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Pod 9: Breaking Free from People Pleasing and Codependency: the why behind the words

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If anyone ever told you you’re a people pleaser or codependent — a therapist, a friend, or a Cosmo article with a ten-question checklist — that’s the “diagnosis.” It tells you what you do, not why you do it. And that missing “why” is the whole story. You don’t wake up one day and decide, Hey, I’ll erase myself and become addicted to approval, that sounds fun. Fuck, no. Something inside you made that decision long before you were old enough to call it survival.  

“Codependent.” “People pleaser.” These labels are like neon signs pointing at your behaviour. You over-give. You over-apologize. You can’t stand conflict. You say yes when your entire chest is screaming no. But here’s the part no one bothers to tell you: you didn’t learn this in adulthood. You didn’t pick it up from Instagram self-help reels. You learned it as a survival reflex. It was etched into your nervous system back when your safety, love, and belonging were on the line. The behaviour is the smoke. The fire is underneath.

Big T Trauma vs. little t trauma:

When I say, “I have childhood trauma,” people hear the word trauma and picture horror scenes. War. Rape. Assault. Car crashes. Fires. Netflix documentaries.  They think trauma means one catastrophic event — something undeniable, visible, headline-worthy. That’s what psychologists call Big T Trauma. And yes, that exists. One blow can shatter your sense of safety forever. 

But here’s the one no one talks about enough: little t trauma. The subtle kind. The daily kind. The death-by-a-thousand-cuts kind.

The parent who said they loved you,but rolled their eyes when you cried or told you “they will give you something to cry about” thats the emotional dismissal.

The teacher who laughed at you in front of the class when you were too curious or too loud.

The friend who ghosted you in silence and never explained why.

The sibling rivalry no one ever mediated, leaving you convinced you were unworthy.

The mother who fed you and clothed you but dismissed your feelings with, “You’re too sensitive.”

The father who provided but was never really present.

The boy who expresses his feeling and is told he is a “pussy” or “walk it off” or “suck it up”.

Each cut looks small on its own. But stack them? They rewire your nervous system. They whisper the same message over and over until you believe it with your whole body:  The world is not safe for me. My needs are too much. My feelings are wrong. Love is conditional. That’s what little t trauma does. It’s not the explosion. It’s the slow leak of gas you can’t smell until you’re choking on it. It’s the death of your inner child by a thousand cuts — cuts that didn’t just wound you, but taught you that being fully yourself was dangerous.

I’ll give my own example. When my sister, at 54, shared with our mother she was in therapy working through childhood issues, our mother’s response was: “Well, it’s not like I burnt you children with cigarettes.” That’s exactly the point. That comment is the trauma. Not because it was the worst thing imaginable, but because it minimized and dismissed her pain. That’s why we need to define our own experiences — not for others, not against someone else’s scale of suffering, but for ourselves.

Most people know about PTSD. That’s the aftermath of a single traumatic event. Flashbacks. Nightmares. Hypervigilance. The body stays stuck in fight-or-flight, replaying the catastrophe.  But CPTSD — Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder — is a different beast. It doesn’t come from one headline moment. It comes from a climate. A whole childhood environment. A slow-drip exposure to instability, neglect, invalidation, abuse, or conditional love. Not one scream, but a home where every silence was a loaded gun.  Not one shove, but a lifetime of being told, “You’re imagining things.” Not one abandonment, but years of being invisible in your own family.

And here’s the insult on top of injury: CPTSD isn’t even recognized in the DSM-5 (the diagnosis Bible). You’re more likely to be told you’re anxious, depressed, maybe “borderline,” maybe “codependent.” All technically true, but none of them get to the marrow.  Because the marrow is this: your entire nervous system was shaped in an unsafe environment.

This is the part that changes everything: trauma isn’t the thing that happened. Trauma is what happened inside you because of it.  Two kids can live through the same event. One walks away. The other walks away fractured. The difference isn’t the event itself — it’s the nervous system’s response. Trauma is the scar tissue your body grows around a wound it never got to heal. 

And here’s the kicker: not all nervous systems respond with fight, flight, or freeze. Some of us responded with fawn. Fight, Flight, Freeze … and Fawn You already know the first three survival responses.

Fight: Attack the threat.

Flight: Escape the threat.

Freeze: Go still, play dead, wait it out.

But there’s a fourth: Fawn.

Fawning, coined by Pete Wlaker, is survival by self-abandonment. It says: “If I erase myself, if I make myself small – I won’t be an inconvenience, if I keep you happy, if I make myself indispensable to you — maybe you won’t hurt me. Maybe you’ll keep me. Maybe I’ll be safe.” So you smile when you want to scream. You say yes when every cell of your body is screaming no. You predict moods like a fucking talented psychic and bend yourself into a compliant pretzel to prevent conflict before it even arrives.

And over time, you forget where the performance ends and you begin. If you’re wondering whether this is you, don’t look for flashbacks of war. Look for these quieter symptoms:

Chronic people-pleasing. You agree to things before you even feel your own wants.

Shame loops. You wake up already apologizing for existing.

Hyper-attunement. You can read every shift in tone and body language, but you couldn’t name your own emotions if asked.

Identity amnesia. Ask you what you like, what you want, what you dream of — and you freeze. You’ve outsourced yourself.

Attachment chaos. You either cling too hard or shut down completely.

Self-erasure. You’re an expert at disappearing in plain sight. Making yourself small.

Sound familiar? That’s not weakness. That’s the nervous system you built in a childhood where you learned: I survive by becoming what others need me to be. So when someone calls you “codependent” or “a people pleaser,” don’t stop at the dressed up diagnosis. Those words describe the surface. They don’t tell you why the hell you ended up that way.

Because the why is this: Your system decided early on, Erasing myself is safer than being myself. That’s not a flaw. That’s strategy. A strategy that worked. A strategy that kept you alive. A strategy that, over time, became your personality. Healing doesn’t start when you “just stop people pleasing.” Healing starts when you understand that people pleasing was your survival.

When you stop shaming yourself for what you had to do. It’s not about eradicating the fawn. It’s about retraining the body. Teaching your nervous system something it didn’t know back then: You are safe now. You can say no. You can exist. You don’t have to vanish to be loved. The wounds of childhood showed you a world where being yourself was dangerous. Where love was conditional. Where safety meant disappearing.

But here’s the truth your body is still learning: survival is not the same as living.  You don’t heal by killing the part of you that wants connection, kindness, intimacy. You heal by reclaiming it. By making it yours again. By separating authentic care from compulsive fawning. 

Because the truth is: you were never broken. You were adaptive. The chameleon in chaos – Brilliantly, exhaustingly adaptive. And now it’s time for something beyond adaptation. And survival did its job. Now it’s your turn to do yours. To teach your body that safety doesn’t require self-erasure. To teach your nervous system that love doesn’t mean abandonment. To teach your inner child that the world can hold them, not cut them. Because you are allowed to exist. Fully. Loudly. Messily. You don’t have to disappear to be loved.

To quasi-quote the immortal words of Eminiem – “Would the real YOU, please stand up”

Pod 8: Self-Sabotage — Tying Your Own Laces Together

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You don’t need enemies. You’ve got yourself. Not in a self-deprecating, sarcastic way.
In the very real sense that some of the deepest damage in your life wasn’t done to you — it was done by you. And you probably didn’t even realize you were doing it. Because self-sabotage doesn’t show up with a warning label. It doesn’t announce itself like, “Hey, I’m here to ruin your goals and derail your relationships.” It’s sneakier than that. It’s you tying your own laces together and then sprinting full-speed into life, wondering why you keep face-planting.


It’s cancelling the date you were excited for. It’s ghosting the person who actually sees you. It’s starting the thing you said you’ve always wanted and then procrastinating until it withers in your hands. It’s snapping at the person who’s closest to you, just so you can feel alone and “right” about it. It’s choosing chaos because calm feels unfamiliar. It’s drinking, scrolling, isolating, numbing — not because it feels good, but because it feels known.
And here’s the wild part: none of that means you’re broken. It means your programming is working. A little too well.
Because about 90–95% of what you do every day is unconscious. That’s not philosophy. That’s neuroscience. You are mostly on autopilot. Living out a script written by a much younger, more frightened version of you — someone who didn’t have choices, just coping mechanisms. You learned early that love has rules. That being yourself came at a cost. That softness was unsafe. That being seen meant being judged. That being too happy meant something bad was coming. So you adapted. You edited. You shape-shifted. You played small. You became the version of you that could survive. But survival has side effects. You don’t even realize it, but you’re still following the old blueprint. You say you want something new, but your nervous system is still guarding the gate.
And most of the time, you don’t notice. Because you’ve rehearsed it. That’s the terrifying beauty of the brain: it remembers the pattern even if you forget the reason.
The wildest example of this is Peter Porco – a man attacked in his sleep with an axe, sustained massive head trauma. His brain was severely damaged — yet after the attack, he got out of bed, walked downstairs, made breakfast, and even fetched the newspaper before collapsing. He died doing his routine. That’s how ingrained it was. Neurologists called it automatism. When the thinking brain shuts off, but the body keeps repeating familiar routines.
We live like that more often than we care to admit. Not with trauma as extreme, but with habits just as powerful. Emotional automatism. We go silent when someone’s tone sharpens. We over-apologize when we’re not even wrong. We say yes while our insides scream no. We chase people who can’t love us, because being ignored feels like home. We shut down the moment someone gets too close. Not because we want to ruin it — but because closeness once meant danger. And we pick the same kinds of partners over and over — even when we swear we’re done with that type. Why?
Because something in them feels familiar. Something in them hits the same nerve your primary caregiver once hit. Not because they are your mother, your father, or whoever you first loved and feared — but because they speak the same emotional language. The unpredictability. The distance. The criticism dressed as “care.” The way you were made to feel responsible for other people’s moods. You don’t fall for people randomly. You fall for the ones who activate your oldest wound and light up your nervous system like a Christmas tree. You call it chemistry. Your therapist calls it reenactment. Your body calls it home.
And if you’re not conscious, you’ll choose them again and again. Not because it’s good. Because it’s known. And the known is seductive — even when it hurts. Your body doesn’t want what’s healthy. It wants what’s predictable. And that’s the cruel logic of self-sabotage. You don’t destroy things because you hate yourself. You destroy things because you’re scared. Not of failure — but of change.
Because change means doing the opposite of what once kept you alive. Change means setting a boundary and living through the discomfort. It means letting someone love you and not flinching. It means not proving your worth, just existing in it. And that feels like jumping out of a moving car with no seatbelt and no guarantee. So you stick with the familiar. Even when it hurts. Because that’s what your nervous system trusts. And unless you stop and interrupt the pattern — unless you untie the damn laces — you’ll keep falling, and calling it fate.
That’s what no one tells you about self-sabotage. It’s not laziness. It’s not weakness. It’s loyalty. You are loyal to who you had to be. But that version of you — the one who kept the peace, kept the secret, kept the smile on — she doesn’t have to keep running the show. You can thank her. Love her. Let her rest. And then choose differently.
But how? How do you actually become more conscious?
Not in a performative, incense-and-crystals kind of way — unless that speaks to you — but in a practical, day-to-day, life-altering kind of way. You start by watching. You notice. Not later. Not once you’ve spiraled and apologized and overthought it to death. In the moment, if you can. Or afterwards, with radical honesty.
You ask weird questions.
What did I just feel in my chest? What was I actually reacting to? What was I afraid of in that second? Who does this remind me of? When was the first time I felt this? What younger version of me just showed up here? You don’t try to fix it all. You don’t perform emotional surgery in the middle of your workday. You just see it. You pause. And that pause is the crack where the light gets in. Because the moment you notice, you’re not completely trapped inside the pattern anymore. You’re holding the thread. And that’s everything. You realize you didn’t want the snack. You wanted comfort. You weren’t angry. You were scared. You weren’t cold. You were ashamed.
You didn’t “overreact.” You over-remembered. Becoming conscious means you start catching the script while it’s playing. And eventually, you change the lines.
It’s not magic. It’s muscle. And it builds slowly. One choice at a time.
You stop saying “sorry” when you mean “ouch.” You stop disappearing to feel safe. You stay. You speak. You breathe through the discomfort instead of trying to outpace it. You stop assuming every silence means rejection. You stop assuming every mistake means you’ve ruined everything. You stop solving for ghosts. You choose something new — and yes, it’ll feel awkward. That’s how you know it’s working. You don’t have to be perfect. Just present. You don’t have to change your whole life today. Just be willing to see what’s true.
Because the goal isn’t to fix yourself. The goal is to meet yourself. Not the polished version. The real one. The messy, wounded, brilliant, brave one who’s been trying to protect you this whole time. And once you see her — really see her — you can say what no one ever said: Let’s do it differently now. Let’s untie the laces.

Pod 7: The Bullshit of “Self-love”

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I am just going to start writing about stuff that hits my radar. I was chatting to my spiritual mentor the other day about self-love and the concept of it, which has prompted this post. Everywhere you look, people are preaching it like gospel: “Just love yourself.” They say it like it’s brushing your teeth. Simple. Daily. Hygienic. Except it isn’t.

Because your subconscious isn’t stupid. It’s got the receipts—every fuckup, every cruel word, every silence that cut deeper than a scream, every time you betrayed yourself or someone else. Your subconscious is an elephant; it never forgets. So when you stand in front of the mirror chanting I love myself with a sticky note mantra and a shaky smile, that inner mammoth smirks. “Really? After all that? You expect me to buy it?”

Self-love gets tossed around like it’s a bath bomb. Bubble baths, face masks, journaling with a lavender candle—don’t get me wrong, those things are beautiful. But that’s not self-love. That’s self-comfort. And comfort without courage becomes sedation.

This is why the whole self-love gospel feels hollow. Because love, in its truest form, can’t be forced. You don’t get to leapfrog over your shadow, plaster lavender affirmations over old wounds, and call it healing. You can’t bully yourself into love. And you don’t need to. What you need is grittier, harder, and infinitely more freeing: self-acceptance.

Self-acceptance is not glamorous. It doesn’t come with rose quartz rituals or Instagram-worthy mantras. It’s not a spa day. It’s standing in front of the jury of your own mind, facing the evidence, and saying: Yes. I did that. I screwed up. I hurt people. I failed. And I’m still here. I still get to exist. Acceptance doesn’t erase the record. It doesn’t pretend the darkness never happened. It does something braver: it allows the shadow to live alongside the light.

That’s the part no one wants to tell you. Self-love is a feeling, and feelings shift. One day you’ll feel unstoppable; the next, you’ll feel like human garbage. If your worth depends on whether you feel love for yourself in that moment, you’re screwed. But acceptance doesn’t care how you feel. It just holds the line: You are allowed to exist, even on your worst day.

Think of it like this: you don’t always love your friends or your partner. Some days they drive you insane. But the bond stays, because you’ve chosen not to abandon them. That’s loyalty. That’s what self-acceptance is—choosing not to abandon yourself when you’re at your worst.

The self-love industry skips that part because it doesn’t sell well. It’s hard to market “accept your shame and failures” on a pastel journal cover. What sells are slogans: “Be your own soulmate.” “Radiate positivity.” “Fall in love with yourself first.” But here’s the thing—your subconscious hears those words and laughs. Because it still remembers when you ghosted that friend, cheated on that test, swallowed your truth, or hurt someone who trusted you. It remembers the nights you couldn’t face the world and spent days doomscrolling in sadness, silently judging you from the inside out. Your subconscious is not buying the Hallmark version. You can’t romance yourself into wholeness. You can’t manifest amnesia.

But you can sit with the wreckage. You can pull up a chair in your own ruins and say: “I’m not leaving.” That’s not sexy. That’s not Instagram-worthy. But it’s real.

When you live this way long enough—when you stop clawing at yourself, when you quit the war—you sometimes stumble into love. Not the manufactured kind, but real tenderness. A flicker of sunlight breaking through a boarded-up window. It comes in moments: forgiving the teenage you who only knew how to survive, softening toward the body you once called ugly, catching yourself mid-criticism and replacing it with a breath. Tiny mercies. That’s love sneaking in through the cracks.

But you don’t chase it. You don’t need to. Because the point was never love. The point is to stop abandoning yourself.

And maybe that’s the only kind of love that’s ever real—the kind that grows accidentally out of loyalty. Not a fireworks display, not a constant high, but a steady hand that doesn’t let go when you fall apart.

So forget the bath bombs. Forget the slogans. If you want the real deal, practice the courage to accept the whole archive—every shame, every failure, every fuckup—without flinching, without erasing, without running. Look at yourself and say: You’re still mine.

Self-love might be the myth, but self-acceptance is the miracle. Not sexy. Not marketable. But real. And real is enough. MORE than enough.

Pod 6: The Mammoth and the Inside Job

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Its been a while … but here goes:

There are moments in conversation when the air shifts. Words fall, but they don’t land as words. They arrive like stones hurled against glass, colliding with the scaffolding of where and who we believe ourselves to be – to others and ourselves. Our chest hardens, our ears go deaf, and suddenly we are no longer listening—we are bracing for impact.

This is when the mammoth stirs.

This ancient beast inside is not metaphorical, not mythological—it’s biological. A creature of bone memory and survival instinct. Jonathan Haidt calls it the Social Mammoth: the part of us that still believes exile equals death. And it did, once. Once, if the tribe cast you out, you would die beneath the teeth of sabre-tooth tiger. The mammoth was your guardian, your shield.

The mammoth is your subconscious—the one who has witnessed, and vividly remembers, your entire history. Every flinch, every punishment, every sharp word, every cold silence. They don’t say the memory of an elephant for nothing. The mammoth remembers it all. Its job is pattern recognition. Its job is survival. And it will protect you—at all costs.

But today? Today that guardian has become the jailer. Your subconscious can’t tell time.  The mammoth cannot tell the difference between discomfort and danger. Between six-year-old you and seventy-year-old you. Between disagreement and death. And so it roars when your partner disagrees. It panics when they go quiet. It thrashes when their truth rubs raw against yours.

We like to pretend we are modern. Civilized. Independent. But most of us are still tethered—umbilical, invisible—to the moods of the people we love. Their calm becomes our ground. Their warmth, our oxygen. Their smile, the fragile rope bridge we cling to over the abyss.

And when that smile disappears? The bridge snaps. The mammoth bellows. Inside us, alarms flare like red sky at night: Danger. Rejection. You are not safe here.

So we shrink. We fold into silence. We sulk, not out of wisdom, but out of terror. Silence becomes a cave where we mistake withdrawal for protection. We lash out in anger, we push people away with our words and actions – because if they aren’t around to upset us, we are safe. At all costs means, AT ALL COSTS.  The mammoth curls around us, whispering: hide, hide, hide—or starts lashing out screaming:  run, run, run.

But here is the truth, sharp and cold as steel against skin: the more we outsource our safety, the more fragile we become. We turn into addicts, feeding on the dopamine of our partner’s approval. Their affection is the hit. Their indifference, the crash. Their disapproval feels like the ground tearing open beneath our feet. Every sharp word, every missed gesture, every flash of their authenticity is received as catastrophe.

And still, we hand them the leash. But it was never their leash to hold.

Safety is an inside job.

It’s not glamorous. Not easy. The work is sweaty, primal, undignified. You cannot expect a standing ovation when you do it. It is sitting with the mammoth when it thrashes, when it claws to run, when it begs to hide. It is feeling the thunder in your chest, the tightening in your throat, and choosing not to drop that weight into someone else’s hands. It is whispering, I can survive this storm. I can stand steady even here. It is remembering that no matter what chaos is happening outside, you have lived through worse and you are still here. You will always be fine, no matter what happens.

This isn’t about hardening into isolation. We are wired for connection; to deny that is to deny our beating hearts. But connection was never meant to be a crutch or a bandage for the wound. Love is not a hiding place. Love is not a shield against your storms. Love is what happens when two whole, rooted beings choose to meet—not to rescue, not to cage, but to witness.

Everyone will let you down at some point. This is truth. But trusting that they are doing the best they can, for themselves and you, is where love grows. We can never change anyone. We can only trust them.

So where do we begin? In the fragile pauses, in the cavern between what was said and what was heard. When your partner retreats after your truth, do not collapse into story. Ask: When I said that, what did you hear?

Or flip it: When you said that, I heard you don’t love me. Most often, that is not the truth. But if you have lived with ghosts in your chest, echoes in your caves, the mammoth will twist words until they sound like war cries.

That is the battlefield: the gap. Between intention and reception. Between what was meant and what was felt. If left unnamed, that gap calcifies into resentment. And resentment is the slow poison that drains intimacy into dust.

And in that gap live our silent scripts—our expectations. The hidden commandments we’ve written in secret: they should soothe me, they should know, they should make me safe. Expectations are predetermined disappointments. They set us up for heartbreak before a word is even spoken.

That is why the courage to ask—What did you hear? or Here’s what I heard—is an act of love. It breaks the trance. It pulls us back from the cave mouth, where the mammoth is pawing the dirt.

Because the real love story is not the fairy tale where someone saves you, or you save them. It is the one where you learn to hold your own ground. Where you build a home inside yourself strong enough to weather storms, so that when you step into connection, you step in it whole.  And your strength also allows authenticity in your partner.

And then love can breathe. And grow.

Not as dependency. Not as safety outsourced. But as presence. As freedom. Two beings standing steady, choosing each other not from fear of loss, but from the raw, unglamorous miracle of authenticity.

Love is not the taming of the mammoth. Love is the meeting of two people who have walked into their caves, faced their beasts, and returned carrying fire in their hands.

That is the inside job. That is the only ground that holds.

Pod 5: Masks – The lies we wear.

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Pod 5: Masks

“I am no longer the influenced child of innocence

But the undecided prophet of the future,

Unsure of decisions but certain of their existence.

Loving and learning; turning and yearning,

I am searching for my caged soul.

The innocence of society sickens yet heals this undecided mind.

Tactfully in influences, yet bluntly it cuts.

I am sad yet with a flash of an eyelid

My tears wash back happiness and joy.

So, unprevented and naïve my life is ruled

And the only individuality I have

Are my socially perverted thoughts of freedom.”

– Nina Peycke

I wrote this in Std 8 or 9 (Grade 10 or 11). Brimming with angst. My English teacher at the time, Mrs Young, gave me 8/10 and commented something like “Well done. This proves that behind your façade lurks a sensitive being.” (or something like that) I remember feeling entirely exposed and deeply violated. Something incredibly raw had bled from my soul and she had seen a part of me that had slipped past the guards. What had I done? What could she see? Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. I wanted to crawl under my desk, I felt like a transparent being with exposed raw nerve endings. Vulnerability was dangerous. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t brave. It was a dead ass liability.

I had worked so hard at curating my persona by then, that kickass, confident, funny, loudmouthed, slightly unhinged kid. My own glittery fortress of “cool” – well, as cool as I was going to be without being mates with the “in” crowd. Strutting in confidence (mostly bolstered by substances throughout my 20’s and 30’s) and bouncing through the world like I was untouchable, unbreakable. It wasn’t confidence, it was camouflaged survival. Re-reading that poem now, I can’t but laugh at myself. So desperately wanting to be authentic, but absolutely revering the mask I had, in this case unsuccessfully created, as a protection to the world that had inadvertently shaped me. But safety that requires performance is not safety. And love that depends on pretending isn’t love.

Keep in mind, I come from the generation that was raised by “I’ll give you something to cry about”.  This is not a dig at our parents, we are all formed by the generation that raised us. That’s just how it is. Our parents come from a generation where there was value in productivity. The generation of “What will the neighbours think” – not “how do you feel”. You didn’t feel, you did. “Children are meant to be seen, not heard” (I know, right???)

The year after I left school, one of my friends was killed in a horrific car accident. It really shook me. It was the first time I was confronted by the idea that I was mortal. A few days after hearing the news I was at a shopping centre, when something triggered me and ashamedly I started getting teary.

My mother seeing this said “What are you crying about?”

Me: “My friend died Mom”.

Her: “She is in a better place! You are only crying because you are feeling sorry for yourself, that you won’t get to be friends with her. This isn’t about her, this is about YOU!”

This conversation is still so jarring to me.  I remember many of these and it was entirely the reason I believed it wasn’t safe being sensitive. I didn’t want to be seen, I just wanted to be loved – even if just for the character I played. My experience was that currency of love was compliance. It reinforced my belief that emotion wasn’t safe. Sadness made other people uncomfortable, and I needed to edit myself to be acceptable.

So, I kept smiling. Kept laughing. Kept bouncing off the walls like a feral firework. And that’s what masks do. Masks are brilliant. They have to be. They are your armour. Your smile that says “you’re fine” when you are dying inside. You nonchalant bravado that says “whatever” when the rejection burns. Your sarcasm that says you’re tough when you are terrified. You’ve got a mask for every occasion, and you’ve worn them so long, they feel like skin. That twisted sense of humour because the horror of reality, would hurt too much.

But here’s the thing. Masks are prisons. The more you wear them the more you forget who’s underneath. You perform. You please. You perfect. But you never truly show up as yourself. You built them to fit in. And then, this in turn creates the feedback loop – “I can’t be myself, it’s not safe. I am not enough” that quiet brutal lie, you have started to believe. Masks don’t just hide you from the world, they hide you from you.

Masks are a way of outsourcing. We put on a mask, pretend to be someone else to be loved.  Why? Because we need approval, external approval. Outsourcing the validation we so desperately crave when all the while we are discounting the most important opinion in the world: our own. The more we perform, the more we betray ourselves with inauthenticity. How can we approve of ourselves if we are fake? And I guess that’s what happened to me.

After decades of trying to be who I thought the world needed me to be, I had a break down. I found myself on a remote farm, alone and stripped of all I knew. It took about 9 months of catatonia followed by the process of getting to know myself, the real me. I had denied myself the privilege of being authentic for so long, it literally got down to barebones business of: who am I? What does love look like for me? What does it feel like? What do I like doing? What makes me happy? Just like the Emperor’s New Clothes story – except, I was the Emperor- parading around, convinced I was clothed in the finest fabric of charisma, confidence, and charm. The emperor was only stripped of the lie because someone dared to say “But you are naked”. And the person to call out me… was me. It started with the simple question of: Who are you when you aren’t twisting yourself into palatable shapes? When you aren’t auditioning for love? Who are you when nobody is watching? Because out there in the middle of nowhere, on that farm, no one really was watching.

You hear all these gurus and pop spiritual folks say “you need to love yourself”- I had no idea what that meant. How could I love what I didn’t know? This isn’t about ripping your masks off all at once – that’s just another performance. It’s about noticing them. Questioning them. Daring to take them off, even just for a moment, even with just one person. Masks may feel protective, but they steal your right to be known. If no one knows the real you, then no one can love the real you either.  And even if they do say they love you, it won’t feel like love. (Can you say “I-M-P-O-S-T-E-R  S-Y-N-D-R-O-M-E?)

But then slowly the shift happens. Ever so slightly, your existence is no longer torn between the terror or “What if they see me?!” but more the intriguing possibility of “what if they see me…and they stay?” What if my mess is actually the magnet? What if sharing my path is the permission slip someone else needs to unlock their own cage?

I am still unmasking. Still learning to sit with the twitchy discomfort of being real. Still learning to trust my voice. Still catch myself responding to something and thinking: “wait, is that really me?” My eternal soul now knows I will be fine no matter what.  And for the first time: I want to be loved for what’s under the mask, not despite it.  Because masks may be pretty: but my face – my real, wrinkly, scarred, wildly feeling, unedited face – that’s fucking gorgeous.

And I love that I am a feral firework.

(and yes, Mrs Young, I am still writing)

Pod 4 – Projection – The Optical Illusion of the Psyche (this one has been really hard to write!)

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Pod 4 – Projection – The Optical Illusion of the Psyche (this one has been really hard to write!)

There’s a fucked-up little game your subconscious loves to play. It’s like a magician pulling coins from your ear — except those coins are your unresolved trauma. And the stage for this tragicomedy? Every single person you meet. This is projection. Projection is your mind’s twisted survival tactic. Instead of owning your pain, you hang it on someone else like a coat. It’s the psychological equivalent of a bad magic trick — where the illusion is so convincing that even you, the magician, forget you’re the one creating it.

Imagine you’re at work. There’s this loud, confident coworker who barrels in like they have trademarked OxygenTM, and within five minutes, you’ve diagnosed them as a walking bag of narcissism. “Arrogant. Attention-seeker. Obnoxious wanker. Pompous, pretentious papoose.” You storm off, eyes rolling so hard, already texting a friend about this human bulldozer who just ruined your day.

Your subconscious is using their face as a dartboard for your own unresolved emotions. Their confidence is a trigger because, deep down, you’ve never allowed yourself to take up space. Your self-doubt can’t handle seeing someone else claim what you deny yourself. Your boss is “a control freak” because you’ve never dared to assert yourself. Your partner is “cold and distant” because you’ve never learned to say what you actually need and true vulnerability is taboo. Your friend is “selfish” because you’ve spent your life playing emotional Amazon Prime, delivering validation to everyone else while you starve yourself.

But projection doesn’t always kick the door in. Sometimes, it slips in sideways. You joke about someone’s “overconfidence,” but there’s a twist in your smile. The humour isn’t innocent — it’s a dagger wrapped in a punchline. Beneath the laughter, it’s your resentment about your own fear of being seen. You become the self-proclaimed “truth-teller,” pointing out others’ flaws — their laziness, their ego, their irresponsibility. But it’s a mirror, an oblique way of criticizing the very traits you deny in yourself. You can’t stop singing someone’s praises. “She’s so strong. So independent.” But you’re not just admiring her. You’re bitterly aware of the ways you’ve felt weak and dependent. You hear someone make a passing comment, and you’re immediately on edge. You start explaining yourself, even though no one accused you. But it’s not them you’re defending against — it’s your own self-doubt. You feel overly sorry for someone struggling, rushing to help, bending over backwards. But it’s not just compassion. It’s your hidden need to be seen as good, useful, valuable — because you’ve buried your own feelings of worthlessness.

You love talking about how selfish, superficial, or arrogant others are. But it’s not them you’re angry at. You’re deflecting — projecting your own shame, envy, or desire to be seen as superior. You tell someone you’re giving them “tough love” or “just calling it like it is.” But there’s a razor edge to your words — and it’s not about them. It’s your own insecurity, trying to prove dominance. Or you go out of your way to praise someone for being “so confident” because, deep down, you can’t stand how scared you are to take up space.

When you’re having that Level 10 response to a Level 1 situation, there’s an internal conversation happening inside you— a hidden conversation between you and your unresolved past. So, before you spiral into shame, projection is not a failure. It’s a treasure map to that exact gold. When you follow a projection back to the source, that’s where the real work begins. Every time you feel a sudden urge of judgment, resentment, anger, or even infatuation – that’s a clue. The gold isn’t in them — it’s in you. It’s the signal fire of “This is you. Look at this.” Want to break the illusion? Start by catching yourself in the act. Turn the spotlight around. Question your judgments, your knee-jerk reactions. Ask yourself, ‘What is this really about?’

For me – it’s arrogance. Someone who owns life. Walks tall, sets boundaries. Every time I would judge them for thinking too much of themselves. I have even ended relationships with people with healthy self-esteem because “who the hell did she think she is?” I judged them hard. And then I learned to sit with it – every time I felt that sick twist of disgust, I turned it inward. I asked, ‘What part of me is this poking?” The only time I was confident, was in jest and heavily under the influence of some substance.

Because your shadow — a term coined by Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist guy— is that part of you where you hide aspects of yourself you believe to be bad. These could be things you were scolded for, rejected for, or felt ashamed of in the past. It’s not just a dark place; it’s a lava landfill of your insecurities, your smothered dreams, and your most cringe-worthy fears.

How do you spot your shadow? With triggers and projections. You begin with a brutal question: What if it’s not them? What if it’s you? Because the world is not full of monsters. It’s full of mirrors. The math of projection – it’s always you vs you. And once you learn to read them, you don’t just break the illusion. You break free.

Make a list of the things that piss you off about other people. Write them down — greed, arrogance, laziness, dishonesty. Then, next to each one, write, ‘How does this live in me?’ Where is this in me? Hate selfish people? Where have you been self-denying, self-sacrificing, and quietly hating those who take? Hate arrogant people? Where have you hidden your own ambition? Where have you traded honesty for politeness? Where had I let myself be devalued? Where had I betrayed the part of me that was awesome? And deserved to be acknowledged as awesome. (Believe me, I still struggle with this – A LOT)

Because here’s the truth: the shadows you deny don’t disappear. They fester. They become addictions, obsessions, toxic relationships. They turn your life into a feedback loop of shame and regret. Until you turn around, look them dead in the eye, and say, ‘I see you.’ I know where you live, I know when you were born and who fed you all along. It was me.

And when you do, you learn that in you is still so much to learn about yourself. So much to honour and to accept, and love, eventually.

Welcome to the real work. The monster in the mirror is not your enemy. It’s your shadow, and it’s dying for your love. Give it that. Or the lambs will keep screaming. 😉

Neen, out.

PS Pod 5 will deal with Masks: The Emperors New Lies

Pod 3: Trigger-nometry — Mapping the Shitstorm

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You were somewhere else. Sarcasm flew out of your mouth. You screamed the harsh words. You shut your partner out. You shut yourself down. You disappeared into silence, or you lit the whole room on fire. And then you told yourself some lie about why (“Y”).

But let’s be honest. It was bullshit.  It happens more than you care to admit. And then when you gaze across your life, you see the damage.   That was activation. That was your nervous system lighting up like a Christmas tree at 3 a.m., screaming a story it memorized before you even had words for it.

This is what we call Trigger-nometry. The sacred, sweaty math of reactivity. It’s not woo. It’s not vibes. It’s a war map. It’s trauma trigonometry. Let’s solve for Y (Why?)

The Formula: T = P + R + S. Your trigger is a sum. A precise equation running the background programming the ‘sum’ of your reactions and your body.

  • P = the Past (the wound that never closed)
  • R = the Response (your chosen panic style: fawn, fight, flight, freeze)
  • S = the Story (the meaning you assign to the moment)

Your boss calls a surprise meeting. Past says: “You’re about to be ambushed.”
Response: Freeze. Fight. Numb. Story: “I must have messed up. I’m in trouble. I am going to get fired.” Your body didn’t react to your boss. It reacted to your pattern.

The trigger wasn’t about now. It was a flare sent up by a younger you who remembers everything.

Here’s an example: The Text That Took Too Long. Let’s get personal. This used to be my narrative in my friendships and early relationships. You send a text. Minutes pass. No reply. It’s been read. The person goes offline. You feel a tightening in your chest. A wave of hot shame behind your ribs. A quiet little voice whispers: “They’re ignoring me. I said too much. I’m too much.” Your brain tells you it’s no big deal. They’re probably driving. But your nervous system doesn’t care.

Your trigger math looks like this:

  • P (What happened in the past) = You were ignored as a kid. Maybe more than once. You were told to go to your room when you were “too much”.
  • R (Your learned response — what response best succeeded in the past) = Fawn. Apologize. Or spiral. Or go cold.
  • S (The story you are telling yourself) = “I am always too much. I should’ve known better. I misread this – we aren’t friends. And my internal dialogue begins – Why would they want to hang out with you or even talk to you? You are so needy. You are so stupid.”

Actual threat: zero. Emotional math: lethal. Because this isn’t just about a text. It’s about every time silence meant punishment. Every time love got withheld like air. And you learned to hold your breath.

Projection: The Subconscious Slide Projector

You ever hate someone fast? Like instant rage, instant repulsion —
and they haven’t even done anything yet? Someone once told me – if you meet someone and you really dislike them (for no apparent reason) instantly, pay attention: that’s the thing about yourself you refuse to accept. And I couldn’t get it. Everyone I met who I unreasonably did not like – my thoughts were “arrogant wanker.”  But how could that be what I refused to accept about myself? Was I arrogant? I couldn’t see how this could possibly be true. I had to be drunk to say boo to a goose.. Only later did I realise – projections don’t have to be literal. No, I wasn’t an arrogant wanker – but there was the clue to what was an issue- I was jealous as fuck about anyone who has confidence, because I desire that. I want it so much. To feel like I can own my space because I never have. To feel like I can have a voice, which deserves to be heard.
That’s projection. That’s your shadow slapping their name tag on one of your own disowned traits. You’re not just annoyed. We will get more into Projection and how to spot it in Pod 4.

Emotional Geometry: Trace the Angles

Let’s get surgical. You’re in the car park crying and you don’t know why?
Cool. Trace it like a forensic pathologist.

This is your five-step Trigger Blueprint:

  1. Sensory Input — what set you off.
  2. Body Alarm — what physical alert went off.
  3. Emotional Flashback — what it reminds you of.
  4. Protective Response — what you did to survive.
  5. Meaning-Making — what story filled the silence.

Map it. This isn’t a healing crystal. It’s a crime scene. Get your gloves on and start collecting data. There’s no cheat sheet to healing. No three-day challenge to ‘trigger-proof’ your soul. Healing is slow math. It’s unsexy. It’s work. It’s repetition. Sometimes it looks like rage-writing and ripping the page out. Sometimes it’s texting “I need a minute” instead of vanishing for three days. Sometimes it’s recognizing the moment you almost spiralled — and choosing not to. I once said to a friend of mine – You know what’s awful really. When you train for a marathon, it’s a long hard slog. Day in, day out training – even in shitty weather when you rather wouldn’t. But in the end, you cross the line and post a photo, and you get hundreds of Facebook likes etc. And there’s external validation. It’s really not the same with healing. It’s lonely and so personal. When you break a pattern, it’s a bigger win than finishing a marathon. And there will be no applause, no “likes,” no amazement at the feat of accomplishment. But that moment? It will change the trajectory of every decision you make. That’s mastery. That’s revolution. That’s the boring, beautiful backbone of healing.

You don’t need to be less triggered. You need to be less unconscious. You don’t need to explain yourself to strangers. You need to understand your own fucking math. Because here’s the truth about triggers: They are precise. Surgical. Exact. They don’t stab you randomly.
They know where your wound is. So, it’s time to meet them with equal clarity. Map the system. Interrupt the pattern.
And for the love of your own future — stop solving for ghosts. You already have the numbers. Now, do the math.

Neen, out.

PS Pod 4 will be Projection – The Optical Illusion of the Psyche

Pod # 2 Triggers – time travellers with dirty boots.

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Pod # 2 Triggers are time travellers with dirty boots.

You ever had your whole world go sideways over a sentence? Not someone screaming at you? Not a slap. Just, a tone. Some perceived slight. A text that took too long? Some helpful advice from a friend that touched something that felt like a branding iron against your soul.
It’s second nature now. Hard to even spot. We live in automatic.  

Whatever it was, it has you in a chokehold — and boom! You are triggered.

A trigger is a time traveller. It’s an old part of you showing up in dirty boots, stomping mud across the clean floors of your life. And you’ve got a battlefield full of them — planted by moments you didn’t know how to survive clean. Conversations you never got to finish. Tears you never got to cry. Shame you learned to swallow like battery acid. It’s something that didn’t heal the first time. Something you lived through – survived – but couldn’t make sense of.

And your body. It remembers. All of it.

So here you are, years later, being loud, getting drunk, finding a way to go numb. Rejecting someone who hit the exact same nerve you learned to guard with your life. Not because you’re crazy. Or have a temper. Or are a drama queen. Not because you are damaged, but because your system is doing exactly what it was trained to do: survive.

Survival doesn’t care if it ruins dinner. Or makes you cry in the office where you have curated your unbreakable facade. It also doesn’t care if it keeps replaying the mind movie of that one night you stopped being a kid. Your triggers are the ghosts in the machine — and they don’t just haunt — they hijack.

You think you’re annoyed that your partner didn’t listen. You think you’re just irritated by a text. You think you’re just snapping because you’re tired.

Behind that is the breadcrumb. Underneath that is the black box from the crash you never got to walk away from. The rules of old wars you thought you left behind.

Triggers aren’t proof that you are broken.
They’re muddy, weather-beaten markers, pointing straight to the places you abandoned just to survive.They are the wounded younger version of you, screaming from the blueprint of the past — the bruises that never got kissed better.

And if you’re willing to go there — if you’re brave enough to listen without fixing, numbing, or spiritual bypassing your way out of the hard parts — they’ll keep leading you back to where the hurt still lives.

Every dirty boot print leaves behind an invitation — not to armour up harder, not to beat yourself up or pretend you’re fine. The world isn’t out to hurt you. Triggers aren’t the enemy. They are the invitation.

Pause.
Breathe.
And ask yourself:

What am I trying to protect? What lie did I have to believe to survive back then — and am I still building my life around it? What am I feeling right now? Where have I felt this before? What story am I telling myself about what just happened?

That’s the work.  Not the crystals. Not the sage. Not the “good vibes only” bullshit. We don’t do “live laugh love” posters here. We hang mirrors and we make you look.

So, if you spiralled today and don’t know why, if you over-explained, over-apologized, or burned it all down and are sitting in the smoke, come closer. You’re not broken. You’re still carrying stories that never got an ending. Your pain is not a prison — it’s your compass.

Welcome, you’ve made it to the reckoning.

Neen, out

PS: Next time we dive into – “Trigger-nometry”: finding the angles where your past still breaks into your present – the broken math of old wounds still trying to solve for safety.

Pod #1 Where (and why) this blog is alive.

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“Because we all have wings, but some of us don’t know why” – michael hutchence






Pod #1: The Day You Learned to Lie – to Yourself
Welcome to the crack where the light gets in.





There wasn’t a ceremony. No parade. The first time you lied to yourself, it was quiet.
Like swallowing a needle and calling it breakfast. It didn’t sound like betrayal, but it was. It sounded like: “I’m okay.” You weren’t. But that’s the trick, isn’t it? The most dangerous lies are the ones you say with a smile. Like swallowing your voice and calling it breakfast.





Back then—maybe you were five, maybe fifteen—you learned that love had rules. Shifting ones. Connection came with conditions. That your safety depended on your softness, your tone, your timing. You became fluent in facial expressions that didn’t belong to you. You read the weather in other people’s moods, not clouds. And so, you didn’t fight. Didn’t run. Didn’t freeze. You fawned.





That’s the fourth trauma response they don’t write on the poster in the therapist’s office. The one that says: Maybe if I’m useful enough, sweet enough, small enough—you won’t hurt me. You might even love me.





You didn’t call it survival. You called it being “a good kid.” “Easy. ”No trouble.”





And goddammit, weren’t you good at it? You could read a room like it was written in subtitles. You knew how to turn yourself into a bandage for other people’s bruises. you turned yourself into background noise. You let the punches land, proverbial and otherwise. Your yes became automatic. Your smile? Performance art. Your needs? You learned early they weren’t welcome. You didn’t just believe the lie—you built a life around it. Fast-forward to your 30’s, 40’s or maybe just now.





Now you’re the fixer. The holder. The default emergency contact for everyone else’s meltdown. People say you’re strong. Dependable. But no one asks when you last ate. Or screamed. Or said “no” without guilt hitching a ride in your throat.





You’re the peacekeeper. The vibe manager. The emotional janitor with a dustpan full of everyone else’s chaos. And then… one day, everything inside you starts rattling.
You look around at your life—you should-be-fine life—and all you can think is:





What the actual fuck is this? Why am I exhausted from a life I built to be liveable?





Something breaks. Or maybe it un-breaks. You find yourself in a quiet room—with a therapist, or by candlelight in the bath, or just your own reflection you haven’t faced in too long—and the truth claws its way up.





A whisper.





“I lied.”





I lied when I said I was fine. I lied when I said it didn’t matter. I lied when I said I didn’t need anything. I lied when I said I could hold it all.





And just like that, the dam breaks. For me, it changed everything. 





This pod? This blog? This whatever-the-fuck-you-call-it? For now, it’s pretty much me exploring how I made it through. It’s a little woo-woo. It’s a little random.
And it’s a little bit of how you can figure it all out too.  It’s not about healing. I hate that word. It’s not about floating off on some incense-scented cloud whispering affirmations. It’s me sharing so that maybe I can help with digging your existence out from under everyone else’s expectations. It’s me giving you permission to give the middle finger to the shame you have carried for wanting to be you.  It’s about remembering who you were before you started shapeshifting to survive. Before you confused safety with self-abandonment. It’s about becoming who you were before the world taught you that your authenticity was a liability. Before you started trading truth for approval.





It’s about calling your soul back from the places you abandoned it— the rooms where you stayed too long, the silence you swallowed to keep the peace, the versions of yourself you carved to be lovable. Acceptable.





It’s about tuning back into your own damn frequency after a lifetime of static.





It’s about asking the hard questions: Why do I do this? Why does it keep happening?
Who planted this story in me? And why the fuck am I still living like its gospel?





So, if today is the day that whisper inside you says enough—





Welcome. You’ve made it to the dark side.
We have coffee. And fire. And truth. And it’s going to be okay -Maybe even beautiful. Not because it’s easy. But because, for the first time, you’re not lying to yourself.





You’re not broken. You’re just arriving at the part where your truth gets loud.





Neen, out. (Homework done, C)





PS: Next time, I will be getting into triggers and how they are the time travellers with dirty boots.