safety and a foundation of trust. It can serve as fuel for growth and success. And it can heal emotional wounds. So pick a way to express your love through words of affirmation and do it today.
When it comes to anything in life, your mentality about it and your energy towards it matters. Your mentality and energy towards a thing, dictates what relationship you have with it, which in turn brings about specific experiences and outcomes. Money is the main gateway people use today for getting the material things they want. Things like goods, services and experiences. It is the primary mechanism. A universal medium of exchange. But if you begin to relate to money as if it, itself is the limitation to having what you want, this can quickly bring you out of alignment with money, abundance and the things you are wanting.
Given that money is the main way that people get what they want in today’s world, and given how there is a price tag on so many of the things that a person needs and wants, it makes perfect sense that if you lack money, money itself starts to feel like it is in and of itself the limitation to having what you want. I’m not going to come in here and gaslight you that the lack of money isn’t a huge limitation. No more than that, a huge source of suffering. All a person needs to do is to be desperately in need of something like medical treatment and not be able to afford it to really get the hell spiral that can happen towards money. It is serious when someone’s experience is that they cannot get what they need and want due to lack of money. And as people, we are going to have to face the fact that we have chosen to venture far into hyper capitalism, commodification and plutocracy. As the human race, we are overdue for a reckoning and an awakening regarding whether a society that allows people to suffer for lack of money is the human society we want to maintain. But in this specific video, I’m not going to be debating whether a market society and a monetized economy is the correct structure for human society. The reality is, if you are in resistance to money, money can’t flow into your life experience. And when you feel like money in and of itself is the limitation to having what you need and want, naturally you will go into resistance against money.
Here is an important principle. Money enables you to have what you need and want. It is a gateway to getting what you want and need. But not if you believe that money is the limitation to getting what you want and need. Not if you believe that money is in and of itself is the problem. You may have heard the term whatever you resist persists. So, it may be tempting to think that if you resist money, you get more of it. Even better, if you resist capitalism, you end up begrudgingly wealthy. But this is a serious oversimplification and is therefore not a true reflection of how resistance actually works.
It is true that when you resist something, you direct an intense amount of energy towards that thing you resist. But what is it that you are actually resisting? It may not be as simple as what meets the eye. When you go into resistance to money, it isn’t money itself that you are actually in resistance to and thus are directing an intense amount of energy towards. It is what money represents for you. It is what you associate with money. What you project onto it. Which isn’t good! For example, bad character or immorality, unfairness, lack of love, responsibility, pressure, traumas related to finances, control, inequality, exploitation etc. If you go into resistance to money and perceive it to be a thing that prevents you from having what you want, you relate to it not as an ally, but as an antagonist. A threat. The result will be that your subconscious mind will go to work protecting you from money. And this will cause you to engage in financial self-sabotage in ways that you are unlikely to even notice.
When you go into resistance to money because you see money as the thing that is standing in the way of you and what you need and want, you may be desperate for money, but underneath this, you resent money. You feel like it holds power over you. Imagine you don’t feel as if you can be happy or safe until a specific gatekeeper gives you permission to get somewhere. Naturally you will grow to hate that gatekeeper. Suddenly your relationship with money is that it is the villain blocking the path rather than the enabler. It doesn’t take a genius to see that this is an abundance blocking mentality. It is a fast track to financial issues. Just to name a few, this pattern very quickly leads to disdain for the very thing you want. For example, say you really want to travel, but you can’t afford it. You may start criticizing tourism as a selfish and trivial use of time. By resisting your own desires in this way, you dull the pain of not being able to afford and therefore have them.
You may also go into a pattern of learned helplessness and defeatism. If you see money as your only barrier, but you don’t have enough of it, your brain may decide that attaining what you need and want is impossible. So, you stop taking action entirely. You don’t look for alternative paths. You don’t network. You don’t develop any skills because you decide it is all pointless. Blaming money for your stagnation and powerlessness protects you from the vulnerability and pain of trying and failing. Lack of money becomes the shield protecting and concealing your fear of inadequacy.
You may also slip into the pattern of hatred towards those who don’t have the barrier that you have. Ie: People with money. You may rage against wealthy people, corporations, or the economic system in general. This can become a personal obsession. This obsessive opposition is a protection against feelings of envy and frustration and powerlessness.
Something critical to get is that self-concept matters to people. Each and every one of us was socialized. People care about being perceives as good and right. If you make money and those who have money out to be an inherently evil thing, on a subconscious level, you are making sure that you will never accumulate money because no one is going to put energy towards becoming the villain. No one wants to become bad or wrong.
So, what should you do if you recognize that you are in this pattern?
See money for what it actually is, a neutral tool. See it like a stick that a monkey would use or a hammer. A tool that was created so as to not be limited to the degree that a barter system limits you. When you see this truth about money, money loses its negative emotional grip on you.
Separate the neutral tool of money from the painful associations and meanings you have added to it and challenge those associations and meanings. These are the things money represents for you specifically and therefore what you project onto it. Ask yourself: If money is just a neutral tool, what threat have I projected onto money? When you find the answers, really question whether these things are a fundamental truth about money and question where these associations came from. For example, say you realize that you associate money with being controlled. Challenge the idea that money equals being controlled. Ask yourself where this association cold have come from. You may realize that you grew up with a parent who used finances as a kind of tool to force you to do what they wanted you to do or to foster dependency so you couldn’t leave them. Realize that making money the problem here is like making the hammer the issue when it is used in a murder. Your issue isn’t with money, it is with control. Money does not inherently imply control. The real issue is a relationship issue.
Discover what the true underlying need or desire is. This is the deeper motivation we are seeking. We can get there by starting with what we think we need or want and from there, we ask: Why do I want that thing? What do I think that will give me? For example: I need a sports car. Why? Because I will feel successful when I drive it. Why will I feel successful when I drive a sports car? Because it signals to the world that I made something of myself. Why do I need to signal to the world that I made something of myself? Because I am sick of feeling looked down on and ignored. What would it give me if I was not looked down on and ignored? It would make me feel like I matter and I am important and have value. This is the underlying desire. To feel important and valuable and like I matter. The sports car was the multi thousand-dollar tool chosen to solve a feeling of insignificance. As you can see, when you were trapped in the idea that you needed money to get what you want, it isn’t actually true. Money is perhaps not even the best way to get these underlying needs and desires.
Almost every desire we have boils down to a way we want to feel. When we have identified the feeling we want to have, and put our minds to ways that we can get to that feeling that have nothing to do with money, we no longer relate to money as the only way to get what we want. And it ceases to be the big, bad wolf.
Challenge the premise that money is the ONLY bridge to the goal. The ONLY way you can get what you want. When you are focused on money being the way to get what you want, money isn’t your actual need. Rather, it is the strategy you believe is the only strategy for getting what you need. Play the game of: If I remove money from the equation, how else can I get what I need and want? Especially play this game relative to how to get the actual, underlying needs and desires you have.
In order to stop seeing money as the thing blocking you from what you want, you’ve got to break the habit of making money the default first step to getting what you want and need. Look for non-monetary options and non-monetary currency. Entrepreneurs often force themselves to think this way because they are often working with limited capital. But even wealthy entrepreneurs force themselves to think this way because of the creativity it inspires. After all, why use a bunch of your own money when you might not have to. One thing they do is to make a list of what their goal requires, but to forbid themselves from using currency to solve any of the problems. They imagine that a law was passed making it illegal to spend currency to get to their goal and force themselves to come up with how they would go about achieving it then. They force themselves to map out how they would acquire those resources using non-monetary currencies. Things like labor (trading time or effort for what they need), social capital (ways you can help someone who already has what you need, so as to gain access to what you need). Barter or skill trade. These are things you can exchange, teach, build or organize for someone else in exchange for their resources. Underutilized assets. Things that exist around you that are currently available or better yet, are going to waste and how those things can be utilized to help you get to your goal.
Another game they often play is to create a low fidelity version of their goal. Doing this proves that the essence of what you want is actually available and accessible immediately right now. Doing this means separating the core value of the goal you have from the expensive package it usually comes in. You figure out how you can keep what really matters by spending the least amount possible. For example: Say you want a luxury apartment. What actually causes you to feel so good in that luxury apartment? Is it clean lines, natural light, zero clutter, curated art? Start by cleaning your current house, go on social media to look for opinions from home décor experts about creative ways to make small spaces seem large, paint the walls a crisp color. Maximize your windows or get a window decal that makes it seem like you are somewhere else. Print high quality art from public archives. Go to thrift stores to find super high end expensive things without the hefty price tag. When you take immediate action toward the thing you want and need, this will bring you more into alignment with the thing you ultimately need and want. Consider it a stepping stone. When you shift your mentality from “I can’t afford this” to “how else can this thing I want and need be experienced?” It changes your brain chemistry, you start looking for the windows that are open, rather than being stuck at the door that is closed and money stops being the master of your life experience. It simply becomes a tool you could use on your path to what you are trying to actualize.
Recognize the value of your skills and qualities. Ask yourself: If the economy collapsed tomorrow and all currency became totally worthless, the playing field was totally leveled, what skills and what qualities do I have that would make me valuable to society? What do I have that people would still trade things for? For example, you might answer: I am intensely creative, I am a good cook, I know how to raise animals, I am very kind and nurturing. I am artistic and know how to throw pottery. I am smart. I have excellent communication skills etc. This exercise makes money no longer feel like an overwhelming monster of a gatekeeper with all the power. Instead, you are forced to see where the real value lies.
When you are making money the problem, you are actually scapegoating. The question is what is the actual problem? It is far more effective to identify the actual problem because when you directly address it, you are acting directly upon reality. This actual problem is usually a deeper, more uncomfortable reality we have to face. For example, money is not actually the problem when corporations are operating with the level of corruption they are currently operating with. The actual problem is human disconnection. The real problem is narcissistic relational behavior in humans. The real problem is legalized monopoly and regulatory capture and externalization of costs within human society. Money may not be the actual problem when people can’t afford their basic needs. The real problem is the financialization of human needs, which detaches economy from human wellbeing. Or for example, by deciding that money is the problem, you don’t have to face your own lack of focus or effort. Or for example, money and the obsession with wealth wasn’t the actual problem in the family, the problem was that everyone was obsessed with social status and spending time with you was way down on the priority list for your parents and they met none of your emotional needs. It may be beneficial to ask yourself: If the truth were that money (including the lack of money) isn’t actually the problem in this situation, what would I have to face?
In a systemic reality where inequality is a reality and where everything has a price tag and your lived experience is that money is the tool required to get the things you need and want, experiencing anxiety, anger, envy, helplessness and feeling like the odds are stacked against you is a normal human response to that systemic reality. There are real systemic issues to be solved. Reality is more complex than “this is a mindset issue”. It is both dismissive and cruel to tell you to just stop seeing money as a barrier. The thing is, when the lack of money is causing you pain, starting to relate to money itself as the problem or the villain will pull you out of reality and it will cause you to resist the very thing you need more of.
For a whole host of reasons, you could make a general statement that it is far better for a parent to want a child than it is for a parent to feel saddled with a child that they do not want. But it is a mistake to think that if a parent desperately wants a child, they are going to be a good parent to the child they have. In fact, because of a little-known shadow, it can be a disaster when a parent really wants a child.
There is a potential that when a parent really wants a child, they actually do come through and give their child a wonderful life experience. They actually are a good parent. Potentially even a great one. At the same time, there is another potential, a terrible one that manifests all too often and that leaves a child with both emptiness and scars. And to understand this potential, we must look at the shadow underneath. So, let’s take a deep dive.
There is always a reason WHY a person wants something. There is always a reason (or many) why a parent wants a child. And I mean a self-centered reason. Even if what a person wants is to give a child “the best possible life experience” (something you will hear often), there is something that the parent personally gets out of doing that. And believe it or not, most people are really (and I mean really) unconscious about their reasons. Being conscious about the reasons, including the ones you may be ashamed to admit to, is what allows you to see the potential pitfalls and issues that could come about as a result of those being your reasons. You can then make decisions accordingly so as to avoid those negative manifestations. For example, a person may become aware that one reason they really want a child is to gain security in their relationship with their partner. Looking directly at that, there is a potential danger that the child does not matter at all. That the child is just a means to an end. And what if having the child does not do anything to enhance the security of that relationship? This could be the recipe for neglect and even resentment.
A parent’s reasons for wanting a child are often projected out into the future in the form of an experience that they imagine they will be having as a result of having that child. And this imagined experience may very well be an overlay. What is an overlay you may ask? It is a fantasy reality that obscures the actual reality beneath. When a parent has a fantasy overlay about who their child will be and what their relationship with the child will be like and what experience they will be having as a parent, and what needs of theirs will be met, it prevents them from being in a direct, real relationship with the unique being that their child is. It also lays the stage for disillusionment. And this disillusionment can and often does lead to things like neglect, emotional abandonment, antagonism and even abuse.
So that you can understand this, I’ll give you two examples:
Brooklyn often feels totally confused and also gaslit because she feels totally unwanted and totally unloved by her mother. And yet, her mother loves to remind her about how wanted she was. Her mother tells stories about how she always wanted to be a mother ever since she was a little girl. How she used to play with dolls all the time and babysit and that having children was the most important thing for her. But when we pry deeper into her mother’s motives for wanting a child so badly, we see that her mother wanted to have a child to get unconditional love and validation. When Brooklyn’s mother was a child, she grew up in a dysfunctional home with a dictatorial father who was very black or white in his thinking. Everything was his way or the highway. She was deeply rejected by him. And her mother was an enabler who expected all her children to be pleasing and blithe. In her own way, because her mother had no tolerance for anything that wasn’t sweet and good, much of her was also rejected by her mother. She had enmeshment trauma and she grew up with a deep core self-concept of shame. And she began dreaming of the closeness she would one day finally be able to get from a child of her own. The acceptance and closeness and unconditional love and security of connection and validation and positive affirmation.
When Brooklyn was a baby, her mother started struggling a bit because she felt as if Brooklyn’s needs were often in competition with her needs and like she was just expected to sacrifice hers. Having a real baby was nothing like having a doll. You couldn’t put her down when you wanted her to sleep. Just because you wanted to feed her didn’t mean she was hungry. She would scream and cry regardless of how stressed out she was. Brooklyn’s mother’s enmeshment trauma was often triggered by Brooklyn’s needs, which led to a power struggle against her own daughter’s needs. She made sure to sleep train and schedule Brooklyn according to her schedule because of this. She was totally lost with regards to how to regulate her own emotions and parent Brooklyn and so, she became a very unpredictable parent.
When Brooklyn reached her toddler years, this kicked off into a whole other gear. Brooklyn started to do what a child does at this age, develop a sense of self. And contrary to her mother’s dreams, Brooklyn was not a mini-me. In fact, they had major differences. Each difference made her mother feel more and more distanced, less and less bonded. As she grew, when Brooklyn wanted to do things herself, like tie her own shoes or walk without assistance or feed herself, her mother experienced this as a rejection. When Brooklyn would react negatively to anything she did, she took this too as a rejection. When Brooklyn would assert her needs, she experienced this as Brooklyn trying to take over the household… As a power struggle. Having Brooklyn was nothing like she imagined having a daughter would be. Instead of validated, she felt invalidated. Instead of accepted, she felt rejected. Instead of close, she felt like her daughter was an outer space alien or as if she was replaced at birth. She didn’t feel showered in unconditional love. Brooklyn only gave her positive feedback sometimes, like on holidays when she would write her cards. So, Brooklyn’s mother withdrew. She dropped ownership over her daughter in all kinds of ways. She took a job because she got more validation doing that than she did parenting. When she would get home from work, she would retreat into books. Brooklyn was more and more neglected. She had a roof over her head. Feed to eat and toys. Her parents would drive her to activities. But there was none of the things Brooklyn needed to thrive on an emotional level.
This relationship devolved badly even more so in Brooklyn’s teen years. The way Brooklyn would push back against her mother’s control was perceived as mutiny and a personal attack. Brooklyn developing a separate identity and interests that her mother didn’t like was viewed as a betrayal. Her mother used guilt, emotional detachment, harsh criticism, verbal abuse and triangulated Brooklyn’s father against her by playing the victim as methods to gain back control. Now it actually was a power struggle. And they were enemies living under the same roof. They would get into screaming fights. Deep down, Brooklyn’s mother felt incredible resentment towards her because by being nothing like the fantasy she had in her head about what her daughter would be like and the relationship they would have, Brooklyn had broken the presumptive contract that existed between them. Of course, this was never a contract Brooklyn had agreed to, she never knew this was what she was getting into by being born.
Now that Brooklyn is an adult, she has a mother wound the size of Texas. She hated her childhood. She struggles in every relationship she has because she has a disorganized attachment. She does not go home for holidays. She is desperate for a relationship which will never ever be there. About Brooklyn, her mother says “It’s possible to love someone that you don’t like.” And Brooklyn doesn’t even know whether she will cry when her mother dies.
And now for our second example. Maddox does not get what is wrong with him. At face value, he was given everything. Every opportunity, all the support and privilege a person could possibly need. And yet, he feels lost and seems to sabotage everything right before he succeeds. He feels trapped by his father’s financial support, because he can’t seem to do what it takes to become independent. Everyone tells him “Your father loves you so much and does so much for you.” But this is not how it feels. He feels as if the weight of the world is being put on him by his father. And he is pissed about it. He goes back and forth between feeling like his dad is a villain and like he is just an ungrateful dick who squanders every opportunity he is given.
Let’s go back in time. When Maddox’s father found out his child was a boy, he could not be happier. He was so excited he couldn’t contain himself. He took Maddox out to do all the things he loved doing the minute Maddox was old enough to walk. His father had him swinging a golf club by two years old. And by three, his father already dreamed that Maddox would grow up to be the world champion. Maddox grew up on the fast track to being a professional golf star. His father funded all of his private coaching and travel to tournaments. He personally managed the trajectory of his career and took him to every single practice and competition. At face value, he was so lucky to have his father who was absolutely dedicated to Maddox’s goals and success above everything else. Only, Maddox couldn’t remember if it really was his goals or if it was his father’s goals for him. Goals that he wanted so badly to meet only so he could feel approved of and valued and loved by his father. Everything was so confusing.
What was really hiding underneath all this dedication to his son? Underneath his enthusiasm about having the son he wanted so badly? Maddox’s father wanted to live vicariously through his son. He wanted to fix the regrets he had about mistakes he had made in his own sports career. He wanted Maddox to fulfill those unfulfilled dreams because it was as close as he could get to him fulfilling those dreams. He wanted the do-over in life relative to his own success. Maddox’s father never made it to the level he was so desperate to make it to in his own sports career. Pushing Maddox to succeed and be the best was a way of healing his old disappointments. The praise he was so desperate for, is something society gave him when his son excelled. Maddox was ego boosting. When people commented on how attractive he is and how talented he is, his father could feel proud because it reflected his own good traits.
Maddox has plateaued in his golf career because it isn’t him that is motivated to win. He is motivated to be loved by his father and to not be abandoned. A love he feels he can only get and a security he feels he can only have, if he becomes the success his father expects him to be. Maddox has no sense of identity. He never got to develop one because he was too busy living up to his father’s vision of what he should be. He has no idea what he really wants. And he keeps sabotaging his games because deep down, he desperately wants to be loved no matter if he wins or loses. There is a ton of friction in this relationship. Maddox is lost and unhappy. And he has become a sex addict because that is the way Maddox now self-medicates his emotional pain. Maddox’s irresponsible behavior and lack of personal discipline is driving his father so nuts, he is now toying with the idea of just letting go, cutting off the financial support and telling Maddox that he is “on his own”. The very abandonment that keeps Maddox in this painful cycle and away from really finding himself.
What is the moral of the story? Just because a person wants a child does not mean the reasons that they have for wanting the child are good reasons. Just because a parent wants a child does not mean that they will recognize and meet the child’s needs. Just because a person wants a child does not mean they will be a good parent. In fact, a person’s desperation for a child may be an indication that they are deep in a fantasy overlay. And that if reality does not align with that fantasy overlay, the child may pay dearly for it.
One of the ways that people receive and express love the world over is through acts of service. And some people especially feel loved when the people in their lives put energy towards them in this way. For this reason, there are some important things to know about this way of expressing love.
An act of service is a non-verbal expression of love where you intentionally expend your own time, mental focus and physical energy doing something that reduces the other person’s stress/burden. Or that ads to their happiness. This way of expressing love is the epitome of the idea that what someone does matters far more than what they say.
When it comes to showing love through acts of service, certain things can render the act you do ineffective, which is the opposite of what you want. Let’s start with having to be told or asked to do it. It is critical that when you show your love in this way, you are out ahead of the person. You are proactively noticing what is needed and answering to the need before it ever gets pointed out. Another thing is the intention behind the act. An intention that is laced with anything other than care and love is going to do more damage than not doing anything at all. For example, if the intention behind it is manipulative or if you are doing something to get something in return. Or if you are doing something out of guilt. Or if you are just mindlessly doing something out of habit. Or if you are doing something out of obligation. Or if you are doing something simply to avoid conflict. Or if you are going to hold anything you do for them over their head. Whenever you are thinking of doing an act of service, you need to be very honest with yourself about what your motives really are and what, if anything you may expect in return.
Another thing that can render an act of service ineffective is lack of effort. Lack of effort destroys the core intent that matters when it comes to service, which is genuine care and thoughtfulness. When it is a zero-effort act of service, the act of service is less meaningful. Putting minimal care or minimal energy into an act of service tells the other person that they are not worth your time, deep thought and energy.
Another thing to consider is that it is important if you are doing things for someone to do them according to their preferences and their needs, not yours. Not doing so will add pressure to them, rather than take it away. Doing this demonstrates true selflessness. It shows a level of emotional attunement that strengthens trust and intimacy.
With the exception of people who prefer certain lifestyle kink partnerships, most people who experience love through service do not want a maid or a servant. Having someone who is subservient to them actually tends to add pressure to them and tends to be an attraction killer. A servant also tends to act on commands. They wait to be told what to do, how to do it, and when it needs to be done. This adds pressure and mental load. A person who acts like a servant, forces them into the role of the manager. They do not want this asymmetry. What they want is someone taking it upon themselves to consider them deeply enough and care deeply enough to make their life experience better through intentionally choosing to expend their time, energy, resources and effort. They want it to be voluntary and free.
To express love this way effectively, you are going to have to have serious follow through. Treat your promises to help as absolute commitments and bring the thing you are doing for them to full completion. Also half-finished or half-assed tasks do not feel like 50% help. It feels like a brand-new project they now have to manage on top of a confirmation that they are not cared about or loved. You need to initiate, execute and close out anything you do.
With all this in mind, here are some great ways to demonstrate your love through acts of service.
Take initiative to reduce a person’s mental load. To do this, you need to take full ownership of things, from planning to anticipating and solving problems to execution, so they do not have to think about a thing. Keep track of important details and demonstrate that you have considered them. Remember upcoming birthdays, vet appointments, and school events. And handle the preparations yourself. Keep a running grocery list and restock essential items before they completely run out. Manage the process of things. Be the one to do the research, the decision-making, the execution, and, if need be, the cleanup without looking to them to have to instruct or guide you. Prevent putting the pressure of decisions on them. Instead be attuned to them and get enough information to make the decision that would add to their life the most. Drop them off at the door and then park the car, so they don’t have to be part of the stress of parking. Give status updates. For example, you can say "I already called the plumber to care of the sink, he comes Tuesday afternoon" so they can instantly cross it off their mental checklist. Do the thing they forgot to do (without making them feel bad about it) Think pressure off, pressure off, pressure off to the degree they don’t need to think about it.
Take initiative to reduce a person’s physical load. Pay attention and put effort into knowing what needs to be done in their world. Pay close attention to what they complain about most, then fix it. Notice problems and fix them before being asked. Carry the groceries. Open the doors. Clear the snow off of their car. Notice low toilet paper, a full trash can, or a messy counter, and fix it immediately before they have to ask. Take over cooking, walk the dog, do kitchen cleanup, take care of the kids. Take over the chores. Run the errands. Take care of an unpleasant phone call that needs to be made. Repair a broken piece of jewelry, a torn piece of favorite clothing, or a worn-out item they cherish but haven't had time to mend. Play the role of sous chef-chop and prep if they want to cook. Anything that you can take off their plate fits into this category. Again, think pressure off, pressure off, pressure off, so there is nothing left to do relative to whatever you took upon yourself.
Put real energy into identifying things you could do for them that would add positive to their life experience and execute on them. Give them physical relief. Make them a food they love or pick it up for them. Give them a massage. Prepare them a heating pad. Run them a warm bath with bath salts, lit candles, and relaxing music so they can decompress in luxury. Take them on a vacation where they don’t need to stress about any element, you’ve already taken care of it. Heat up their towel in the dryer while they shower, or turn on the seat heaters in the car on a cold day. Buy them that thing they like, but wouldn’t buy for themselves. Create a rest boundary for them where you actively protect their downtime by handling any incoming disruptions so they can lie down and do nothing undisturbed. Create unexpected moments of delight, comfort or emotional connection. Facilitate their freedom by taking over all responsibilities for an entire afternoon or day so they can guiltlessly enjoy a hobby, see friends, or sleep in. Pre plan a date night. Arrange the entire evening, from start to finish and with every detail covered, so they only have to get dressed and enjoy. Print and frame a recent favorite photo of the two of you, or compile a scrapbook of a meaningful trip.
Surprises are good when it comes to this way of expressing love. They prove that you are thinking about them even when they aren’t looking! It proves proactive thought and proactive action. It breaks through routine. It makes them feel that you value them and that they are special to you. Also, a surprise completely removes the element of a person having to ask, which takes away the weight of making a request. It transforms a regular day into an unexpected moment of pleasure. Your most powerful ally for a surprise is the invisible fix. This is when you fix the problem or take care of the task in a way where they don’t know that you did it. For example, sneak out of the house to fill up their gas tank, so they are surprised by it when they get into the car. Finish a dreaded task while they are out of the house, so they come back to it done and totally by surprise. Surprise them with breakfast in bed. Pay off their debt, so they are surprised that it is suddenly gone. You can also go for surprises that add delight to their life. Such as secretly washing their bedsheets and making the bed with a chocolate or a sweet note left on their pillow. Organizing a surprise party for them. Dropping off their favorite meal at their workplace. Setting up a surprise picnic in the living room. Meet them at the front door when they come home from work, handing them a drink, and telling them dinner and cleanup are completely handled.
People who best receive love through acts of service love positive things to be added to their life. But the gift of relief is the primary gift that people with this love language are in need of. You can’t go wrong if you are consistently thinking: How could I best relieve them right now? And don’t forget, the energy you are in and the attitude you display makes an acts of service gesture or breaks it. You’ve got to actually want to do it and act like it. Doing an act of service that you don’t want to do, while you are complaining, sighing, acting exasperated, acting like a martyr or being resentful, completely destroys the gesture. Acts of service is a way of showing love that buys back time. Giving the other person free time to relax or do what they love. It reduces stress. It is practical protection because it helps prevents them from experiencing lack or stress in the future. And it makes a person feel like they are not alone in the world. Instead, they have someone there, paying attention to them, considering them and proactively doing life with them.
Allow me today to share with you an analogy that you should never forget. An analogy for how healing really works. Really getting this analogy will change the way you think about progress and healing and in ways that have the capacity to drastically improve your life experience.
To generalize, people in the modern world have an instant fix mindset. We live in an era of instant gratification and in a world that is on-demand. Instant downloads, same day shipping, fast food, pain killers that trick the brain into thinking an underlying condition is healed instantly because it doesn’t hurt anymore. Society demands constant productivity; there is pressure to feel good and get better and be ok instantly. The media warps our perception of the road to recovery and healing with dramatic cuts and timelapses that make it seem like someone has gone from A to B in no time at all. And the expectation of instant healing is drastically fueled by the modern manifestation and wellness culture. Many manifestation and wellness teachers tell you that you will experience a quantum leap or an instant timeline shift by changing your thoughts. They promise that if you align your energy perfectly, changes will happen in a flash and physical or emotional wounds will dissolve that very moment.
This mentality, this expectation, is not an accurate reflection of how healing really works. On top of this, it actually sabotages the healing process. This expectation causes you to constantly monitor yourself for a cure. Because it isn’t instantly occurring, you feel frustrated and stressed, which activates the sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight mode), flooding the body with stress chemicals, which are oppositional to healing. It fosters shame and despair. Shame because when you aren’t instantly better, you usually internalize that as some kind of personal failure. And despair because the gap between your expectations and reality is so big, it causes you to feel totally helpless and powerless about whatever you are trying to heal. This expectation causes you to abandon potentially great healing tools, just because they proved not to be a magic bullet. It also tends to cause people to prefer medicines, tools, techniques and processes that simply mask symptoms or make pain go away, and to confuse this with healing. This is not the same as healing. In fact, symptom suppression and getting the pain to go away can be oppositional to healing.
So how does healing really work? The answer is, like a ship rudder. I’m going to give you the analogy now. In life you are sailing on a specific course. You have a destination in mind. A healed state of being or a wanted outcome. When you do things that are aligned with that healed state or that wanted outcome (for example, alter your perspective, uproot a detrimental core belief, make a different choice, change a behavior, interrupt a pattern or habit, take a different action, use a healing method or tool, engage with a medicine etc.) these are rudder adjustments on the ship. You are making adjustments to the rudder, so as to be aligned with the destination you have in mind. Now what do you notice about sailing in the open ocean? A rudder shift doesn’t usually drastically change your immediate experience. Occasionally it does. But usually, you adjust the rudder and the view around you doesn’t drastically change. The horizon still looks exactly the same. You’re still in the same water. But that rudder change, even the smallest of them, sets you on a different course. So much so that those few degrees were the difference between ending up on one continent versus an entirely different continent.
Applying this analogy, just like when you alter the rudder on a ship a tiny degree, when you do these things to heal, at first it may not feel like anything much. You may not notice that much of a difference. But the reality is that metaphorically speaking, you end up on a totally different continent. People do not understand how monumental these shifts in the rudder really are and how drastic of a different destination they will lead to.
And one more part of this analogy: A ship captain expects waves, wind and currents to push the ship off course. These setbacks are not treated as a failure or a disaster, but as a cue to look at the compass, lock onto the course to the desired destination and make another adjustment to the rudder. So too, healing isn’t often just smooth sailing. There are twists and turns, and layers and surprises and unforeseen circumstances and setbacks and regressions. And occasionally, ships can wreck. And when they do, it isn’t about adjusting the rudder towards the same destination anymore. It is about salvaging, rebuilding, selecting a new destination and setting sail in that new direction.
By really grasping this idea of the ship rudder, that unsustainable demand for an immediate result will shift to a sustainable process-oriented progression. You will start to notice the signs of progress that didn’t count for anything before because they did not measure up to the expectation of total fix. And with this, your motivation will be sustained because you will understand you are getting somewhere. The perception that you are failing and are getting nowhere will dissipate and with it, so will shame and despair. You will be freed from the trap of needing to fix your entire life today. Success will be redefined as simply angling the rudder toward health rather than having to achieving an instant cure. This will reduce anxiety and overwhelm. It will also lift despair. Healing won’t feel so impossibly hard anymore. Setbacks will not register as a “back to square one” or as a “I’ve gotten nowhere”. Simply as an indication that it’s time to look at the compass and adjust the rudder so you are once again aimed at the desired outcome. You will be able to enjoy more of the now, on your way to your desired destination.
Since the 2006 release of the film and book The Secret, followed by the 2020 pandemic social media manifestation craze, manifestation has become a mainstream concept. There are so many people teaching about manifestation, so many people talking about it. So many people posting about their manifestation journeys online. But there is something really important that nobody is talking about when it comes to manifestation. A tiny little detail that isn’t tiny at all. This little detail is what we will be talking about today.
The idea that has been propagated is that manifestation is really, really simple. That it is as simple as “think a positive thought where you are completely in the experience of already having the thing you desire. And then, it will appear or happen.” As if the conscious mind were a device that simply orders what it wants from a compliant universe. The reality of manifestation is not this “kindergarten”. Here is what nobody tells you about manifestation.
The conscious mind is NOT the only player in the picture of manifestation. It is not the only thing dictating your vibration. Subconscious processes are too. In fact, the subconscious mind is what rules your mind. Conscious focus rules an embarrassingly low percentage of your daily mental activity. What does this mean? You can consciously focus on having wealth for 20 minutes a day. However, if your subconscious mind holds a core belief like "money is root of all evil", your subconscious will win out and you will not manifest wealth. On top of this, your mind creates an internal model of the world based on past experiences, not present conscious wishes. It projects what it expects to see onto reality. This predictive processing mechanism tends to be far, far stronger than conscious focus. Contrary to what people whose primary coping mechanism is to avoid all things they deem negative and to cling to a pure positive mindset tend to espouse, the integration of the subconscious is critical work if what you are interested in is manifestation.
When you are manifesting, on an energetic level, you are essentially declaring “I am that!”. Not just “I want that”. You are saying “I choose to be what is a perfect match to (fill in the blank)”. For example, if what you want is a compatible partner, you are energetically saying “I chose to be what is a perfect match to a compatible relationship”. In this time-space reality, there is no way to experience it otherwise. What happens that second, is that the snags need to be worked through. All the things preventing you from that thing you are wanting. Not just one snag, all the snags. And relative to certain things you desire, there can be a lot of them! All the things (all the layers) that are not that, and that are oppositional to that which you want. Manifesting is going to bring you face to face with what in your life and what within you is not congruent with that thing you want. But guess what? Working through these layers of incongruence is one of the most important things you can be doing with your life. Consciously setting an intention like this, transmitting what you want, and then working through each layer of incongruence is the design of not only your personal expansion, but universal expansion with it. And as you transmute each layer, you come closer and closer and closer, you get more and more and more of what you want. This process is an integral part of the purpose we have for incarnating into this life experience in the first place.
Manifestation is not a passive process. Actively changing your perceptions, your decisions, your behaviors, and your actions is a critical part of manifestation. Putting yourself in the mental space of already having what you want is a powerful initial step. But just focusing on what you want alone will not bring it magically into physical existence. What brings it into existence is your thoughts, perceptions, decisions, behaviors and actions being in alignment with it. A mind being focused on the desired outcome drives intentional behavior. This intentional, aligned behavior aligns all the layers of the being with that outcome, thus bringing it to fruition. This means you’ve got to change your behavior if you want the manifestation to occur. You also have to take actions if you want the manifestation to occur. Nothing passive about it.
Manifestation is out of the comfort zone. And it implies a great deal of discomfort. A very important part of manifestation is to consciously choose consequences. We have to understand the costs and benefits of staying exactly where we are and as we are and not making changes. And to the opposite, we need to understand the true costs and benefits of making the necessary changes to align with what we want. We will need to let go of a great many things that we truly believe are currently working for us. We will also need to face any fear that stands in the way, which will initially feel like a loss of safety to us. We will need to unlearn things, see truths that are very painful to accept, heal past trauma, confront blind spots, take risks, step into the unknown, feel the groundlessness of letting go of our identity, feel the disorientation of stepping out of our old reality and into a totally new one, change our patterns despite immense pressure to fall back into them and the list goes on.
So you can understand this better, here is an example. April has been doing manifestation exercises to manifest owning her own salon. She has been working out of other people’s salons for the last ten years and she is desperate to open her own so she can express herself creatively, make really good money without being limited to only what she can make in a day styling and cutting hair, use the products she believes in and elevate industry standards to be environmentally sound. But in this process of manifestation, things occur that make April all too aware that she has lots of layers of incongruence in the way. Just to give you two examples of many, the adaptive strategy that she employs to stay socially safe is to people please and placate others. Rather than manifesting the salon owning experience she wanted, the first thing that happened was that she got an offer from the owner of the current salon she worked for to take on the task of overseeing their newly opened location in a mall. April thought, hmmm… maybe this is a good sign that I’m headed in the right direction. She took the position, seeing it as a stepping stone. When an opportunity came to rent a place of her own and strike out, she spoke about it with two of her coworkers. Word got back to her boss and her boss called her really upset. April was so afraid of a conflict with her boss that she denied everything, told her boss it was just salon politics and triangulation and then went above and beyond to be the best employee, letting the opportunity pass her by. And as if this wasn’t bad enough, she decided to open a side business doing wedding hair. But, being a people pleaser, she set prices based on what friends, family and demanding clients wanted to pay, rather than what the business required to cover overhead and make a profit, so she actually lost money. April wasn't willing to do what was needed to actually fully line up with what she was wanting. But rather than see this, April started to think maybe this manifestation stuff is just a bunch of BS and just 'isn't for me.'
In order to actually open the salon, she will have to stop her people pleasing, placating behaviors. She will have to face her fears and yes, even traumas that fuel the behavior. She will have to change her perception about disapproval. She will have to choose the consequences of upsetting her boss and being poorly talked about by others and she will need to mitigate a great deal of conflict and social upheaval in her life. She will need to set and keep boundaries that do not please others. She is going to have to actually take the action of striking out on her own, opening a business, seeking employees etc.
The second layer of incongruence of many is that April has a split. One part of her wants to own a successful salon. Another part of her swoons at the idea of a man walking into her life and providing for her so she can have kids and be a homemaker. April follows trad wives obsessively on Instagram. She is envious of them. When she attends a weekly group for female entrepreneurs, she muscles up the persona of a hard-hitting business woman. But she got home and had second doubts about all of it. She sat down and watched the movie The Longest Ride with a carton of ice-cream and the pain started to flood up from within. These were two distinctly different lifepaths. She could do some version of both. However, if she did this, she would be overwhelmed and she would end up doing less of both. Basically, she would be limiting her maximum potential in both of them. Every time she goes to align with owning a salon, the part of her that wants this specific 1950s feminine experience and home life activates and she puts more energy into doom scrolling than she puts into taking the steps to become an entrepreneur. In order to move into alignment with her manifestation, she now has to do an existential deep dive into what she really wants in general. She has to re-examine her priorities and values. She has to figure out the WHY behind both desires. She may end up having to amend the vision of what she wants to manifest. She needs to do very serious integration work, so this zero-sum game doesn’t exist inside of her.
None of this should discourage you from manifestation work. What it should do, is to better prepare you for how it really works. The really good news is that when you get that this is how it works, you are not surprised by what is or isn’t manifesting. You are able to be so much more of a conscious and active participant in the process of manifestation. You can awaken more and more as this process highlights exactly where your subconscious programming (fears, doubts, or limiting beliefs) contradicts your conscious desires, allowing you to address them directly. You can use this process to define yourself and amend the desired future more and more. And you can extract all the plethora of things that you are meant to extract from the process itself, all things you would miss out on entirely if manifestation did work the way that you have been led to believe.
Because we are on this subject, you may benefit by a guided meditation that I created called the Why You're Not Getting What You Want Meditation. This meditative experience leads you through the process of becoming aware of what your subconscious commitment is. Subconscious commitments often oppose conscious commitments; making the things that you want and are deeply committed to, difficult or impossible to attain. But becoming aware of your subconscious commitment, puts you in the empowered position to choose as well as to align your energy and actions with what you really want.
One of the most difficult aspects of spiritual practice that involves increased consciousness, is hitting up against the reality of a multidimensional universe. What is true on one level, is untrue on another level. And seemingly contradictory things are true simultaneously. This can be very confusing. One such complexity that people run into is: How can it be true that this is a consensus reality, where everyone has free will, at the same time as it is a mirror-based construct, where everything that you experience externally is just a reflection of something within you? This is the seeming juxtaposition.
Just to give you a background on these two concepts, a consensus reality in this universe is a reality where multiple points of consciousness (we can call them people in the context of this conversation) are co-creating that reality. It is a social construct. In a consensus reality, there are things that are agreed upon that are the very mechanisms that form a shared reality. The collective agreements are what holds the system itself together. You can think of it like a shared dream where every participant is both creating and experiencing the dream and each participant is affecting the other aspects of that reality.
The law of mirroring, often called law of attraction, is a foundational principle or pattern that holds true for this reality we are currently experiencing. The foundational pattern being that of reflection. The principle being that the rest of the reality will constantly reflect and respond to the reality of a single point of consciousness within itself (we can call this a person in the context of this conversation) regardless of whether they are conscious of it or not. It is this law that is reflected in the idea of "as within, so without," meaning that you, as an individual create a "feedback loop" that shapes your reality. This law would suggest that the universe is an individual reflection, which seems to contradict with the very nature of a consensus reality.
To complicate this further, the universe is a fractal universe, where reality is structured recursively. Where each point of consciousness within the greater consciousness is in and of itself a smaller scale copy of the greater consciousness. This makes you both a piece of the greater universe and also a smaller scale version of the entire system of the universe itself.
Free will exists within both the framework of the consensus reality and the framework of the law of mirroring. It is simply experienced as a problem for people in a consensus reality. In a consensus reality, people experience free will as a problem because one person’s free will can clash with another person’s free will, preventing them from being able to make the totality of this reality what they alone want. When it comes to the law of mirroring, free will is experienced as solely beneficial because it allows a person to change themselves (what they can control) and by doing so, to control their entire reality to make it what they want it to be.
So, how do these two seemingly juxtaposed things go together? They are simply two different layers of the same system. Meaning that you will experience the reality of both co-creation and subjective reflection, like a hybrid. Perhaps a good way to at least conceptualize of this is to think of this reality like a multi-player video game. In any video game, the source code defines things like the logic, the laws, the mechanics and the behavior of that game. And everyone in the game must follow the source code so they can interact in the same space. The game world itself is a consensus reality. But a feature of this video game is that a single player can have a different experience of the game world based on this code within this consensus reality called the law of mirroring, which is a feature that largely exists for the purpose of self-awareness. Even though things like players influencing and effecting other players is still part of the experience of the game, and even though every player is ultimately co-creating the experience, this feature dictates that each individual player will also be reflected. They will have a unique experience within the larger game because of this. A great many things about THEM as a character within the game (things like pre-birth intention and pre-birth choices, thoughts and beliefs, behaviors, decisions, perceptions, actions etc) will dictate the things they see in the game, the items they find, what other players they interact with etc. This mirroring effect does not just apply to individual players, but also to “points of group consciousness” within the game world. This dictates what groups within the game world are experiencing, such as families, races, societies and species etc. When viewed through this lens, you can see that individuals are not just passive observers of the universe, rather they are embedded expressions of the universe, influencing the whole through their local, personal, and subjective experience. What all this amounts to is that even though you are pointing to two different layers of reality, the boundary between the two is actually fluid; as an individual changes their perceptions, beliefs, choices, behavior, actions, and therefore changes their subjective reality), they will influence the consensus reality around them.
Sticking with this metaphor, if players become aware of the codes dictating the game, they have conscious influence over the game itself. For example, they can deliberately alter themselves in ways that cause them to experience different things within the game world. This is what the teachers of law of attraction are concerned with. Most of them just greatly oversimplify the things within a player that cause them to line up with specific game world experiences. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: A Major Misunderstanding about The Law of Attraction. If a player awakens to the fact that a feature of the game is that it is designed recursively, they then know that small changes at one scale can affect the whole. This implies that their state and the external game world are in a constant, repeating dialogue. They have discovered a hack that if there are serial killers in the game and they don’t want serial killers, a big power they have over that is to find the serial killer within them and change that inner serial killer. Now, if everyone did that, the entire game world would change. We wouldn’t be talking about the rudimentary level of the game of changing yourself so you change your own little subjective piece of what you experience out of the entire overall game world, which stays largely the same.
When people take the law of mirroring (usually called the law of attraction) to the ultimate extreme, they take the concept of reflection so far that they suggest that there is only one consciousness (yours), and that everyone and everything else is a projection or reflection of that single consciousness. As if all there is, is a subjective reality. To use a video game analogy, they are just very lost in the Heads Up Display and Specific Quest Path as if it is all there is to the game. And it is very important to get that not everyone within this game world is playing to create the most perfect subjective experience for themselves. That is only one potential objective in the game. And when this change in player intention happens, this automatically makes them a match to different things within the game world. Perhaps now you understand why it isn’t as simple as: The more self-awareness and awareness in general you have and the better you get at self-mastery, the more pleasurable your experience within the game world gets.
Long story short, if every player “ended the war within”, there could be no external war in the game world. If a single player ended the war within, they would not line up with the experience of war. That is, unless they did something like decide to recognize the total game world as themselves, and/or decide that one of their player intentions is to end war in the game world for all players. In which case, they will still experience war. Something empowering to know is that introducing even one payer, much less a few, that view things differently, can subvert the entire system within a game world as dynamic as this. You do not solely control the broader "consensus" environment that you chose into upon coming into existence. You are not the sole operant power. And yet, you can shape what you experience within the consensus reality and you are seriously affecting every other aspect of that consensus reality. The two seemingly juxtaposed concepts in fact go hand in hand.
A personal creed is like a North Star or a compass that dictates how you show up in the world. And most people don’t know it, but it can be one of the most powerful and effective, yet simple life hacks that exist. This can be a profound spiritual practice and/or an impactful personal development exercise.
A personal creed is a concept or principle that reflects your core values, that you hold yourself in alignment with and accountable to. It could show up in the form of a short statement or one single word or a concise idea. This is a thing that you want to be an embodiment of. Maybe something that you want to live up to. It dictates how you show up in the world. It guides you to be who you want to be in life. Before you panic about the inauthenticity of trying to BE someone, you should know that part of authenticity is deciding who you want to be and why. True authenticity involves stripping away "fake" goals and who you think you must or should be; so as to make your ideal self a reflection of your genuine values. If your ideal self-aligns with your authentic core, the opposition between being who you are and being who you want to be disappears.
A creed could be literally anything. So long as it is something that YOU are powerfully aligned with. To give you a list of examples, it could me: Softness, integrity, safe harbor, strength, do unto others as I would have them do unto me, empowerment, put a dent in the universe, leadership, connection over ego, open minded, warmth, respect worthy, responsible, one thing at a time, follow through, poise, actively engaged, patience, present, family first, pay attention, be of service, thrive not survive, disciplined, respond don’t react, integrity over image, consistency, the buck stops here, be a goldfish, empathy, I am captain, gentle, right priority, do it afraid, keep the spark alive, be like (fill in the blank with someone or something you want to emulate), proactivity, curiosity is key, etc. This list could be literally endless. Your creed must be something that is in alignment with your personal development and that you really believe will bring about improvement and that you deeply value.
You may already have an idea of what you want your creed to be. If not, think about what trait(s) you want to embody. How you want to feel in life. Is there something you have not yet mastered, but very much want to master? Who do you admire most and what for? Consider what you think might turn things around in a positive direction. When you picture your best self, what creed would hold you strong to that direction? How might you challenge yourself in a way that feels healthy and needed?
You could pick a creed to govern your life in general. And/or you could pick a creed to govern different elements of your life. For example, a man may pick “ownership” to govern his life in general, “be a safe harbor” to govern his relationships with women, “brotherhood” to govern his relationships with men, “wear a velvet glove” to govern his career and the list goes on. Also, sometimes creeds serve you for your entire life while others are seasonal. They serve a specific purpose at a specific time.
Once you pick whatever that creed is going to be, you live up to that creed and hold yourself to it every minute of every day. As if you are making every micro-moment of your life, all your thoughts, words, decisions, behaviors and actions a reflection of that creed. This simplifies the process of showing up in your life the way you want to show up. Everything you say and everything you do is going to be measured against your creed. If you don’t know what to do, you are going to consider what you must do in order to live up to your creed.
So that you understand this, I’ll give you two examples, imagine that Jeoffrey has been struggling a lot in his relationship with being in the back seat of his life and he has slipped into a flipped polarity dynamic with his wife who is now stressed out and resentful. Jeoffrey thought hard about what Creed he wanted to use as a North Star. He landed on: Be Like George Washington. For Jeoffrey, who was a history buff, George Washington embodied so many of the things he wanted to embody as a man and in his relationship. Courageous leadership, self-restraint, the health of things in his care above his own status, being an active driver of what he wanted to see happen, intentionality, initiative etc. So, Jeoffrey started to live with being a George Washington as his creed. He considered: When would George Washington wake up, and what would he immediately do? As a result, Jeoffrey started waking up earlier to get ahead of the family, so he could direct them through the process of getting dressed, fed and off to school/work. He started dressing better because when he was tempted to put on the same T-shirt multiple days in a row, he remembered that George Washington would have taken more pride in himself. When his wife got mad at him, he asked himself “how would George Washington handle this?” As a result, he didn’t shy away from the conflict. And he kept himself under emotional control. He imagined himself to be the leader in the scenario and so, he took it upon himself to figure out what she was in pain about and to propose a solution to the pain rather than the surface issue hiding the pain. When he was at work, he imagined how George Washington would act if he suddenly got body transplanted into his (Jeoffrey’s) body. This made him take way more initiative at work. When he went to the grocery store, and he was faced with the decision about what toothbrush to buy, he asked himself, which one would George Washington buy? Basically, with everything from tiny to big and at all moments of the day, he held himself accountable to the creed of: Be like George Washington. Because Jeoffrey picked a person to personify as his creed, rather than a trait like leadership, he did need to differentiate between becoming exactly like that person, including the negative traits. For example, Jeoffrey knew that George Washington was a workaholic who was unavailable to his partner and also had a raging hot temper. These traits are not what he wanted to emulate in his life or in his relationship. Rather, it was George Washington’s positive traits that he wanted to bring in. And those “presidential qualities” he felt would bring his self-respect and marriage down a better road. Consequently, it did exactly that. It led to him being promoted and also to his marriage improving so much so that his wife was convinced that her prayers had been answered and she had experienced a walk-in by her perfect guy.
Emily settled on the creed softness. She has come to a point in her life where she is fed up to the max with being locked into this go-getter, armored, hard way of being. She has paid a heavy toll for it and is now chronically ill. So, she wants to live according to the creed softness. Every day, she tries to embody softness. She asks herself “how could this be softer”? How could I say this softer? How could I do this softer? When she has choices to make, she asks herself: Is it softer or harder? Will it make me softer or will it make me harder? She gravitates towards softness. She chooses softness. She used to wake up with an alarm, she doesn’t do that anymore. She has researched softer ways to communicate to other people. She has decked out her apartment with things that are soft and soft colors and things that put her is a safe and therefore soft mode. When she is faced with the decision to take one route to go somewhere vs. another, she thinks about which route feels softer and takes that route. For her, softer is really about a state of being. So, she lives according to staying in alignment with that state of being. Emily is much happier now and many of the symptoms she had been experiencing have been dissipating. Emily feels horrified when she thinks of ever going back to the state she was stuck in before.
The practice of living according to a creed greatly simplifies the process of self-development. It has an uncanny way of stripping the complexity out of life, while accelerating personal growth and life improvement. And when you do this for long enough, it will become habitual to the point that it is second nature, you will no longer have to intentionally work on it. So what’s your creed gonna be?
With ever increasing intensity, people who have been coming to me with relationship problems, have been apathetic to doing the very things that would improve the relationship. And a pattern is emerging. The pattern of effort itself being a trigger. And so, let’s take a look at this specific trigger as well as what to do about it.
In a world that is so complicated and in a world that seems to be getting harder and harder and harder, wanting a relationship that is easy rather than hard makes total sense. That being said, relationships involve varying degrees of difficulty because they are not only where our relational needs are met, they are also the primary impetus for personal development. And, they take work to build and maintain. The right attitude to have is that a language wont speak itself and keep itself fluent, a campfire wont light itself or keep itself lit. A home doesn’t build itself and stay maintained, a garden doesn’t plant and sow itself, a tapestry wont weave itself. A relationship takes work to build, to make good and to maintain. In a relationship, you are taking two unique and very complex individual beings with their own thoughts, feelings, wants, needs, preferences, traumas, weaknesses, strengths, perspectives, past experiences, motives etc. and you are attempting to merge or unite them in a harmonious way. A relationship is never a static state of happiness. It is always a dynamic, active never-ending process, like a dance. A process that just so happens to require constant maintenance and adaptation.
Healthy relationship work can be hard as hell, but what sets it apart is that it builds safety, builds trust, builds connection, deepens the bond and develops the self. Unhealthy relationship work doesn’t build these things, despite the effort put in. And the motives behind the effort will also be out of alignment. Things like obligation, terror of abandonment, adhering to strict doctrines, pure avoidance of consequences, intermittent reinforcement, the need to fix the other person to feel worthy, believing you won’t find better and guilt etc. Unhealthy relationship work breeds resentment. All this being said, some people are triggered by the notion of having to put effort into a relationship period the end. When they reach that moment where the relationship becomes challenging and they see that in order to make the relationship good, they have to change something about themselves, such as their behavior, or do something that needs to be done, or put in mental effort, such as really put energy into understanding the other person or actively communicate, they feel immediate resistance and sink into apathy instead. In order to understand what is occurring when this happens, we need to take a journey into the past.
If you are one of these people who is triggered by the idea or experience of relationship work, you have learned to associate effort in relationships with negative things rather than positive things, therefore as a path to relational pain, rather than relationship improvement and connection. The thing to become clear about is what specifically you associate effort in a relationship with.
I’ll give you an example: Ben shuts down the minute that it becomes clear that in order to make his marriage good, he needs to hold himself accountable to the things he promises. He is apathetic about keeping his word. The idea of having to put effort into holding himself to a standard and having to make sure he is always keeping his word, feels intolerable to him. He goes to men’s groups. He knows how unacceptable it is for any man to say: I don’t want to hold myself accountable or keep my word with my wife. The other men would hand that man his ass and never let him around their daughters or sisters or mothers or anything. Ben becomes introspective about what is so intolerable about putting this effort into his marriage. What he quickly puts together is that it feels the same way as it used to feel when he was living at home with his hyper-critical mother who expected him to be and do exactly what she wanted and to the exact standard she wanted, in order for her to not be at odds with him. He molded and contorted himself into what she wanted him to be, but never was able to meet her standards. So, when he is faced with having to put effort into his marriage to make it work, he immediately associates doing this with a loss of autonomy, the horror of subjugation, the feeling of always failing, being a dancing monkey in order to be emotionally safe and get love, and the unsafety and pain of never being able to just be the way he is… The good, the bad and the ugly without the risk of rejection and abandonment. So, the first step is to look at your life to really define the association you have with putting effort into a relationship. Name the thing you are afraid of and are wanting to avoid.
Moving through this trigger is not about trying harder. It is about un-coupling effort from threat!
The first thing that can be done about this, is trauma healing work. This is work with the trigger and what in the past the trigger is linked to directly. My method for this, is The Completion Process. You can learn how to do this process by doing my Completion Process e-course, by reading the book, both of which are on my website. And/or by being led through the process by a Completion Process facilitator.
The next thing to do is to really look at what work you need to do to make the relationship better and compare it consciously to those things you negatively associate with effort in a relationship to see if doing that work really does or really does not equal those things. For example: Ben knows that holding himself accountable to the things he promises and making sure he keeps his word equals a loss of autonomy, the horror of subjugation, the feeling of always failing, being a dancing monkey in order to be emotionally safe and get love, and the unsafety and pain of never being able to just be the way he is… The good, bad and ugly without the risk of rejection and abandonment. But the question is, does keeping himself accountable to the things he promises actually equal a loss of autonomy or any one of the other things on that list? Does making sure he keeps his word equal being a dancing monkey in the relationship, or any one of the other things on that list? The answer might be yes. And if this is the case, then that is what needs to be creatively trouble shot, so that the answer isn’t yes. But usually, the answer will in fact be no. If the answer was yes, you have the real problem targeted, so you can then do something about that. If the answer is no, this realization will de-escalate your nervous system and go a long way towards de-coupling the relationship effort you need to put in from threat.
The next thing that needs to be done is: Very consciously and deliberately look directly at the thing(s) you are actually wanting to avoid IN the relationship. The things that are a “no” for you. Evaluating if and where you feel those things IN the relationship currently and problem solving those areas so that you no longer feel that way. The things that are a “no” for you, will be those things you associated with effort. Using our example, for Ben it will be: Loss of autonomy, the horror of subjugation, the feeling of always failing, being a dancing monkey in order to be emotionally safe and get love, and the unsafety and pain of never being able to just be the way he is… The good, the bad and the ugly without the risk of rejection and abandonment. He may look at these things and realize that he has a very dysfunctional relationship with expectations. He may consciously evaluate expectations within the context of relationships and land on the truth that it isn’t ok to require his partner to have no expectations of him. He may then sit down and decide upon what expectations he thinks are fair and that a woman should have of the man in her life. He would communicate with her directly and even debate, so as to get on the same page about the fair vs. unfair expectations in their relationship. And he may decide to go to therapy to work on his issue with things being expected of him by other people.
This is a process that must be done very consciously. Because it is not ok in a relationship to play a zero-sum game, what that means in this context is to put the other person in pain just so that you don’t have to be in pain and can avoid these things. An example of what that might be like is: Ben realizes that he does not want to have this feeling that he is never able to just be the way he is… The good, the bad and the ugly without the risk of rejection and abandonment. He realizes that he wants his partner to stay committed to him unconditionally. So, he drops holding himself to any standard in the relationship with her and starts doing things like not working on his toxic behaviors because “it’s just the way he is” and purposefully acting out by doing things he knows she doesn’t like to “test” whether she will stay loving and creating an environment where his partner cannot share how she feels about him and the relationship because if she does, she is rejecting him and does not love him for who he really is. Ben’s desire for radical acceptance and commitment no matter what has now become a license to act with no self-regulation and to behave narcissistically. He is treating his desire for "no risk of rejection" as a hall pass to stop doing the work to make a relationship good. And because of it, in the name of wanting to be unconditionally loved, he has created an abusive relationship. He has created unilateral terms for the relationship. He has made the relationship entirely about his need for safety, leaving no room for his partner's need for him to caretake her wellbeing, for boundaries or for respect.
Aside from those most important things, here are some other things you can do:
Re-define the “work” as something you see as positive. For example, creation, transformation, nurturing, maintaining, cultivating, mastering, synthesizing, calibrating, alchemizing, exalting, experimenting, adventuring, evolving etc. Whatever feels the best to you. For many people, work has a negative connotation. For example, stress, exhaustion, drudgery, dread, sooo much effort, unfairness, exploitation, something being too hard. Re-define it so it doesn’t feel like lifting something heavy that you don’t want to lift or like a chore.
See how the effort advances you and makes you gain more. Shift the goal of the effort to something self-serving rather than detrimental to yourself and also rather than something for the other person. For example, say that in order to make the relationship better, you know that you have to go to see a counselor. Rather than the goal being to “fix the relationship” or “make her happy”, make the effort of therapy for the goal of: “Me learning tools that I currently don’t know, which will make this relationship and/or relationships in general less painful and more peaceful.” It is tempting for people to relate to relationship work like a limitation, burden or tax they have to pay, just to keep the relationship. As if they are working just to stay in the same place. This is a way to burn out in a relationship and resent putting effort into a relationship. To give you an example. Let’s say that the other person is nagging you to do something. You know you need to put in the effort of doing that thing to make the relationship good. Putting in the effort to understand the why behind the nagging will reveal to you that the person has an unmet need. Something like “I feel like I am alone carrying all of the pressure, what I need therefore is a teammate, so I feel like we are in this together.” If you put effort into doing things that make them feel like you are really in it with them and carrying weight, the nagging will stop and you will gain peace, harmony and closeness. The other person might respond to this with more warmth, affection and even playfulness. So, you gain these things too. Rather than seeing it like you are complying to a demand at a loss to yourself, see that you are gaining all of these things, as well as a better version of yourself. A version of you that is a stellar teammate.
Wake yourself up to where you are. The reality of the here and now vs. the past. This bridges the gap between your emotional age (which feels small and trapped) and your chronological age (which is actually not small and not trapped and is instead capable and free). Being triggered by putting effort into a relationship so often has to do with your experiences as a child. It is as if you are stuck there, regardless of having turned into an adult and regardless of current circumstances being different. When you are triggered, your brain has essentially "time traveled" back to a moment where you had no agency and you are re-experiencing that, despite being in a different situation in the here and now. You can think of it like a form of post traumatic stress reaction. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that because it is a fact that you are an adult, you shouldn’t be feeling like you do. Your childhood “primed you” for your life. But it can actually really help a lot to snap yourself out of it by remembering that you are an adult now and you have different people around you and you cannot be controlled like you were as a child, you can leave. Your effort is your choice. The people around you are not your parents. You are not a prisoner. You are voluntarily in the relationship. A request from a partner is not the same as a demand from a parent. It is information about their needs, which is like having a map to how to build a harmonious relationship with them, not a rulebook for how you must behave “or else”. Conflict is not an exit sign; it is an invitation to engage. Really remind yourself of what is going on. For example: “I am 30 years old, I am living in Milwaukee. I am working at a company with a boss that has an intense personality. I can quit this job. Even if I would face things like not having a paycheck, I am actually able to quit this job. I am staying because this job will add to my resume in a big way. My boss is not my dad. Wanting approval from my boss does not make me feel very masculine, and I really want to feel strong and like a man, because I am one. I am not a little boy anymore. I am actually safe in life in general still if my boss doesn’t approve of me.”
Commit to small doses of effort in relationships and work your way up. If you are triggered by putting effort into a relationship, you need to rehabilitate yourself relative to putting effort in. One way to do this is to prove to yourself that putting in relational effort doesn't result in re-injury. Things like pain, control, or exhaustion. This is best done by starting with small, intentional doses and then expanding your effort from there. Shrinking the effort in this way, decreases the perceived size of the threat, so you can engage with effort in a relationship in a way that doesn’t put you in fight or flight mode. For example: Hou could set a timer to go off at specific intervals and when it goes off, you could ask yourself: What is one thing I could do to right now to make the other person feel good or to make our relationship even better? And then carry that one thing out to completion. The thing you choose to do could be as small as giving a compliment or as big as following through on a huge project you know they have been desperate for you to do or anything in between. Some people need to rehabilitate themselves with doing only very little things at first, so as to prove to themselves that it is positive rather than a threat. And then when they are ready, to take on things that used to feel big and that they used to feel resistance towards.
Or you could create a one-week challenge for yourself where every day, you pick only one thing to put effort into that would improve the relationship. When you micro dose effort in this way, you need to really notice and resource the positive things this leads to. The improvement in emotional tone, the changes in the other person, the reciprocity that may show up, the softening in others, the increased sensation of harmony, the reduction in resistance and tension you feel, the pride you feel at being the way you are being in the relationship, the way the other person starts to bid for connection with you, etc. Take note that a positive reaction may not immediately happen because you may have taught the other person that you will not put in effort, that doing so is a problem for you. So, they have had to swallow that painful reality and now have a protective wall built between you. They may be so burnt out they can’t react, they may be waiting for the other shoe to drop (as if the dose of effort is going to come with a side dish of pain) or there may be lag time before their nervous system can believe this is the new you. When your effort is having an impact in a positive way in a relationship, perhaps the best way to tell is that bids will increase from the other person in the relationship. Ie: They will start to display little ways to try to make a connection, try to your attention, affection, or affirmation. Remember that you are not doing this small dose of effort routine so that you have an excuse to put bread crumbs of effort into a relationship and expect it not to starve. You are not doing this so these small bits of effort are performances to keep the other person quiet. You are not doing this so you have checked the box and now are “off the hook” for the rest of the day. You are not doing this to set a boundary against the other person regarding what they need from you. What you are doing is training your nervous system that it is good to put in effort and that doing so leads to good things, not a recipe for disaster. And no matter what the result, you are in integrity within the relationship. This is something to notice and really feel as well.
It is important to mention that all of these suggestions are about being triggered by effort in a relationship and so, you are not actually putting in the work necessary to have a good relationship. It is actually possible to be triggered by effort because the trigger is a warning that you are the only one putting effort and work into a relationship, and probably have been the only one for a long time. When this is the case, what you are calling a trigger is likely to be in the realm of resentment and to be a protective protest, an attempt to preserve your energy, self respect and dignity. This means you are over-working and over-functioning in the relationship; trying to dance a tango with a partner who will not take responsibility for dancing. You are trying to do the work FOR the other person, which is not actually possible in a relationship, which is why your efforts are leading to burn out.
If you don’t want to put effort into a relationship, you are not invested in relationship. A relationship requires two active participants to function. There is no way to opt out of this and be in a relationship any more than it is possible to dance a tango and not really put effort into mastering dance yourself. You may have to consider whether it is actually an act of self-awareness and integrity to choose to not be in a relationship because you truly don’t want to put in the work of a relationship. But if you truly do want a relationship, and you are triggered by effort, you aren’t doomed. It is all about de-coupling effort from threat. And proving to yourself that instead, effort in a relationship leads to positive things.
What is the difference between pain and suffering? This is one of the most common questions I have been asked since the very beginning of my career. And even I have given answers to this in the past. But at the end of the day, it isn’t helpful to differentiate between pain and suffering.
Pain is defined as: A localized or generalized unpleasant bodily sensation or complex of sensations that causes mild to severe physical discomfort and/or emotional distress. Suffering is defined as: To feel or endure pain or distress. As you can see, there is nothing in the definitions of the two concepts alone that make it meaningful to differentiate between them. To suffer is basically just to feel or endure pain. Never the less, many people now differentiate between the two.
What distinction are people now making between them? They have decided to use the word pain to mean the initial physical or emotional sensation. So, pain would be the primary feeling. And they have decided to use the world suffering to mean what your mind does with that sensation. So, suffering would be the secondary response to that feeling of pain. When viewed through this lens, pain is what happens to you, while suffering is what you do to yourself through your thoughts about what is happening or about what happened. You will find that people tend to relate to suffering as being more intense and prolonged. But most importantly, people now relate to suffering as being different in origin, different in nature and especially different in terms of our capacity to control it. Which is where the idea of suffering being optional came from.
Looking all the way back to Buddhist teachings, you will find the parable of the two arrows. The First Arrow (essentially unavoidable pain) represents the inevitable pain that is part of life. Illness, loss, or difficult events etc. The Second Arrow (essentially pain we have control over) represents our mental and emotional reaction to the first arrow, such as the thoughts which cause us to go into resistance to it, the meaning and interpretation we assign to it, all of which prolong or worsen the pain of the first arrow and the emotions that arise as a result of those thoughts. The lesson being that while you cannot always control the first arrow, you can learn to stop firing the second arrow through mindfulness practices.
In the late 19th century, scholars like Max Müller published the first major English translations of Buddhist texts. Key Western psychologists and Philosophers like Carl Jung, William James, Alan Watts and Eric Fromm studied these spiritual theories. Including the ones related to pain; and incorporated them. And then, in the 1970’s, there was a massive influx of Buddhist ideologies as Westerners traveled to Asia to study with teachers from the Eastern World and then brought those ideologies back home. They began backing them with scientific empirical frameworks and even stripping the concepts of their religious elements so as to integrate them into mainstream healthcare, neuroscience, and psychology.
The idea that pain and suffering are distinct things deeply penetrated Alcoholics Anonymous and the twelve-step program. Most people don’t know it, but this is actually where the phrase “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional” comes from. And it was used explicitly to teach recovery in this way: A person cannot control the pain of past trauma or life events, but they can control the suffering caused by obsessing over, resisting, or trying to numb those facts. This concept caught on like wild fire. It became a standard psychological, spiritual and self-help tool between the 197Os and 1980s. And it is now foundational to many therapies, for example DBT and ACT. It is also foundational to the teachings of many spiritual teachers and influencers, for example Jon Kabat-Zinn, Haruki Murakami and Eckhart Tolle.
To give you a quick idea behind why people find it very beneficial to differentiate between pain and suffering is that it shifts a person from the mentality of being a helpless victim to being in a position of personal power. That it helps a person to see the “second arrow” so they can stop it and that it helps people to not fight against what is and instead take a mindful approach to what is. But allow me to explain why it isn’t helpful to differentiate between pain and suffering.
The actual definition of these words (pain and suffering) being what they are, using the word suffering to represent the second arrow dynamic of pain, is something that really does not benefit people. It is far better to come up with a totally different word to describe it. This will make more sense as we continue.
Differentiating between the two, especially when you say that suffering is a choice, often makes people go into further resistance to pain in general. The exact opposite of one of the main intentions they had for differentiating between them. Pain is a response. Human biology does not neatly separate the physical from the psychological. And no clear line actually exists between the pain that is part of the initial physical or emotional sensation and the pain that is being caused by the secondary mental response to the initial pain. It’s all just pain for people. Also, who defines this? One expert would say that the pain that arises as a result of finding your partner in bed with someone else, is just the initial pain. Another expert would say that that pained reaction in and of itself is actually suffering because it is the byproduct of thoughts that are within your control. Basically, your mind has instantly made it mean something and so you feel pain. Another person from a different culture may not have that same personal interpretation and so, they wouldn’t even feel pain. Because the what is and isn’t initial pain vs. what is and isn’t just my own self causing me to feel pain is so blurry and is a HUGE philosophical debate, people are lost in the weeds. We are forcing people to try to intellectually separate the raw data of pain from the emotional response happening as a result of what they think in response to that pain. This is not an effective way to help people to process their distress. And it is a delineation that the greatest minds don’t even agree upon. As a result, over and over I watch people relating to pain in general as if experiencing it at all means they are doing something wrong and as if it is a personal failure. As if they would not feel any pain if they were conscious enough or positive enough. Even worse, because people associate suffering as being intense and prolonged pain, anytime the pain they are feeling is intense or prolonged, they automatically label it as suffering and therefore link it to “not ok, not necessary, my fault”. This will put you into resistance to your own pain real quick.
Differentiating between the two, especially when you say that suffering is a choice, is not automatically empowering. Instead, it is deeply invalidating, as well as psychologically and emotionally harmful. When someone is in the middle of something extremely painful, something that no one would ever choose, they do not need to come into contact with any notion that they are choosing to feel that pain and could just as easily not be feeling it. It adds a layer of shame to the person experiencing pain, so they end up in double pain. It also leaves them alone with their pain. The implication of suffering being something you do to yourself and therefore, something that is optional, means that if you’re in pain, it’s your own fault. And if you’re doing it to yourself, no one feels sorry for you and no one will help you. You almost deserve it if you’re going to do it to yourself. If someone’s pain involved being harmed by someone else, this ideology is victim blaming. The "suffering is a choice" narrative forces an individual to fix themselves. This completely ignores the biological fact that we are a social species that thrives in co-regulation.
When a person cannot simply "choose" to stop feeling pain or stop feeling devastated by tragedy, they internalize their pain as a sense of personal failure. They are now dealing with the original trauma plus the crushing guilt and shame of being affected by it. And it is to say that the painful situation isn't the problem; your inability to accept reality or hold a different perspective about it is the problem. If you would like to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: People Are Not Attached To Their Pain.
This ideology surrounding this differentiation between pain and suffering is deeply ignorant to physiology and neurobiology. To tell someone facing serious pain, whether that be a physical condition or a trauma or a crisis or a compromised nervous system or chemical imbalance or gut microbiome issue or mold toxicity that they are choosing to suffer is as cruel and inaccurate as telling someone with a broken leg that they are choosing not to walk. The mentality that has come from the differentiation between pain and suffering patronizes the person who is in pain, erases reality and trivializes the often brutal complexity of their lived reality.
It is a minimization tool. When you differentiate between pain and suffering, you are literally shrinking the size of a tragedy by dividing it into two pieces, and then throwing the biggest piece away as illegitimate. If the pain you are experiencing is reduced to a "self-created narrative," it minimizes the actual size of the real pain. And this is not how it is experienced. So, it is a gaslight. When someone is experiencing pain, telling them to separate pain from suffering minimizes their experience. It implies that the event itself is only a minor, temporary pain, and that their ongoing pain is just suffering that they are generating themselves. This downplays the pain of the situation and reframes an entirely normal human response to pain as an exaggerated emotional failure. On top of this, when the pain involves a trauma, this mentality reduces the very real neurological and biological crisis that is occurring to an attitude problem. When the situation is far more complex. This minimization takes the focus off of the painful situation itself and puts the focus on whether or not you are thinking positively enough, meditating correctly, practicing acceptance well enough, or are being too dramatic. It minimizes the objective pain of the event by turning the entire thing you are going through into a test of your own personal emotional and mental maturity. Which is cruel.
Differentiating between pain and suffering promotes bypassing and suppression of key elements of distress that need to be processed. It is all too easy to decide that pain is just suffering and is therefore unnecessary. This can cause a person to suppress, deny and disown emotions as well as the painful personal truths contained within those emotions. For example, people may suppress genuine and important grief, anger, or fear by labeling it as "unnecessary suffering". This idea really tends to be one of those intellectual concepts that gets used to avoid all things negative, which is why it is so wholeheartedly embraced by people who cope with toxic positivity. Promoting the suffering is a choice mindset onto people creates an environment where negative emotions are banned. It demands that people maintain a facade of positivity. This prevents people from voicing legitimate complaints, being truthful, revealing vulnerabilities and acknowledging and expressing emotion because any sign of deep distress is dismissed as a personal spiritual defect.
This differentiation can cause you to bypass the reality of how you feel because you’ve already made it not real and unnecessary. Constantly trying to categorize feelings into "clean pain" versus "dirty suffering" has the tendency to seriously prevent a person from fully processing and moving through their emotions.
It creates obsessive self-monitoring and self-policing. Attempting to police one's own thoughts to prevent suffering often creates a secondary layer of anxiety. People become hyper-vigilant, constantly checking in on their internal monologue: "Am I creating my own suffering right now? Am I making this worse? Am I doing this to myself?" This obsessive self-analysis increases stress rather than reduces it.
This philosophy can very easily cause a person to slip into the idea that external conditions do not matter. People LOVE this idea. People HATE powerlessness. It makes them feel empowered to be able to be unaffected. It’s why they adore books like Man’s Search for Meaning. But as profound as these insights on human perception are, we need to seriously ask ourselves “should the goal for us as people be to be unaffected?” What are the shadows inherent in this? What are the dangers of this? I can assure you, there are many. And external conditions DO matter. Telling someone who is hurting because of these conditions that their suffering is just a “poor mental attitude” is gaslighting and pushes them to put up with things they should not be putting up with. It can force a person to focus on their internal thought patterns rather than addressing the actual, ongoing source of harm. It also makes us complacent to things that need to be changed. It should really scare you how far this can go because this differentiation between pain and suffering, where suffering is purely an individual, internal choice can easily go in the direction of society having no obligation to help those who are struggling. It can absolve governments, communities, institutions and each other of our responsibility to help where we can, to fix broken systems, to alleviate poverty, or to provide social safety nets and the list goes on. It has the tendency to shift the entire burden of systemic and structural failures onto the shoulders of the individual. Which none of us should think is ok. Worse still, the "pain vs. suffering" rule changes the math of accountability. This is especially important when it comes to abuse. Because it makes the person who was harmed accountable for the pain they are experiencing, rather than the person causing harm.
We shouldn’t define it this way, but let’s pretend to go along with everyone and define suffering as the secondary response to that initial feeling of pain. What you do to yourself through your thoughts about what is happening or what happened. What people who need to make the world simple and cut and dry do not get is that when something happens, the reaction you will have to this is instantaneous. The subconscious mind literally floods forward. And it does this so incredibly fast that there is no way for a person to tell what’s what and what is causing what. This secondary response, which is in fact immediate, is usually an absolute multilayered mess. It isn’t like frosting being added to cake. It’s like an Indian curry or better yet, aunt Mildred’s failed lasagna that devolved into a soupy mess. For example, let’s say that a you get into a car accident. That second, you could be flooded with the pain of traumatic physical injuries and somatic shock. Just seconds after the impact, the experience may give rise to the immediate thought: "I am trapped." This thought is both an accurate assessment of the present moment and the birth of a long-term driving phobia. The brain welds them together instantly because the brain is designed to learn from danger instantly so it can keep you alive next time. And it works the same way with pains/threats of an emotional/psychological nature. All of a sudden, you start to panic about finances and feel the financial pressure crushing in on you. You fear losing your job. You feel the hit of pain of thinking about having to depend on other people, traumatic memories about being treated like a burden, fearful images about a relationship falling apart due to them having to take on extra pressure, including caring for you. All the horrible associations you have with police officers. That dark humor trope you picked up from doing a first aid course… Bystander: "He broke his leg!" Paramedic: "Stand back! Let me drop this heavy stretcher on his other leg so they match." And the accompanying terror that the first responders are going to make it worse rather than better. You feel an overwhelming need to just be held by someone familiar. All the while, your brain is already forming permanent, subconscious associations. It binds the sensory data (the smell of burning rubber, the sound of breaking glass) to intense terror. Human distress behaves like a rapid, compounding feedback loop. One response instantly causes the next, erasing any clear boundaries between pain and suffering. When we are experiencing intense pain, especially if part of this pain is the perception of danger, you lose the cognitive ability to step back, look at your emotions objectively, and sort them into neat categories. Everything just feels like a massive, blurry, abstract, ambient, all-consuming wave of pain.
Weeding through this mess to isolate out and resolve the layer that people are calling “suffering” (essentially what a person is adding to a situation, what they are making a situation mean and their interpretation of what is) has a very important place and time in the process of healing. But there has to be a huge level of attunement to when that place and time is right. And it isn’t as simple as “it’s just stuff I am adding to it, and so it’s suffering and so, I now choose not to suffer”. I’ll give you just one example of what I mean. Let’s say that you experience something painful and that causes a core belief to come up and that core belief is making you suffer more. Just because you can identify that this core belief is something you are adding to the experience, doesn’t mean you can just decide to not have it. A whole process is needed just to uproot that one belief. Whole different experiences are needed to no longer have traumatic associations. And when it comes to complex traumas, there are often layers upon layers upon layers upon layers. Years and years worth of layers. Everyone would love to just be able to “choose not to suffer” the minute they see one of these layers. But this is not how this layer people are calling suffering works.
When someone is in pain, they really may not benefit by a semantics lesson on pain vs. suffering. Nor do they need a highly intellectual lesson on the difference between a primary and secondary emotion. Nor do they need to feel the cognitive burden and heat of being responsible for objectively observing their pain and philosophically differentiating between pain and suffering. They certainly don’t need the pressure of “you should be able to make yourself feel better” on top of the pain they are feeling.
For all of these reasons, it isn’t helpful to differentiate between pain and suffering. What we need to do is to respond to pain as valid and important period the end, no matter what is causing it. We do this by seeing it, feeling it, listening to it, and deeply understanding it as well as what is causing it. And with that information, we figure out consciously how to best respond to that pain so that the conditions are no longer there to cause the alarm (which is what pain is) to go off.
Believe it or not, it is possible to feel negative about positive. There are many ways that a person can form a negative association with positivity. Many things that a person can experience with positivity that are traumatizing. If you or someone you know, is one of those people who has positivity trauma, it can feel like you or they are up against a wall regarding what to do about it. Which is why, I am going to explain how to heal positivity trauma.
If you have positivity trauma, positivity will in and of itself be a trigger for you. So, all those positive things that should make someone feel better, make you feel worse. Things like positive slogans or phrases, positive people, gratitude practices, compliments, positive language, positivity exercises, reassurance, inspirational content and silver linings. So will situations where you are expected in any way to be positive. You have been led to believe that something is wrong with you because of this. But actually, your brain and body are just reacting the way they should react given what you have experienced. Your negativity or cynicism is actually a survival mechanism. It is your body guard so to speak. A strategy to keep you away from all the painful things you now associate with positivity. To learn about this, you can watch my video titled: Do You Positivity Boycott? But what should you do if you have this positivity trauma? After all, it is also painful to keep yourself in negativity all the time because of how unsafe positivity was.
The most important thing to do is to recognize what is happening for what it is and stop telling yourself painful stories about yourself. What I mean by this is, when you encounter positivity, it causes you to feel pain. And when it comes to shifting your mindset to be more positive or to do positivity exercises, you procrastinate and approach it like someone going to get a root canal. It hurts to have to do it. You probably have a whole bunch of negative stories you tell yourself about yourself when this happens. Things like: Something is seriously wrong with me. Maybe I am addicted to the negative. I am just a negative person. It’s my fault I can’t be happy, look at me. I’m not grateful for what I have, so the universe is going to take it from me etc. Stop it. No, I really mean it. Stop it. These stories are not in reality at all. What is happening, and what you need to remind yourself is happening, is that your positivity trauma has been activated. When you have trauma relative to positivity, it means metaphorically speaking, you have been bitten by the shark called toxic positivity. As a result, you have learned that a positive slogan means you will be neglected or silenced because they were used to negate the way you feel. A compliment means loss because you have experienced people taking it back. Reassurance means a bad thing will happen because you’ve experienced so much false reassurance. A positive focus exercise means you are going to get blindsided by something bad. Positive language means you are about to be erased because it was used to completely cover your reality and the truth of what you thought and how you felt about it. Pavlov, a Russian physiologist proved that dogs could be trained to associate a neutral stimulus (ringing a bell) with food. And that eventually, they would start salivating at the sound of the bell alone. This showed that behavioral responses are learned through association. It is no different with what you are experiencing. Positivity – negative association – negative response. You can halt the trigger spiral just by naming what is happening objectively. For example: I know what is happening, I am triggered by the positive, my nervous system is trying to protect me from (fill in the blank with specifically what the negative consequence of the positive thing would be). This may take some reflection to become conscious of what it is. For example, say I pass someone wearing a T-shirt that says “Life is Good”. I feel myself becoming bitter and hateful towards the person wearing that T-shirt. I think hard about what bad thing that might mean to me. Maybe the answer is: That T-shirt totally invalidates the fact that I haven’t had a good life at all. It makes me feel totally alone in my pain and like the odd one out. And I feel extreme envy towards people who have had a good enough life to feel that way. And I feel expected to be positive and happy, no matter what I have been put through. I would say: I know what is happening, I am triggered by the positive, my nervous system is trying to protect me from my pain being invalidated, being alone in pain, feeling envious and feeling the pressure and pain of having to put on a façade.
Prioritize feeling safe. Not feeling “positive”. Prioritize the downregulation of your nervous system. So many people who struggle with positivity trauma think that the problem is not being positive or not being able to resource the positive, when it isn’t. It is that you are stuck in fight or flight mode and you don’t even notice that this is actually the issue. The problem is you don’t feel safe. Trauma makes you not feel safe. Have you noticed that when you start to feel safe, suddenly, you start to feel more positive naturally? If you don’t feel safe in a given moment, you will not be able to feel positive or notice positive things. In fact, you will be traumatizing yourself because you will be gaslighting yourself. One part of you will be putting pressure on you to feel positive, as if you should be feeling that way or at least be able to make yourself feel that way. The rest of you will be rejecting the positive because it is a complete contradiction to what is actually happening for the nervous system. You need a calm nervous system that is registering that it is safe in order for you to be able to “register” and feel the positive. Soothe the body into feeling calmer. Confirm that you are safe. It is far more effective when you are triggered to soak your face in cold water, to massage your ears, to go under the covers, to create vibrations in your neck/body by humming, singing or gargling, to scan the room and name things, to cross your arms over your chest and tap your shoulders in an alternating left-right rhythm, to gently rock yourself, to listen to soothing sounds or deliberately go smell scents that make you feel safe, to follow along with a guided meditation, to do breathing practices that specifically pull you out of fight or flight mode and/or to focus on ways you ARE safe than it is to try to be positive or do positivity exercises. If you are struggling with positivity, ask yourself: Why don’t I feel safe right now? And based on the answers you receive, take an action that directly resolves the unsafety. The nervous system responds so much more to physiological safety cues than it ever does to psychological effort to think differently, especially when thinking positive for you is already something that registers as a threat. Toxic positivity demands that you use your mind to ignore your body. You are looking to do the opposite, to use your body to tell your mind that you are safe. Whatever you do, if you have positivity trauma, don’t try to ‘positive’ your way out of feeling or being unsafe, which you know you love to try to do.
The healing experience is for “the negative”, really just your unfiltered honesty, to be fully listened to, heard, understood, received, validated and responded to in an attuned way. Your pain needs to be witnessed and responded to in an attuned way in order to reverse the isolation, neglect and abuse you’ve lived in for so long. It is what will pull you out of survival mode. And it is what will pull you out of shame for your emotions. You can no longer be with people where you need to suppress your pain to help them avoid discomfort. This means, be around people (especially friends) who value radical honesty and validation over good vibes or positivity. Be around people where they do not need or expect you to remain positive no matter how challenging or difficult a situation is. Especially avoid people who use positivity to bypass and spiritual bypassers. You need spaces where heavy, painful thoughts and emotions are treated as important information, not defects or personal failings. You need people and places that truly don’t put pressure on you to be ok. You need people who get that you never should feel happy; happiness is an internal signal, and if it isn’t going off, the conditions are not present for it to be signaling. There are people and places where it’s ok to not be ok. Not that no one responds in an attuned, compassionate way to your pain because they think it is ok that you are hurting. Rather people and places where your feelings and current emotional state are not treated like the problem, pushed away, or run away from. They can be there and be part of the place and relationship.
Remember that the goal is to become “total”. Not to become a positive person. To be positive is to be partial. To be negative is also to be partial. To be truly grounded in reality and truth, is to be able to see, recognize, feel, know all that is. A person who is total can see the negative and the positive. A person who is total can feel the full range… Joy and sadness, elation and anger, excitement and disappointment. One practice that can help with this is AND consciousness. To be able to hold seemingly contradictory truths and feeling states, and for both to be valid, rather than for either to cancel the other out. For example: I am not enjoying being here AND there are things here that are lovely. Grief and enjoyment are not mutually exclusive. You don't have to "finish" being sad before you're allowed to or can enjoy a movie. To understand more about this, you can watch my video titled: AND Consciousness, The Modern-Day Replacement For the Middle Way. Just don’t do this exercise if you are using positives to “tone down” or try to “cancel out” negatives.
If you do any exercises around positivity, do it FOR your health. Think of positivity exercises no differently than you think of health food or drinking water. Positivity can no longer be a social demand. It must be a personal tool that you can use because you have decided that it does something for you. Just like eating healthy food is not about hiding the bad stuff, it’s just about adding something that supports your system, any of these positive exercises are not about hiding or stuffing down or cancelling out the "bad" stuff; they are about adding something that supports your physical system while you navigate the "bad" stuff.
Micro-dose positivity and in ways that feel safe. Imagine it like this, if you were traumatized by a shark attack, you wouldn’t go swimming in the deep ocean with great whites. You would need safe water experiences. Some ways to do this relative to positivity are to drop trying to be happy and positive. Instead, make your aim to feel relief or comfort or a moment of enjoyment. Find what feels good in little, safe ways. Maybe even not including people in this to start. Things like seeing if you can really let yourself enjoy the cup of tea or the thing you are eating. Things like fully feeling the sunset. Things like noticing and naming the things you like while driving. The deep red color of that car. The skyline. How that woman is singing at the top of her lungs. The song that is playing. The fabric of the outfit you are wearing etc. When positivity has been used against you in an abusive way, your brain treats good feelings like a danger and you experience a threat response. You are looking to prove to your being that things are different now. A good feeling or noticing a good thing, does not come with a terrible consequence. The most common form that toxic positivity comes in, is verbal. So, start with positivity in a nonverbal form. For example, rather than affirmations, focus on noticing beautiful things. Things that just exist, whether you recognize them or not and that are not putting pressure on you to appreciate them or demanding that you notice them. You might find that to start, it is safer to experience good feeling things or engage with the positive when you are alone. Why? You don't have to put on a happy facade to make someone else feel comfortable. A forest is full of things that cause you to feel pleasure, but if no one is there, this allows you to experience those things without having to put on a performance of joy and without fearing the consequences you associate with others seeing you feel good. Or for example, engaging in a hobby (gardening, painting, wood-working) creates a flow state. This quiet, internal positivity doesn't involve another person, so there is none of that complexity or pressure added. Trying to be happy or doing a positive focus exercise may feel 10/10 dangerous. So, do something that is more like a 3/10 for you. Maybe that is aiming to feel an internal exhale or putting your headphones on and really being present with all of your senses to a song you think is really, really good. Feeling a micro-moment of "safe" positivity doesn't mean that what is hurting you is somehow erased or that your trauma isn’t present and real and in need of something.
Do parts work relative to the parts of you that are involved in this painful relationship with positivity. You may have even more parts, but when people have been traumatized by toxic positivity, they struggle with four primary parts. Part one is the part of you that was damaged by positivity, the one who was harmed by it in a list of specific ways. Part two is the part that is trying to protect you by refusing to say or do anything “positive” or put any energy into improving your mood because that is what harmed you. Part three is the part of you that puts the pressure on you to feel ok and be ok, no matter what is happening to you or in your life. This is the internalized aspect of the person who harmed you with positivity. Part four is the part of you that is desperate to feel better and get relief (any relief at all) no matter if that is through positive focus or anything else positive. This one is usually drowning in negativity and is desperate to be positive and do positive, but is being prevented from being and doing it. To learn how to do parts work, you can watch my video titled: What is Parts Work and How To Do Parts Work. There are also several therapy modalities that use the tool of parts work. Many Completion Process Facilitators do, voice dialogue does, internal family systems does, schema therapy does, gestalt therapy does. So, if it feels right to get help doing it, you can find a therapist who specializes in one such modality and go to them with the intention of working with these aspects of yourself. Just make sure that your therapist does not employ toxic positivity and makes you feel like you can trust that they have a big container for and are not resistant to painful emotional states. It would (or maybe wouldn’t) surprise you how many therapists get into the role of being a therapist because they are in fact resistant to negative emotion and want to find ways to shut emotions down.
Speaking of parts work, if you do any positivity exercises and it feels like it is triggering any part of yourself or like it is “against” any part of yourself, that part of yourself that it is triggered or feels like the exercise is against it, needs to be directly tended to with care. Aside from parts work (which you can do with this aspect of you) an effective exercise is to close your eyes as if in mediation and ask to “see” this aspect of you. And respond to that part of you in an attuned way, so as to resolve the pain that aspect of you is in. As well as to meet its needs. For example, if you see a part of yourself that is screaming and banging its head against the wall, you may intuitively get that this part of you is absolutely desperate. What is this part desperate for? Maybe it is for someone to go over and grab them and hold them while they are screaming and really feel and see the depth of despair they are in. And to figure out why they are in that level of despair and then to rescue them out of it in whatever way makes sense. So, you would go through that process as if you were doing an intuitively guided visualization. If seeing things in the mind’s eye does not come naturally to you, you will notice that your knowing is still intact. So, you can feel and know your way through the process even if you don’t get good visual images.
It can be very healing to create a container for you to be unapologetically negative. Especially if part of your trauma involved always having to keep a “happy face”. This is a specific space or place or time of the day or a specific journal for all of what isn’t positive to be there. Negative thoughts, what feels bad, worries, things that were or are painful, everything that is “too much”. And remember, feeling better is not actually about being positive. It is about becoming aware of the emotion you are feeling, figuring out why the emotion present. And what it is trying to tell you. What needs it implies. And then responding to that information in an attuned, compassionate way.
Set boundaries when it comes to toxic positivity. But you need to remember, people who use toxic positivity feel threatened by "negative" emotions. Their pushback against your negative emotions is about their discomfort with the way they feel; their own emotions. At the end of the day, it isn’t even about you. But it is actually re-traumatizing for you to be around toxic positivity. And toxic positivity isn’t healthy for anyone. This means, if someone is meeting you with toxic positivity, rather than go into a self-doubt, shame spiral, you have two choices. The first is to set an internal boundary. A boundary that you hold inside and act in alignment with, but don’t express externally. For example, say that you realize that the other person does not have the capacity to hold space for pain. Stop bringing your deeper truths to them. The vulnerable ones that contain your pain. The second is to set an external boundary. A boundary that you do express externally. Usually, this is done in the form of something you say to them. Something like: "Hold on. Before we look for a solution or a bright side, I need us to stay here for a moment. This part…the part where it hurts, is what I need you to see!” Or “I don't have the energy to perform a good mood today, I’m honoring my grief right now, and that’s what my health requires." Or "I don't have the emotional bandwidth to be 'positive' about this right now. I need to sit with the reality of what happened.” Or "I’m not looking for a silver lining right now; I just need you to hear that this is horrible for me." Or "When you try to reframe this as a 'growth opportunity,' it actually makes me feel less safe talking to you." Or “you are making me feel like rather than really trying to understand me, you are just needing me to fix my mood." Or "For me, this is a very painful experience, and searching for the 'lesson' in it feels abusive right now." Or "We have different ways of looking at this. And right now your way of looking at it is making me feel worse, so I’m going to step away from this conversation so I can process things on my own."
You can also set the boundary before you speak if you are entering a conversation where you know you'll be vulnerable and don’t want to be met with toxic positivity. This defines the container for the conversation before the other person has a chance to ruin it. For example, you could say: “I really need to just be able to be totally unfiltered and honest about what is happening for me, but I’m afraid for it to be reframed or to be given advice for how to feel different than I feel.” And then, don’t proceed unless the other person gives some indication that they won’t and you are safe to share. Remember, a silver lining is a personal resource. This means that you are the only person that gets to decide if a situation has a "silver lining." And the only person who gets to decide if it counts for anything.
I’m going to give you an analogy that is really helpful when it comes to responding to your emotions and knowing whether someone else is doing the right thing with your emotions. Imagine that your emotions are visitors in a space, like a house. Your emotions are telling you about that house. When the focus is on fixing the emotions, the approach is actually to get the emotions to go away. This can be compared to evicting them from the house. To the opposite, when you treat your "negative" emotions as honored guests with valuable information, you are essentially asking them what they need for the "house" to be more of what is wanted and needed. And this, in turn causes them to give different feedback/share different information (what you experience as a change in the way you feel/feeling better).
Feeling happy is not a goal post or level of the game of life to reach. It is an internal signal about what is happening within you. You are not failing if that signal is not happening. It simply means the conditions are not there for there to be that signal. If you are not feeling it. And given what you have experienced, you have every right to be un-positive forever. You do not ever have to be positive or develop a good relationship with positivity.
At face value, positivity is a good thing. Everyone wants to feel good, so positivity feels good to people. Not so fast. Some of you were traumatized specifically by positivity. Positivity may have even been used as a tool of abuse against you. And so, positivity feels bad to you rather than good. And as a result, you subconsciously boycott positivity.
Positivity is not a positive thing when it is used to deny, negate, invalidate, suppress, disown, reject and run away from things. When this is how positivity is used, it becomes toxic positivity, which is an extreme form of avoidant resistance. It is a form of willful denial. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my episode titled: Toxic Positivity (Why Good Vibes Only is Hurting You). If you are around people who use positivity in this way, and especially if you grew up with someone who uses positivity in this way, you will find yourself resisting positivity out of solidarity to yourself. Let’s look at how this might happen.
You may have grown up with or you may currently be with someone who is keeping you in a bad situation and/or who is doing things that hurt you, but that person may be expecting you to feel good and respond positively to them anyway. If this is the case, the ‘blame and shame’ goes onto you, the recipient of mistreatment, for not being able to be happy no matter what that person does or doesn’t do to you, rather than the pressure to behave differently going on them. The full pressure to feel good is on you, despite other people acting as an oppositional force to you feeling good. Think of it like trying to stay healthy despite people putting poison in your water every day or trying to build a sand castle while someone comes and kicks it down every hour. This, is wildly unfair. In this case, just going along with it and being positive, is experienced as not only them getting away with it, but you enabling your own harm.
You may have grown up with or you may currently be with someone who uses positivity to negate, invalidate and deny negativity and so, anytime that you voiced your personal truth, such as thoughts and feelings, they were immediately negated, invalidated and denied. When this was the case, you were forced to carry the torment of your experience alone, while simultaneously being sent the message that your pain is your own failure, or is just a choice you are making. This is a form of gaslighting, which is psychological abuse and it caused you to doubt your own reality and wonder if you are really the problem. You ended up feeling shame and guilt for having normal and natural emotions. It destroyed a sense of connection and security in the relationship because you were not seen, felt or heard. There could be no psychological safety around honesty and expression with them. You ended up in deep isolation because what is true about you and for you, was being rejected. And it prevented resolve and healing because emotions must be processed through the body and being, and they can’t be if they are being suppressed. When this is the case, you ended up with two hurts instead of one. You still have the original hurt, and now you have the hurt of feeling shame for hurting and the pressure of pretending you aren't hurting so that the other person stays comfortable. In this case, positivity is experienced as deep isolation, pressure and suppression of personal truth.
You may have grown up with or you may currently be with someone who uses positivity to re-frame everything in such a way that they build their own reality, regardless of the fact that doing so left you alone in the pain and kept them and or you in a painful, dysfunctional dynamic. In essence, the reframing prevented them from taking necessary action. To do this is to make something that is not acceptable, acceptable. It is a form of lying to oneself. You may have had a front row seat to all the hell this caused or is causing. When this is the case, you learned that positivity takes you out of reality and causes serious harm.
You may have grown up with or you may currently be with someone who enforces positivity to hide their behavior towards you from other people and who expects you to be positive to make you keep up pretenses. It is very important to get something and it may be a gamechanger for you. If a person has the behavior of treating you poorly behind closed doors when people are not watching, only to change their behavior and be nice when everyone is watching, then it means they know that what they are doing to you is bad. If you were or are with someone who needs you to act positive and happy, so that other people see them in a positive light, then you learned that positivity hides harm from view. And you learned that positivity is you joining them in that lie they are weaving for the public. And by doing so, the truth and the truth of what is actually happening to you is disappearing behind a veneer that no one will see behind.
You may have grown up with or you may currently be with someone who uses positivity to make you look like the problem, when they are the problem. This is a classic issue in dysfunctional families or dysfunctional relationships where there is scapegoating going on. When this happens, a person uses positivity as a mask so as to look like the good, healthy, evolved one. But because you are reacting to their bad behavior (what they are deliberately hiding from everyone else) with normal human emotions like anger, sadness, or frustration, you end up looking like the source of the conflict. Like the one who is bad, unhealthy, unstable and unevolved. This is weaponized positivity. They deliberately provoke you in private, but as soon as there is an audience, they become the voice of reason trying to "calm you down." They claim they are just trying to "keep things positive" or "move forward," implying that your desire to discuss a real problem is a character flaw or a "low vibration" or that you are obsession with the past. They remain calm, use a sweet tone, and speak in therapy speak or spiritual talk. When you react with anger, anger that is perfectly justified, they point at your reaction as proof that you are the aggressive one. This tactic is designed to triangulate other people against you. To cut you off from your support system. And if everyone is focused on you as the problem, no one sees their dysfunction, including them. When this is the case, you learn that positivity is superbly dangerous and leads to you being falsely accused, losing the closeness and support of others and being scapegoated.
You may have grown up with or you may currently be with someone who only tolerates positivity and who withdraws or rejects you if you demonstrate anything else. You learn that closeness and love is conditional upon you pretending to be happy. When this is the case, you form a huge rejection wound because you learn that the real you is not tolerated and is not wanted. You associate positivity with the pain of conditional love. You may also start to feel like the only thing that is real, is negative things.
You may have experienced medical dismissal. You may have had serious physical or mental health symptoms and they were ignored by doctors or experts who told you to "just reduce your stress" or "you're so young and healthy-looking; I’m sure it’s nothing serious!" or "you need to have a better outlook.” Or "Your labs are 'perfect,' so there's nothing to worry about!” or “you know, the body hears the messages we send it, so how about you send it good messages instead of messages of worry!" When this happens, a refusal to care is disguised as encouragement. If someone does this, they are blocking your path to treatment. This approach can enable irreversible damage that could have been prevented. It breaks the trust that a healthcare provider is someone to turn to for help. It can make it so you did not return to get care from them or another provider because you believed that no one would take you seriously. You started to doubt your own estimation of yourself and your body. It puts the blame of your pain and health condition (as if it isn’t bad enough already) on you, for having a negative mindset. And it puts you in the position of feeling like you have to “perform” to be around the person who is giving you medical care, rather than show the truth of what is going on with you. When this is the case, you learn that you, and anything that you really need other people to help you with, will disappear the minute positivity enters the room and as a result, you won’t get help with what you actually seriously need help with.
You may have experienced institutional betrayal. This can happen in any group or organization that you depend on (especially one that has a duty to protect you). It happens when that group or organization causes you harm or fails to respond appropriately when you are harmed. For example, you may have reported harm only to be told something like “It wasn’t that bad, look at the bright side” or “you need to stay positive, you aren’t really contributing to a positive culture here.” When this is the case, it destroyed your sense of security in that institution and even in the world. And you learned that positivity is a cover up for harm.
There may be more ways that a negative association with positivity can be formed. But the most important thing to get is that just like anything else, association makes all the difference. If things like this have been your experience of positivity, then you are going to associate positivity, including positive language with all of the pain you experienced. You will associate it with things like isolation, erasure, danger, abuse, gaslighting, terror and shame. For someone with these experiences, hearing something like "look on the bright side" triggers a threat response. You immediately hear things like “you are the problem”, “your safety doesn’t matter”, “you are alone in this and it’s up to you to get yourself to a better place”, “Silence!”. It is almost like you have an allergy to positivity. And so, on a subconscious level, what happens is that you boycott positivity out of solidarity to yourself. Just the same way that a person might boycott health food if health food was a part of their abuse, despite the fact that health food might make them feel better. When people are put into this relationship with positivity, in response to this pain, they usually end up with four fragmented parts of themselves. One part that is desperate to feel better and get relief (any relief at all) no matter if that is through positive focus or anything else positive. One part that is trying to protect you by refusing to say or do anything “positive” or put any energy into improving your mood because that is what harmed you. A part that was damaged by positivity, who was harmed by it in a list of specific ways. And one part that puts the pressure on you to feel ok and be ok, no matter what is happening to you or in your life. This is the internalized aspect of the person who harmed you with positivity.
If you boycott positivity because of the pain you have associated with positivity, your “negativity” is actually a survival mechanism, not something that is wrong with you. So, stay tuned and in an upcoming video, I will explain what to do about this.
Quality time is a way that people express and receive love the world over. It is the love language that is perhaps the most unanimously spoken. So let’s look at quality time in depth and learn how to express love through quality time.
Quality time is when you spend time of quality with someone. What makes the time you spend with someone of quality or not? This is exactly the variable to consider when it comes to this way of expressing and receiving love, because the answer is super subjective. One person may experience watching a movie to be something that is bonding and engaging and mutually enjoyable. And so, for them watching a movie would qualify as quality time. Another person may experience watching a movie to be something that feels disconnecting, that lacks active interaction and that feels unsatisfying. And so, for them watching a movie would not qualify as quality time. One person may experience playing a sport together to be support and trust enhancing, connecting and stimulating. And therefore, playing a sport would qualify as quality time. Another person may experience playing a sport to feel oppositional and competitive rather than bonding and empty of the deep communication about each other’s thoughts and feelings, which is what they crave. And therefore, playing a sport would not qualify as quality time. There is nothing more important to identify when it comes to expressing love through quality time than what makes time spent together of quality to the other person. With this in mind, here are some things to know about quality time as it applies to love.
What demonstrates love the most about quality time, is that you made the deliberate decision to choose to spend your time (which is limited) with them. Quality time is not about hanging out and killing time. It is giving them a piece of your life that you will never get back. This is a validation of a person’s worth, importance and the positive place they hold in your life.
For quality time to be an expression of love, whatever you are doing during that time together must be something that enhances the relationship between you. Something that deepens connection, fosters your bond, brings you closer together and increases relationship satisfaction.
Proximity is something that exists on a sliding scale for people when it comes to quality time. For some people, physical proximity is absolutely critical. It is a necessary component for time to be experienced as quality time. For other people, proximity isn’t as important. For example, there are people breaking up with their partners because their jobs take them out of proximity. At the same time, there are people who are experiencing quality time playing video games together while living in different countries. Don’t try to get someone who needs your proximity in order to experience quality time to not need your proximity.
The most crucial element of quality time is undivided attention. Quality time is time that is spent focusing completely on the other person and/or what you are doing together. Your attention cannot be out and away from them and what you are doing together for the time you are spending together to be “of quality”. To get a picture of what quality time is not, think of a wife who desperately wants to emotionally connect with her husband, but he is just focused on the golf tournament on the television. Or think about the parents who bring the family on vacation. They are all at the pool, but everyone is doing something separate. One kid is sliding down the slide, the other is doom scrolling, mom is reading a book on a lounge chair and dad is on business calls on his phone. So, when it comes to quality time, think shared activities, think undivided attention, think being there and in it with your full presence, think uninterrupted conversations, think active listening. Think being fully engaged.
When you are thinking of quality time, think of two pillars. Pillar one is: Connecting Conversation. Conversation that is meaningful where you and the other person share your thoughts, feelings, desires, needs, preferences, aversions, and experiences. It is communication that increases intimacy. Pillar Two is: Connecting Experiences. Engaging in activities where the focus is doing it together and in a fully ‘engaged in the moment’ kind of way. Obviously it is best if both you and they like the activity. This being said, people who really love quality time have been known to do something they may not like enough to go do of their own accord, but they know the other person enjoys, just because doing it with them enhances their feeling of connection with that person.
Time spent together is what creates core memories. Memories that both you and the other person shares. This valuable collection of treasured memories strengthens the bond and gives you connection through exclusivity of experience. If you climbed to the top of a mountain with someone, that is an experience only those of you that were on that hike have and share.
Now, here are some tips for how to speak the love language of quality time.
If you find that you have any resistance to expressing your love through quality time, instead of bulldozing that resistance, resolve that resistance first. If there is some part of you that is in opposition to spending quality time with someone and you go ahead and just do it, the other person will feel it and it will back fire. Why will it backfire? Because it will send the opposite message from the one you need to send with quality time. It will send the message: I’d rather be doing something else with my time. Whatever the reason is that you may have resistance to spending quality time with someone, you need to become aware of it and work to resolve it. If you do show love through quality time, you must actually be in alignment and in integrity doing so. It will only be effective if it is actually true that you want to be doing whatever it is that you are doing with someone.
Set predictable, uninterrupted, connection time. This goes a long way when it comes to expressing love through quality time. For people who feel most loved through quality time, inconsistent time feels like a recipe for instability and emotional starvation. They start to feel hungry and desperate for connection, which can lead to anxiety, desperate clinginess, resentment and extreme pain. For example, distraction free meals together (meals where no one is looking at their phone or is mentally zoning off somewhere). Or intentional reconnection time. For example, twenty minutes when you both get home where you sit down and talk with each other about how you are feeling, what you are thinking, what is happening for you and recounting the experiences you had. Or end of the day together time. For example, you decide that at a specific time each night, everything else and everyone else stays outside the bedroom (including mentally) and you come together to do a joint activity together, like learn a language together. Or predictable calls you make to someone each week. Or reliable date nights.
Do shared relaxation experiences. These are activities you can do together that are soothing and downregulating. Things like stargazing, doing a puzzle, a picnic, watching a series together, reading together, experiences that incorporate physical affection or therapeutic touch, chore dates, taking a walk, couples meditations, building a pillow fort or cuddle time.
Do shared stimulating experiences. These are activities that are exciting and upregulating. Things like trying something totally new together, doing an activity that involves some risk, exploring somewhere new, volunteering together, going out dancing, setting out to achieve an ambitious goal together or learning something new together.
Create together. Just like it sounds, these are activities where you create something together. It could be literally anything. It could be cooking together, building a business together, creating a mosaic or painting, building something, planting and tending to a garden together, doing a DIY home improvement project together or creating a photo album together.
Have Intentional Conversations. There are so many different kinds of conversations that could be considered quality time. For example, you could get a list of questions to both answer. You could have a subject specific conversation. You could interview the other person. You could have a conversation entirely centered around emotions. Don’t fall into the logistics trap. This is a big problem for people who live together. They think they are spending time together, but they are actually just discussing the budget, the kids, or the grocery list. Not conversations that are of quality.
Exercises in Pure Presence. This is a hard one for most people to wrap their head around. They are literally bonding non-activities. What they share is intense levels of presence. Things like simply sitting with the other person and being totally present to them. Feeling their energy, watching them, smelling them, hearing them, noticing your impressions and the effects that their being is having on you. Eye gazing is another example of one such experience. Cuddling for some people can be one form of this.
Do dates and intentional one-off experiences. As opposed to being routine and predictable, these are special. Things like a specific vacation, a surprise date night, a staycation, a concert, a sports game, a holiday activity, a progressive dinner, shutting off all the power to the house and doing an electricity free night, a tour, a photo shoot or re-creating a specific meaningful memory.
Protect the quality time you are having. There are lots of things that can intrude on or interrupt quality time. You need to guard against these. Treat the time you spend together as a fixed commitment. Not picking up the phone call, not getting distracted, setting boundaries like after this hour, we don’t talk about work, having the kids watched by someone else, doing the chores in advance, so you can give your full undivided attention, scheduling things, picking the right environment. If an emergency happens, immediately re-scheduling and demonstrating that time with them does matter to you and like you are losing something you value and want in having to cancel. You get the picture. If you had a high stakes appointment you needed to make it to, you wouldn't cancel it to finish watching a series you like. Treating the other person’s time and presence with that same level of "un-cancelable" respect is what gives the emotional experience you are looking to give with quality time. Protecting your time with the other person is the ultimate sign of loyalty and the ultimate validation of their worth to you.
Remember that distraction is the enemy of quality time. Be intentional about time together. It isn’t just about the what you are doing together, it is about the why you are doing what you are doing together. You want to get out ahead of things so you don’t end up in the land of: "What do you want to do?" "I don't know, what do you want to do?" To show love through quality time, you are looking to get away from passive availability and to go towards active prioritization. When you proactively plan your time with the other person, initiating time spent with them doing something specific, you remove the pain of the "ask." What do I mean by this? If a partner always has to initiate or pull you or beg for attention and time together, they will not feel loved by you. Rather than feeling like someone you value, they will feel like an afterthought because you have nothing better to do. Or even worse, they will feel like a chore to you. You want to actively demonstrate the following: I spend time with you because I want to."
Most of us in the modern world are given a name when we are born. You may like that name, or you may not like that name. You may feel like it fits you, or you may feel like it doesn’t fit you at all. You may change your name over the course of your life. You may be in the position at some point to name something or to name someone, whether that be a pet or a company or a child or something else. At some point, you may find yourself asking, what’s in a name? Names matter and they matter in so many ways.
Names validate existence. They signal that a thing exists, that it is differentiated from every other thing around it, that it is relevant and that it matters.
Names carry a vibratory frequency. They are like an energetic signature. And when you attach that vibratory frequency to someone or something, it effects that thing. The full picture of this vibratory frequency is quite complex. It involves things like thought forms associated with that name, stories attached to that name, past or future events, associations it conjures for yourself and others, the numerology associated with it, the impact of the specific tone, it’s timbre, it’s volume and intensity, its texture, its duration, its rhythm, tempo and meter, what qualities or things are energetically contained or included within it, the concepts that are associated with that name, its meaning etc. This vibratory frequency is constantly influencing you and those you come into contact with. It acts like a kind of blueprint, shaping how you manifest in the world, shaping how others experience and interact with you, and shaping how you interact with and experience life. A name is full of coded information. Given that you have a vibratory frequency before being named, the vibration of your name can do things like bridge, resonate with, enhance, clash with or diminish your non-physical vibratory frequency.
A name is an anchor for identity. A name becomes entwined with a person’s sense of personhood. It acts as a steady point of reference that enables a person’s self-concept and self-image to remain steady and consistent throughout time.
A name influences how you see yourself. Because a name is such a key part of identity, it is obvious that it would have an impact on how you see yourself. Imagine the difference in how you would see yourself if your name was Felony vs, if your name was Charity. This is also true of the why behind a name. Say that a little girl was born and her dad wanted a boy instead, so he was disappointed and looked at his wife and said, we’ll just name her after you. This little girl would struggle with a sense of importance, self-worth and also differentiation from her mother all her life. A name can both form and express self-concept.
A name influences how other people see you. There is no getting around the fact that names trigger immediate associations, thoughts, feelings, biases and impressions. And this absolutely effects how other people see a thing or a person. As well as how they behave around and treat that person. You can think of a name like a social badge, coded with all kinds of information for others.
Given that a name is a very powerful vibration, it shapes your self concept and therefore how you behave in the world, as well as shapes how other people see you and therefore how they behave towards you. Names have the capacity to influence your personality, your life experience and therefore your life path. This has actually been well studied. Individuals often develop an appearance that matches their name over time, this is known as the "face-name matching effect". People tend to adopt behaviors, such as frequent smiling or certain grooming styles that fit the stereotypes associated with their name, changing their appearance (specifically hair and facial muscle structure) to mirror the social expectation of their name. A person named "hope" may feel subtly urged to smile more or be more optimistic, while a name that implies strength, like Victor may lead to a more assertive self-image. If a person has a name with positive connotations, they are likely to receive more positive reinforcement from others, fostering high self-esteem. Conversely, a name seen as negative, unprofessional, difficult, or undesirable often results in negative attention, causing a person to develop lower self-esteem or feel insecure. Studies have shown that people with more common or traditional names have easier experiences in hiring, while those with distinctive, foreign, or stereotyped names often face discrimination. Teachers often subconsciously hold different academic expectations for students based on their names, which can influence a child's school performance. On dating apps, people with names perceived as "unfashionable" or "old-fashioned" are more likely to be rejected. Psychological research into "implicit egotism" suggests that people are subconsciously attracted to things that resemble them, including their own names. You may be subtly drawn to careers or locations that share your name's initials. For example, people named Dennis are statistically more likely to become dentists, and those named Baker might gravitate toward the baking industry. You will also be drawn to products you buy and brands you trust based off of their similarity to your own name. All this can influence serious life decisions, shape a person’s potential and dictate life path trajectory. In this way, a name can become like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Names are very powerful connectors, tying you to things. For example, a name that is associated with the ocean can tie you to the ocean. Or, an ancestral or cultural name can connect you and tie you to things like ancestry or culture. There is a heritage transmission in names of an ancestral nature that connect you to your roots, but also to things like a specific culture, family history, ancestral legacies, family values and individuals within a family line.
Names play a role in pre-birth intention. Obviously, because a name carries such a powerful vibrational signature that relates to your identity and the life you are ultimately going to live, before you come into this life, your name was a part of your pre-planning. But here is where it gets complicated. Your consciousness may pre select a name that carries a specific vibrational frequency that aligns with your consciousness or the intended purpose you have for this life experience. Or, you may choose into an experience where your name is out of alignment with you, because the desired effect that has, is a part of the expansion path you intended for this life. If it is the first scenario, your consciousness will influence your parents, often on a subconscious level (and more rarely in a conscious way) so that they experience the inspiration or pull towards a specific name that matches that pre-intended name. Just to give you two examples, beings who are coming into a life specifically to create ancestral lineage progression are likely to select the name of a specific ancestor or a name that vibrates as a kind of antidote to ancestral traumas. If a being has a pre-birth intention to be a healer, they are likely to select a name that holds very specific numerology, so as to be able to act as a conduit to specific energies. Sometimes, a name change in life is a part of a being’s pre-birth intention as well. Changing your name at a certain point in your life can signal a shift away from a karmic or familial chapter of soul progression over to a completely different chapter of soul progression, based on entirely different influencing factors.
Logos, the word, is a powerful tool for creation. Logos is a bridge between the nonphysical and physical world. It forms potential energy into ordered form or manifestation. A person’s name is a word that brings order to their individual existence. It invokes specific qualities into the material, physical realm and they are expressed through the person’s temporal form. It is essentially, a statement of being.
Because of all of this, obviously changing your name can have a serious effect on you and your life. For example, dropping your family name and taking on someone else’s family name obviously impacts belonging and unity. On an energetic level, it can literally mean you are being claimed by and are becoming one with that family line. And this implies you are taking it and all that is contained within it (good and bad) onto yourself. To the flip side, it can mean that you are disconnecting yourself from the family line you were born into. Releasing it and all that is contained within it (both good and bad). Not completely of course, because you opted into the genetics associated with that family line and were shaped by those ancestral gifts and traumas that were transferred either directly or indirectly. But you are disconnecting yourself from it significantly.
Changing the name that you go by (usually this is a person’s first name) is usually what has the most impact. It will drastically alter your personal frequency; drastically alter the way you see yourself and the way other people see you. It is very likely to change your life path. Changing the name that a person goes by, helps a person to create a distinct persona. It often allows them to align their persona with their inner truth. It can signify a fresh start, helping individuals to reclaim power and positivity after trauma or distance themselves from a traumatic past. It is a wildly transformative act. One that has the power to do so much good for a person. It is a move to take ownership over one’s own identity.
Some things that you need to be very conscious of when you are changing your name is that doing so is a big deal because of everything that is in a name. You need to be very conscious about whether changing your name is an act of rejection, especially self-rejection. Or an act of separation. The choice to separate from something is a very serious choice, not to be taken lightly. You also need to be conscious of whether it is an act of discontinuation. The choice to discontinue a name, such as a family name can also have serious implications, because it is a chosen ended-ness or death sentence to a specific frequency and all that is coded within it.
The intention you have behind a name change matters a lot. Because this can either make it in alignment to change your name or out of alignment to do so. On top of this, changing your name can be a logistical nightmare. It can create legal problems. It can lead to you being flagged as a threat by certain bureaucracies. Changing your name can create issues for you and other people because they associate you with your old name and may continue to use it, which may create frustration, conflicts and identity dissonance in you. Every interaction with people who know you already may feel like an identity negotiation. And they may be upset that they have the pressure of changing you in their heads and remembering to call you by this different, new name. The entire social dynamic between you and others may be laced with a kind of friction, at least for a time. If you have established success under your name, changing your name can lead to a lot of professional problems and potentially professional losses. Changing your name can lead to a kind of unexpected existential crisis as well. Your old name links you to everything you have experienced in the past. For some people, changing their name feels like they have killed off the person that lived those experiences. Essentially that they have killed off themselves. Taking the new name can also make you feel like an imposter. Dropping a family name can enhance the feeling of being orphaned and can generate serious guilt. And a person may change their name believing that it will magically fix all their issues, only to realize that this didn’t happen. It didn’t magically make it so you don’t have a drinking problem, like dad did. It didn’t magically make it so you have confidence. It didn’t give you the fresh start you wanted.
The more conscious you are about your name(s) and about any name you may be considering, the better. Becoming conscious about a name implies perceiving the energetic signature it holds, discovering its etymology and meaning, researching its origins, being aware of what it is associated with (across all cultures). Being conscious of what it is tied to and all the implications of that. What it connects a person to. Really reflecting on its impact on identity, how it will cause someone to perceive themselves and how it will impact the way that others will see them. The thought forms, associations and stories that are part of that name vibrationally. What it symbolizes. What it will influence a being to become. Its phonetic personality. Its numerology. Its prophetic implications. It’s sound and flow, pronunciation, and spelling. The WHY behind it (the why has to be aligned and a there has to be a good why).
A name is not just a label. Contrary to Juliet’s speech in the wildly popular play of Romeo and Juliet, a rose by any other name, may not actually smell as sweet.
As you might have noticed, when you go down the spiritual rabbit hole and start seeking out experts in the spiritual field or when you get into therapy and start meeting with therapists, pretty quickly, you will be oriented towards yourself for everything. You will be put on the fast track to a state of hyper independence, hyper responsibility and hyper individualism. But why is it that so many spiritual teachers and therapists take you in this direction?
When you get into spiritual practice or into therapy, especially if you live in the Western World or Western Influenced World today, you will be surrounded by ideologies like: Everything you need, is within. You create your own reality. You are the only one responsible for your own happiness. No one can make you feel something without your consent. If it drains you, let it go. You don’t owe anyone anything. The outer world is only a reflection of your inner state. Non attachment is the goal. You have to love yourself before someone can love you. You are the only thing you can control. You are your own soulmate. Don’t give your attention to anyone or anything that decreases your personal vibration. Healing is a solo journey. The message is the same: If you are evolved or healthy enough, you won't need anyone. And you won’t be affected by anyone. This ideology is profoundly flawed. But, let’s look at why so many spiritual teachers, so many self-help experts and so many therapists go in this direction.
One of the things that spiritual teachers, self-help experts and therapists are the most dedicated to is: You being in a state of personal empowerment. Seeing as how powerlessness causes so much suffering. Well, if you haven’t noticed, running around trying to control everything and everyone else is not a particularly effective strategy for personal empowerment. Neither is running around trying to appeal to everything and everyone outside of you to do something so that you can feel good or get what you want. On top of this, many teachers and therapists are at a loss regarding what you or they can do to externally change things. For example, they can’t tell you how to get your boyfriend to start acting committed. They can’t tell you how to get your parents to stop scapegoating you. They can’t tell you how to get your friends to be reliable. They can’t tell you how to get inflation to go down, so you can afford your life. The sheer scale of modern systems and global challenges has shifted the locus of control to large, impersonal institutions that individuals have no access to. The vote, which used to be what granted power to the individual, has been shown to be something that can be tampered with and fixed and that may even just be an opiate for the masses. Huge, systemic issues are baked into the infrastructure of our lives, in a way where you cannot participate in society without feeding those issues. We are facing problems that require massive, collective solutions and yet, we live in a day and age where social capital has been systematically destroyed. So, it isn’t a strong resource anymore. Because of all of this, in order to empower you, most teachers and therapists put the focus on: Me, myself and I. What YOU can do to make the relationship better. How YOU bring about the things you are suffering from and what YOU can do to bring about what you want instead. How YOU can change YOUR perspective about what is happening or YOUR reaction to it. What YOU can do to take responsibility for things. How YOU can meet your own needs. And the list goes on. Most spiritual teachers, self-help experts and therapists see this as an orientation that sits you squarely in the seat of personal empowerment. And in many ways, this approach is quite effective, that is until it starts leading to its own issues; like stress and burnout, isolation, denial of relational needs, the perception of perpetual inadequacy, blaming oneself for what was not actually one’s fault or within one’s control, disconnection, the breakdown of community, failure to see the actual problems, including systemic problems, because blame is put on oneself and acts as a smokescreen for everything else. But the bottom line for this point is, focus on self-empowerment, tends to swing you in the direction of self.
So many people find their way to spirituality and/or therapy because of trauma. And so, so much of the trauma that leads people to both fields, is interpersonal trauma. Relational trauma. Some then go on to become teachers or therapists. But this does not mean they have healed from that trauma necessarily. It is very important to know that one of the main stress responses or adaptive coping strategies you will see in people with relational trauma, is hyper independence. They figure out that the way to avoid pain is to become an island unto themselves, to find every way they can to try to not be affected by other people. To use self-reliance as a protective shield. To never depend on anyone. And to reframe all of their relational avoidance “issues” as somehow good, virtuous, awakened and empowered. For example, avoidant attachment becomes “protecting my own energy”. Emotional numbness becomes “I have found inner calm!”. Fear of intimacy becomes “Love your own company!” Fear based isolation response becomes “I have found a higher state of consciousness”. Social troubles are reframed as personal psychological deficits. You really need to accept that many teachers and therapists simply find and teach methods and ideologies that in and of themselves are unhealthy defense mechanisms and coping mechanisms. I’ll give you just one example. Imagine that you were born in India, a culture that is especially prone to enmeshment dynamics between parents and their children. You suffered all your life from those experiences where you were controlled and where your boundaries were never recognized and where your parents acted as if you exist for one reason, to make them happy and meet their needs. What thoughts would end your suffering? The answer is things like: A person must become their own source of safety and happiness. No one belongs to their family; they belong to the universe. Methods of detachment. Absolute freedom in non-attachment. Solitude is an audience with the self. And you would not want anyone to suffer as you have suffered, so what you teach them and the direction you lead them, is in the direction of autonomy, extreme independence, individualism, self-reliance and rebellion against social constraint. The same is true of therapists and their own personal traumas. So much of what so many teachers and therapists teach, is a direct counter reaction to their own trauma. This is a shadow that each and every one of us must remain all too aware of.
You cannot separate the current world from history. You cannot separate individual experts from the cultural attitude of their day. And the reality is, the world today and its teachers are highly influenced by neoliberalism. Let’s go back in time. In the 1970s, many nations faced high inflation, but low economic growth, such as unemployment and a drop in profitability. There was a need for a new economic approach. Neoliberalism was that ready-made solution that had been cooking up nicely since the 1930s. The ideals espoused by neoliberal leaders gained massive traction as the ne solution. In this ideology, collectivism and the government was pointed to as the problem. Individualism and a free market was pointed to as the solution. Collectivism was branded as coercion (forcing you to pay for things you don't use and forcing you to carry other people, lazy people). It was seen as the smothering force that kills the drive to work hard. Individualism was branded as freedom and choice (the right to spend your own money and live your own life and weave your own fate). By cutting the social safety net and lowering taxes, those leading the movement aimed to set the individual free because they believed that self-interest is the most powerful engine for progress. And that by everyone looking out for themselves, the free market would grow wildly, make society wealthier as a whole. This was a massive, collective mentality shift towards individualism.
Just like that, societal values began to shift and individuals where now valued, praised and esteemed for hyper independence and hyper individualism. It may interest you to know that psychocentrism was a key element of neoliberalism. Basically, the personalization of societal, systemic issues and the responsibility shifting away from the state over to the individual. For example, suddenly, the problem wasn’t housing inequality, it was your own success mindset failure. And perhaps to your surprise, this all caught on. Why was this shift to psychocentrism so wholeheartedly adopted? Because it offered a sense of personal empowerment and personal agency in a world that felt uncontrollable and full of chaos. It helped people to believe that they were the masters of their own fate. It was painted as virtuous. Unlike systemic change, it offered instant gratification. It rebranded challenges and misfortunes as necessary experiences for growth. And being the new value within society at large, all of the things that are supported by neoliberalism, like independence and individualism are what now got people social acceptance and approval.
While self-help, psychology and spirituality all have origins that are older than the neoliberal movement, during this time, there was a drastic shift within them all, a shift towards alignment with neoliberal ideologies. And guess what? The explosion of self-help industry happened in perfect conjunction with the rise of neoliberalism. It became a mirror of this new ideology, essentially built to back it up. Just like neoliberalism espouses hyper independence and individualism, so too does modern spirituality, modern therapy and modern self-help. It makes people really uncomfortable to think that the standard mentality in fields like psychology, self-help or spirituality have been influenced by a political, economic philosophy that arose as a direct reaction to things like fascism, socialism, communism and stagflation. But it is true.
Commercialization of spirituality and psychology. Being an expert in these fields is really difficult because in today’s world, you need to make money to live well. But, if your career and expertise is in one of these fields, you need to sell what you do as a product. And it needs to be marketed. What sells? Self-Centered things. Things that are aligned with individualism and independence and personal empowerment and self-actualization. This makes wellness look like an individual project, when it isn’t. Spirituality and Psychology and Self-Help is now tailored to meet the consumer’s demand. And if you won’t do this, you are sacrificing your own success and limiting your own exposure. And in a world where the cultural ideology is neoliberal, the experts that resonate with people most and are the most commercially successful, are those who align with this ideology. So, naturally and especially in a world controlled by personal algorithms, you will see more of them!
Many people (including teachers) misinterpret high level concepts. And many more love to skew them to support their already hyper independent, hyper individual world view. For example, a teaching like “everything you see outside of yourself is a reflection of what is within.” Can easily be misinterpreted to suggest that true spiritual work only happens within, which is not true in the slightest. Or teachings around non attachment can easily be misinterpreted so as to teach a person detachment, disconnection, indifference, renunciation, lack of affect, having no goals or desires and needing nothing and no one.
Self-Empowerment and Self Actualization is awesome. You don’t need me to tell you that. The thing is, we are living in a day and age where people are becoming more and more separate from each other. A world where loneliness is an epidemic. You are living in a day and age where independence has become a sickness. If you would like to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: The Great Independence Sickness.
It is possible to be profoundly empowered, without swinging the pendulum and slipping into the rigid self-defense mechanism of hyper independence and hyper individualism. Without denying the reality of systemic issues. Without denying that human beings have relational needs and are not islands unto themselves. And most of all, without perpetuating the toxic ideology that if you are evolved or healthy enough, you won't need anyone. And you won’t be affected by anyone.
Recently, I was on stage with a man who felt very stuck with regards to prioritizing himself or prioritizing his partner. It was this interaction that made me aware that so many people don’t understand something critical about prioritization. Something that could be life-changing for them if they did. This is going to be a bit of a mind twister. But let’s look at a blind spot that most people have when it comes to prioritization.
Let’s start with two examples. In our first example, Ryan is in a relationship with Megan. Megan has a deep need to be prioritized by the man in her life. She needs certain things from Ryan in the relationship too and Ryan is struggling with this. He feels like when he tries to meet these needs Megan has, he is losing autonomy and is losing himself. He doesn’t know what to do because they are at an impasse. Megan wants to be Ryan’s priority. And when he is asked: Is Megan YOUR Priority? He likes to answer yes. The thing is, he has already unknowingly exposed the fact that Megan is not actually his priority. And her needs being met is NOT one of his needs. How has be exposed this? Because when something actually is YOUR priority, you don’t feel like prioritizing your own priority takes anything away from yourself. Rather, it is experienced as the opposite, as being totally aligned with your own best interests. When something is YOUR need, you don’t feel like meeting that need takes away from yourself. Rather, you feel like you are meeting one of your own needs. This is why Megan cannot feel ok in the relationship. Ryan is coming at this relationship with Megan from the mentality of a little boy, rather than a man. Rather than coming into the relationship and actually making Megan his priority as a voluntary act, or being honest with her that he is not going to prioritize her, he came in and started to vacillate between wanting to please her and feeling controlled and like he is losing his autonomy by feeling like he needs to do what pleases her. When Ryan really gets that if something is actually HIS priority, by definition he could not feel like prioritizing it goes against himself, he is forced to admit that Megan is not his priority. That he has not taken positive ownership of her wellbeing. He also admitted that he had no interest in changing this and that he does not actually want to have to consider another person at this point in his life. He does see how if he were able to make her HIS priority, and make her needs being met one of HIS own needs, everything he would say and do would change, and so would his attitude.
In our second example, Jenny works at a company that is revolutionizing baby formula. The company is frequently getting attacked by organizations that produce and have stock in existing baby formulas. And one of the managers was stealing company money. Working for this company is not a typical 9-5 job. Many employees have quit already because so often, everyone had to scramble and work like crazy around the clock to answer to a crisis. Jenny caught wind of the fact that one of her colleagues, Justin was thinking about quitting, so she called him to figure out what was going on. During this call, Justin was getting very mad about how one of the current managers was pushing him too hard on a deadline and couldn’t respect that his weekend was off time. It made Justin upset that Jenny seemed ok with what he was so outraged by. Jenny explained that when her adopted brother was born premature, he did so badly on all of the formulas they tried that they had to try to make him a homemade formula. That this has led to the whole family learning about the corporate corruption, contamination and nutritional ignorance behind baby formulas. When she saw her brother thrive on homemade formula, she could not get the idea of all of these babies suffering and even dying because of the crap they are being fed. She joined the company because of how much this cause mattered to her personally. What Justin was seeing in Jenny is that the company doing well is HER priority. Which is why, when the company itself needs her, even after hours, she does not love having to scramble to do more work. But she doesn’t perceive it to take away from her or to be in competition with her needs. In seeing this, Justin felt guilty. He could see that he has not been acting from the mentality that the company succeeding is his priority nor that the wellbeing of the company was a need of his. Suddenly, the fed-up way his boss had been acting towards him made sense. Justin was not actually ok with this mentality. In fact, he had gotten really mad at other people in the company in the past acting like their vacation or their own financial opportunities mattered more that the company succeeding. Justin also came onto the team because he believed so much in the company mission. Justin took a deep look at himself and shifted his attitude. And once he was in the mentality of the company best interests being his best interest, the needs of the company being a need of his and the company wellbeing being one of his top priorities, he no longer felt like the company was taking away from him or opposing his own best interests.
When you grow up in dysfunctional family dynamics, which so many of us did, you learn that life is really a battle between yourself and others. Your own safety vs. other people. Your own needs vs. other people’s needs. Your best interests vs. the other person’s best interests. And when we grow up, this is how life feels and this is how relationships feel. Without really knowing it, we are subconsciously stuck in a fight for ourselves, against others. The way to end this fight is to take other things or other people in. Take them into yourself as a part of you to the degree that their needs being met is one of YOUR needs. Their safety is YOUR concern. Their best interests are a critical part of YOUR best interests. And regarding today’s conversation, they are YOUR priority. This works with things, not just people. It ends the mentality of self vs. other. So, to reiterate the truth: If you own something as YOUR priority, then by definition it doesn’t screw you in any way to prioritize that thing or to act in the best interests of that thing. The only question that remains is: Is (fill in the blank) your priority?
Over the last few months, so many people have written in, wanting to know why so many people in the Millennial generation and Gen Z generation are choosing not to have kids. And so, by popular demand, I am going to explain this recent phenomenon that is occurring in certain areas of the globe to you.
There is not one single reason why so many people in the younger generations are not having children. Rather, there is a list of reasons. So, let’s start with what sits at the top of the list of main reasons that so many people aren’t having kids.
Starting with the millennial generation, the days of ignorance about family dysfunction are over and many in the younger generations have no intention of having children if they or the children will experience any of that dysfunctionality. The younger generations were the first to really consciously put two and two together. The painful things they are experiencing in their adult life and the way they were raised. To generalize, the outcome of boomer parenting was just bad enough to force a collective wakeup about parenting in general. Parenting before the boomer generation was nothing to celebrate. You could point to certain things that the even older generations did and say that they were worse than what the boomers did. So, you (and the boomers especially who are largely convinced that their parents were worse) might be asking what made the boomer parenting so bad that the suffering it caused created a mass awakening about family dysfunction?
A. The single-family home (with no extended family) really became the norm during this time. This is a far bigger deal than people get. When a child is raised in a village, or an extended family situation, where the child has a sense of community, the child has many resources. If mom and dad are not providing a resource, or held a damaging perspective or were emotionally stunted, you could turn to an uncle or a grandmother or a neighbor to get a better perspective, to be regulated emotionally, to get a need met. By isolating the family unit, the parents become the sole source for everything. And this, makes poor parenting far more damaging because there is nothing to blunt it. To make matters worse, the boomer generation was the first generation where the dual income household became common. The result of the women’s rights movement was that boomer women were also working jobs, but with the expectation of still doing all the domestic duties, including raising children. This transition to a new arrangement between the genders was and still is a disaster. This led to maxed out mothers, who could not be it all and do it all. Boomer fathers were the first to slip into the modern male experience of not really having a distinct role anymore. As a result, many of the boomer fathers did not take real ownership of family life, including their children. Rather they acted more like occasional babysitters of their own kids. Their children suffered the consequences of this. On top of this, divorce sky rocketed, making parents even less able to parent well. On top of this, this was the era of “stranger danger”. Where a media frenzy turned the neighborhood from a safe, communal space into a source of fear. And children were cut off from community because of this. Due to all of these factors, the Millennial and Gen Z children were not well resourced. They lost access to many of the emotional resources and self-esteem resources and needs resources that previous generations had access to and did not recognize the necessity of. So many children during this time experienced neglect. The worst part is, their parents do not recognize themselves as having been neglectful when their child’s basic necessities were provided for. Food, water, clothes, toys, roof over their head.
B. Boomer parenting was an emotional nightmare. Boomers were raised by a generation that was shut down emotionally due to economic crisis and war. They were not raised with any understanding of emotions. Because of this, many of them failed to establish true emotional connection with their children. Many of them failed to emotionally regulate their children and failed to co-regulate with their children. And many of them carried over severe emotional neglect and also emotional abuse into their parenting. Where their own parents were emotionally shut down and they were raised by simple and straightforward authoritarianism, many boomers swung the pendulum towards being hands off and they employed heaps and heaps of emotional invalidation. When their children expressed their perceptions and feelings, those feelings and the perceptions were immediately invalidated. The child’s reality was constantly denied. This is a gaslighting experience that creates a fundamental erosion to the child’s self-worth and sense of reality. On top of this, boomer households practiced "dishonest harmony”. They maintained a surface-level appearance of a happy family while refusing to address underlying emotional issues or conflicts. Family life was in and of itself, a gaslight.
Something important to understand is that the boomers viewed their parents as doing the best they could, given the horrible situations they were trying to survive. They view their parents as being broken by the world and not having the capacity to parent well because of it. And at the same time, they watched them sacrifice their personal self-interest for the sake of the family. In contrast with this, the boomers grew up and lived into a uniquely prosperous era. The good times. Millennials and below view the boomers as having all forces going in their favor. As people who were supported by the world. Boomers really focused on their own personal fulfillment and individualism. They chased personal success and esteem through career, they broke off marriages because they needed to find their own happiness. Children were expected to add to their happiness. Because of this, the bad parenting that the boomers displayed did not read as “doing the best they could”. It didn’t read as not having the capacity. Rather it read as: They have the capacity, but they are too self-centered to do it. Because of this, in contrast to the way their parents felt, the trauma the millennials and younger endured at the hands of the boomers feels unnecessary and deeply personal.
Younger generations view the Boomer era as a betrayal and collapse of the multi-generational support system that is fundamental to the human race. To put it mildly, they see a generation that benefited from their own parents' sacrifices, who grew up with strong community ties in a system set up to guarantee them success. Only to take over and dismantle the whole thing. To build a world that served only themselves and that was rigged against their own children. To refuse to provide a societal structure for their own children’s wellbeing and life success. To get rid of all the resources and safety nets for their own children. To create constant global crisis. All while claiming, they "did their best.” And all while judging their adult children for struggling in the absence of all the things that allowed them, the boomer generation to succeed.
C. In the 1980s, views about parenting changed. The boomers recognized some of the painful parenting techniques as the reason they had felt pain and instead of just repeating the way they were parented; they began looking for other opinions. This was the era of the parenting book. Alas, some of the most detrimental parenting theories such as Parent Power and Sleep Training and The Cry It Out Method and Physical Discipline and the Helicopter Method and the movement of everyone gets a trophy and the importance of early independence were born and employed at this time. And the detrimental parenting theories made into books only increased in the 1990s. These methods created a ton of traumatization and developmental trauma. Boomers raised their children with a blend of ‘unconsciously exactly what their parents did’ and also ‘nothing like their parents did’. Unfortunately for them, instead of this leading to conscious parenting, this created a damaged generation with a lot of unmet needs.
D. Because of the way that these younger generations grew up, there was no “buffer” anymore to cover for the dysfunction of the parents. And coming into adulthood, they had real issues. Issues have a cause. In recognizing the cause of their issues, they started to see all these direct links between parenting and the bad outcomes they were experiencing. This completely shattered the idea that kids will just turn out if you meet their basic necessities. Rather, it painted the very real picture that everything a parent does or doesn’t do, everything that a child is exposed to, shapes their adult experience. They were living in the painful if not disastrous aftermath every day. In seeing these painful realities about the way that they were parented, they started to realize that the WHY behind having kids really matters. They started to ask themselves why they wanted kids. And a lot of them did not love their own answers to this. Suffice to say, all this waking up relative to the impacts of parenting made parenting a far more serious endeavor. One that must be done super consciously and intentionally. One where you must hold yourself to a standard. But this standard cannot be easily met and if you can’t meet it, you should not have kids. They woke up to the fact that there was a serious gap between the societal idea that childhood is this carefree, wonderful experience and bliss is about having a family vs. the reality of what they experienced. This will make you seriously second guess having kids. With access to contraception, the millennial generation is the first generation that really woke up to the fact that having kids is in fact a choice, rather than a given. And so, for many, the answer is NO unless XYZ.
There was too big of a gap between the societal mantra about the formula for happiness vs, the reality that was directly experienced. Societies are made of collective ideas that everyone buys into. And one of these ideas is that happiness is about a certain formula. The formula of going to college, getting a good job, getting married, buying a house and having children together. Well, the millennial generation grew up indoctrinated with this formula, but when they followed it, the formula failed. They were misled. The millennials were dumped out into the world as young adults with all forces against them. It is akin to releasing a bird from its nest in a hailstorm that would last for its entire lifetime. Tuition cost so much that they had to take out massive student loans. They were told that having a job would soon take care of that. But even with a degree, they couldn’t get jobs because there was a backing up of the natural cycle of job progression to retirement. Very few people could retire. Overqualified people had to take jobs they would not have considered before. The millennials were now competing in the workplace against their parent’s generation and even grandparent’s generation. Not only could millennials not compete against their resumes, they had not been brought up for competition in the first place. So now, they were in a highly competitive environment that they were not prepared for, they had debt they could not pay back, no use for their degrees and had to go back into the entry level jobs they had held before and during college. These were jobs where many had to hold two jobs, just to pay the bills because the cost of living had increased so drastically. They were forced to come to terms with the fact that they would most likely never be able to own a home. The Disney fantasy that they were sold as reality, that you meet someone, fall in love and it will be happily ever after, was falling apart and instead revealing a reality that relationships are impossibly hard and a lot of the time, they don’t work out. And so, the kind of quality of family life that all this adds up to is bad. Many of them realized that they couldn’t afford kids. And even if they could, the level of stress that would add to the chronic stress they already have, would make their already poor quality of life worse, not better. Gen Z never had these illusions to begin with. They grew up in the harsh realities that millennials had to discover over time. So many of them had a front row seat to marriage not working out and family life being a crappy experience and society being rigged against them that they reached all these same conclusions by the time they were in middle school. This is where the reality of the economic barrier to having children comes into play. Having a child is just too much of a financial and energy burden on top of the stress and burnout that people are already experiencing financially and with the complexities of life. What all this amounts to is that the mantra broke. And the reality that surfaced was: Quality of life may in fact be opposed by having children, both for themselves, and for the child.
It takes a village to raise a child. Many people in the younger generation get this, only there is no village. The nature of the modern world, after so many boomers moved away from their families in the pursuit of personal aims and then so many in the younger generations have moved away from their parents due to high housing costs or jobs etc. has made it so that many younger adults find themselves living far from their extended families. And often far from their friends. With every single person in the workforce in a world where so many people are simply working to survive, everyone is too stressed out and maxed out with their own life to help each other out with childcare. Community has fallen apart in an era where people connect with each other online. In the generations before the Boomer generation, parents often viewed child-rearing as a lifelong family duty. But people from the Millennial and Gen Z generation often find that their parents are more interested in traveling or their own retirement than helping with the "village" needed to raise the next generation. Older generations have either checked out of the grandparenting role, or put in minimal effort and presence. Parenting in today’s world means doing it just mom and dad. But to make matters worse, because of the reality of modern relationships, divorce and therefore broken homes being what it is, single parenting is now all too common. There are too little resources and there is too little support to make raising children a good idea.
In alignment with this last point, in today’s world, women do not feel like having children is a benefit to them, rather it is a serious detriment. While both men and women say that children would add to their stress level, there is a serious divide in career trajectory for women vs. men when it comes to having children. This is being called the parenting penalty. Having children leads to women being perceived as less reliable, less dedicated, less competent, less committed and less available for their careers and this often leads to fewer opportunities and lower pay. And the reality is, as a woman, you are expected to raise children like you don’t work and work like you don’t have children. It is a double bind that makes the old adage “you can do both, because you can do everything!” fall apart. Instead, it feels like an either or, because you can’t do both to the maximum that is necessary to succeed at either. Both are such high pressure, high stakes, labor-intensive endeavors. Men on the other hand, are perceived as being more reliable, more responsible and having more reason to work. This leads to better opportunities and higher pay. Women who have children are not seen as being the ideal worker and experience consequences because of this. Women who have children are also perceived as less desirable by men. It diminishes her perceived worth. Rather than motherhood making a woman esteemed, it causes her be seen as less valuable within society. This is compounded by the reality that in a society where there is no longer a village, a woman who works is going to need to now pay for childcare. Childcare is extremely expensive. The average family spends a shocking amount of their income on childcare. It also requires flexibility in a parent’s work hours, which most jobs do not allow for. Society still views women as the primary caregivers and so the burden of a sick child or a school holiday almost always falls on the mother first. This is forcing many women into part time work or less competitive roles so they can manage the extra housework and household duties. Not exactly encouraging for having children.
Pessimism about the future. The future does not look very bright right now. A significant amount of people, are not having children because they don’t want to bring them into a worsening world. A world which is descending into an ever-worsening climate crisis. Environmental toxicity. Pandemics. So much political instability. The government and the system being one that they cannot trust, one that appears to be against the people, rather than for them. Financial inflation and struggle and even crisis. And also, the ever-present threat of war.
Modern relationships are a disaster. The path to partnership that often leads to having kids, is tumultuous now a days. Marriage rates as well as people staying married are hitting record lows. People are really struggling to partner in a secure enough way that it leads to the choice to have children. There are many contributing reasons for this. Postponing children until the right partner is found can make people pass their window for having children. That window being defined by mental factors, emotional factors, biological factors and life circumstance factors.
As you can see, not having children is a growing global trend driven by very real causes. And now, you know the main drivers.
You have most likely heard a lot about how important it is to visualize what you want to have happen. You have also most likely heard a lot about how important it is to not focus on what you don’t want to have happen, what you fear. Because of this, it may surprise you to hear that consciously playing out the outcome that you fear (the worst-case scenario) is also a very important tool to have in your tool box. It’s time to learn about fear visioning.
Some of us walking this earth are first class worriers. And for those who aren’t, you may still run into a situation in your life where there is a specific scenario that you fear. You may do all the positive visualization that you could possibly do and spend all day trying to orient your thoughts, words and actions towards what you want to manifest. But still, your mind wanders to those thoughts that cause you to feel fear. Still, you are living with this backdrop of anxiety, stress, resistance and avoidance. Like a vague phantom, it haunts you. When this is the case, the best thing to do is to take your consciousness and go straight into the very thing you are so very afraid of. To do fear visioning instead.
In order to fear vision, you define what you are afraid of, this is likely to be a specific scenario you are terrified of, a specific outcome you are desperate to avoid, maybe an action you are terrified to take or a conversation you are terrified to have. And you imagine or visualize yourself in that scenario as if it has already happened. Really be in it. Describe it in intense detail. Consider what details you see, hear and feel in that scenario. Write down every unwanted element of this thing that you fear. And everything “and then what” relative to each element happening. Some people like to go an extra step with this and rate each element on a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being it is a setback, 5 being it is life altering in some way and 10 being, it is life ending.
From there, you begin to reverse engineer the whole thing by problem solving the unwanted elements you become aware of. You basically come up with contingency plans for each element. Doing this is like building an internal safety net. Even if these contingency plans involve difficult choices that you would never want to make, having a contingency plan or a way out, provides incredible relief for your psyche. Doing this often causes you to realize that the worst-case scenario is actually not as impossibly bad as you thought it was. You may even start to see that it is manageable, where it felt totally unmanageable before. It demystifies your fears. It reveals to you what you really value and really care about and therefore what to prioritize and therefore where to really put your energy. It removes the shock of the unexpected. It also reveals to you some empowered steps you could take right now to make the worst-case scenario less likely to happen or less bad if it does happen. This kind of empowerment reduces your anxiety, which makes you clearer and more grounded. It tends to make you feel less overwhelmed, putting your nervous system in the place where it can pre-emptively learn to deal with and prepare for potential adversity. It pulls you out of resistance and avoidance mode. You will automatically stop dedicating so much of your unconscious energy to terror and thus have the energy to do what needs to be done; as well as to focus back on your goals and what you actually want to have happen. And as an added bonus, it actually puts you more firmly in the vibration of gratitude because an unwanted outcome implies you are somewhere worse than where you are now. And this can greatly increase your gratitude for and appreciation of where you are right now and the things you have right now.
Some things to consider when you are doing this process are: What are the odds of this actually happening? Relative to each unwanted element, if this really happened, what would I do then? How would I fix this one element or make the experience a bit better? Relative to each element, is this really up to me, do I have control over this, or is the reality that it isn’t up to me? What advice would I give to a friend who is in the exact same scenario? What resources can I use? What people can I involve and go to for help? What would I turn to in order to recover? What internal resources can I lean on if this situation did happen? What virtue of mine will be of benefit and a bonus? If this situation did happen, what would go up in ashes or end that I’m glad would go up in ashes or end? What elements, in order of most important to least are the most important to me? What small steps might I take that would reduce the likelihood that this will happen? "What single action could I take today that would make this worst-case scenario mathematically less likely to happen? If I am overwhelmed by possibilities, what one thing could I do today that would make everything else easier or irrelevant? Who has faced this situation before that I could reach out to for advice?
If what you fear is taking an action or having a conversation, you might consider: What is the consequence of saying or doing nothing? If I play out continuing to do nothing, what happens in a day, a week, a month, a year, five years? What is it costing me to postpone this?
So that you understand how this works, here is an example. Mason quit his job a while back to start a business in motion graphics marketing. He took on a client who refused to pay after months of work put in by Mason and his head designer. In fact, his client is threatening him with a full-blown legal fight if Mason tries to make him pay according to the contract he signed. This is a disaster because they were counting on this money and already blew through their budget. Mason has been sick to his stomach with worry. So, let’s look at what happens when Mason decides to do fear visioning. Mason first defines his worst-case scenario. He imagines slipping deep into debt. Being unable to pay any of his staff and them abandoning the company to go work for someone else. Facing an online smear campaign against him and his company, making it impossible to get new clients. Having his car repossessed. Not being able to keep his apartment and having to move back in with his parents at 37 years old. Having to take a job where he feels humiliated, has no creative license and is financially limited again.
From there, Mason takes each element of his nightmare and really plays them out. For example, he imagines sinking into debt and he asks himself, and because I sink into debt, what would happen? For him, the answer is: My credit score is destroyed. To this he asks himself: And because my credit score is destroyed, what would happen? To this his answer is: I could not obtain a business loan that I could afford the interest and so on and so forth.
From there, Mason lists the elements of his worst-case scenario and rates them from 1 to 10. For example, he lists being unable to pay his staff at a 4 because he knows people in the Philippines which can be hired on the spot, they just have to be micro managed to do things right. He lists moving back in with his parents as a 7 because he knows that he would sink into an “ashamed of himself depression” and would likely stay in that terrible space because his father is critical and competitive. Failing at this business would give his father even more occasion to cut him down. Because of this, Mason sees a lot about what is most important to him. He sees that living an independent life is most important to him. More important than having to take a job for another company. This in and of itself reduces the tower of resistance he had to the unwanted scenario of having to take another job. This tells him that his personal independence in life is what he should be putting his energy into protecting at all costs.
With each element, he starts to come up with contingency plans. For example, when he imagines the worst-case scenario of not being able to keep his house, but realizes that moving back in with his parents is not something he can do, he starts to think of alternatives. He realizes that he could temporarily take a work away job, or a house caretaking job. Something totally unrelated to his field even. This would give him somewhere to stay while planning his next move. Or for example, when he takes the worst-case scenario of his credit score plummeting, he can think of some ideas. One is to call his credit card company and request that they increase his limit. Another is to get his sister, who he has a great relationship with to add him as an authorized user, so he can inherit her positive spending history. After going through each element, Mason is feels calmer and more centered. He isn’t in fight or flight mode anymore.
With his contingency plans in place, he then trouble shoots the situation as it stands today. Mason decides that a law suit with his client would be a worse outcome, one where he is likely to lose more money than he would make on the project. So, Mason starts trouble shooting the issue of the company money now being so shockingly low. He knows that the people who work for him would probably rather sacrifice their own paychecks for a month than have to find new jobs all together. So, he holds that on the backburner as the worst of the contingency plans. He thinks of the idea of putting all his time and energy into securing an anchor client, for a small project that he can do himself without his team. He would lose sleep for sure, but he could make the money to float the company while they are working on other projects that will bring in good revenue. He also decides to find a business mentor that has experience in his field to involve him in the situation.
Mason also asks himself the question, what one action could I take today that would make this whole situation less likely to happen? The answer is: Write a sincere e-mail to the client about wanting them to be pleased and suggesting working hand in hand for an intensive period of time with someone from their company to make sure this happens. This is a step Mason would not have been willing to take before, because it means compromising his artistic agency, but at this point, this choice is the lesser of all evils.
This fear visioning exercise calmed Mason down relative to his future. It drastically reduced his stress. It taught him what is most valuable to him. It pushed him to create productive contingency plans. It made him aware that even if the business fails, he still has over 10 years of experience as a motion graphics designer. And that his resume is actually better now because he has added "Motion Graphics Business Development and Ownership" to his skill set. So really, the worst-case scenario is actually manageable. And it caused him to be able to effectively trouble shoot the situation at hand.
In case you are interested, because the client did not take him up on his offer, Mason did end up deciding that the best course of action was to take on a one-off motion graphics project and work nearly nonstop for three weeks in order to float the company financially. But he did not lose his company. Having his contingency plan in place, and releasing resistance to the phantom worst-case scenario, enabled him to focus all of his energy where it was most effective. And he wasn’t in the hell of panic the whole time doing it.
The conscious practice of fear visioning is very different than catastrophizing. Catastrophizing is a largely unconscious and unstructured process. Because it is so unconscious, it feels involuntary and tends to loop and be repetitive, not leading to empowerment and not creating a reduction in terror. Rather, it leads to an increase in terror and a kind of paralysis from overthinking and overanalyzing. Fear visioning on the other hand is highly conscious and structured. It is specifically done as an exercise that will reduce your terror and help you to solve the problems you imagine. Leaders in all kinds of sectors use some version of fear visioning in order to identify problems and pit falls before they happen, a strategic kind of foresight that leads to early risk mitigation. This in turn leads to greater chances for success.
When you bring the feared outcome to light, it becomes less frightening. It transforms abstract panic into concrete, proactive plans and action steps. It reduces your fear of the unknown. It brings you out of paralysis, so you can create movement in the right direction. And because it is such a powerful process for releasing resistance, it makes your positive visualizations, your intentional manifestations and your proactive actions so much more effective.
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