Tag Archives: therapy

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 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 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