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June 13 - August 11, 2025
Understanding why I do the things I do is important to me because the things I do affect the people I love. So I don’t want to live on autopilot. I want to choose carefully which patterns to pass on.
As soon as we’re born, we enter into cultural and familial systems that say: You cannot trust your appetite. You cannot trust your desire. You cannot trust yourself. Since you cannot trust yourself, here’s a list of rules for you to follow instead. So we lost vital parts of ourselves. We had to lose those parts of ourselves to survive in families, institutions, and societies that denied us access to our history, power, and innate wisdom. We’ve been losing and losing and losing parts of ourselves for our entire lives. So of course we are not fully present now. Of course we are not able to be
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Now I’m pushing the boundaries I’ve set for myself so that I can settle into a new acceptance of who I am. It’s almost like I’m stuck in a flowerpot and I’m expanding while it’s breaking. It’s breaking.
I’m like this because I carry the patterns of my family of origin.
The moment we’re born, we look up at our caretakers. We notice—before we even have language—what makes them smile and come close, what makes them frown and turn away. We notice—and we keep noticing—and then we adapt to survive.
We magnify the parts of ourselves that earn us love and protection, and we hide what doesn’t. We know instinctively that we need our caretakers to survive—so we become what we believe they want us to be. And then we grow up and one day we look in the mirror and wonder: Why am I still hiding so much of myself? Have I ever even met my real self?
I became more attuned to others’ emotions than my own. In my family, there was one person whose emotional fluctuations dictated everyone’s experience. This dynamic teaches a child to be highly attuned and vigilant to others’ emotions to keep the peace. I did that my entire life and only recently learned that it’s an actual thing. It’s called emotional monitoring, and it involves living your life as a fixer in hyperactive awareness of everyone else’s experience. You’re so busy keeping everyone comfortable that you completely lose any boundary between everybody else’s experience of a situation
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Our attachment style is formed in early childhood—before we are two years old!—and follows us into adulthood.
If I have a secure attachment style, my caregivers were attuned to my emotional and physical needs and responded with care. They encouraged me to explore the world and gave me room to grow. Their words and actions said: You are worthy. You are safe. You matter. Even if I didn’t form a secure attachment in childhood, I can have secure attachment later in life by cultivating healthy and trusting relationships.
My healing involves learning to soothe myself, affirm my worth, and give myself the affirmation I am craving so that my relationships feel more reciprocal and less frantic.
Attraction in adulthood is an activation of our earliest attachment patterns. That’s all attraction is. Our body is saying: I know how to be the corresponding puzzle piece to this person.
We learn to play characters to restore status quo to the family dynamic. But playing our roles comes at a cost. We aren’t able to develop into our full, real selves. Now I’m waking up and realizing that my family role isn’t my actual personality; it’s just the script I was given.
What if I’m not broken at all? What if I never was? How would I live differently? How would my life story change if I adjusted my understanding of the main character?
Lost Child/Easy One I was easygoing in an attempt to reduce the stress on the grown-ups. I went with the flow and withdrew to avoid being a burden. But all I wanted was to be seen and loved. My gifts include my flexibility, adaptability, and independence. But I have a hard time letting myself be seen or asking for support. Now, my healing work is to express my needs and take up space.
if you were the invisible one who was never seen and so you think you’re not worthy of being seen;
There was a study done in the Netherlands which found that the DNA in descendants of famine survivors reflected the trauma of famine even though that trauma never even happened to them. They inherited the trauma from their ancestors; it lived in them through their DNA expression. Their body remembered something they never experienced.
Trauma doesn’t change the genes; it changes the expression of the genes, which some people like to call the memory. The genes have memory. But what we find in our clinical work is that we don’t only inherit the anxiety or biological response to the trauma; our minds also know something about the actual content of the trauma.
Every single person has some element of trauma that is generational. And the pain of generational trauma will have some form of rage. That’s righteous rage. It’s rage that has to be honored.
You’re the edge of your lineage, and there’s something for you to attend to. There’s something for you to transform.
Where does pain come from? When you ask that question and start to find answers, you realize that the complexity of the various violences we experience with our mothers or otherwise come from them being hurt by systems that began way before they were even born. They were up against so much. It doesn’t erase the harm that we’ve experienced, but it throws it into context and amplifies them as people who tried their best.
When we think about PTSD, we’re talking about people who are displaced in memory. They are acting as if the danger is around the corner, even when they’re in relative safety.
Trauma is not conscious. It’s your body saying: This particular thing that happened is too much, too fast, too soon, or too long without enough repair. When trauma activates, your sense of self in the world drifts and gets stuck.
We know that from age eight to twelve we begin to split—we hide our real self, and we become something else to present to the world.
Is the self a fixed, understandable entity? Probably not. I feel more like a community than a singular self. I feel like I’m made up of many competing, conflicting parts that developed in response to the trauma and magic of living. As Whitman said, we each contain multitudes. Glennon
they get stuck at the age of that trauma—frozen at that scene and terrified. We don’t want to feel that pain all the time, so we lock these parts of ourselves away. We exile them to inner basements. And we do that without realizing that we’re actually distancing ourselves from our most precious qualities.
What we often find is that as people gain access to their exiled parts, they want to start to paint, they want to start to play. They get access to these things that they had locked away. Richard Schwartz
Our parts develop to protect us. They try to keep us from feeling too much—to keep us a little dissociated from our bodies.
Our parts started to protect us when we were just children; they think we are still children, and they protect us the way they did back then.
when we try to drown out any part of ourselves, it just gets stronger, defending itself; it flails around wildly, taking over until it can get our attention.
“I trust that you are trying to help. What are you trying to protect? What are you trying to say?”
There are certain voices inside my head that will never quiet down until they first feel fully heard, acknowledged, and understood. I find myself wondering: What is this part’s problem? Why on earth is it telling me not to eat? Why? Why? Why? Turn it down, turn it down, turn it down. No. Turn it all the way up. It needs to be heard.
We have these parts that have worked so hard for so long and have done a really good job helping us survive. They just have old information. They just don’t know that we’re safe now and all the rules are different. They just need an update.
I created a little avatar, a little fighter in the video game of life who wears a motorcycle jacket and holds a microphone to go out into the world in front of me. It’s a dissociative protection of the real me, my little self, and it’s actually very sweet. Thinking about taking care of myself like that, especially at a young age and also still now, I like thinking that there’s someone saying: “I got you. You hang out back there, I got this one.” And then that high-haired stand-up comic goes out into the world and takes care of my more tender self. Cameron Esposito
How old were you when you looked around and thought: I have to take control of this. Elementary school? You were just a little kid, and you took on the responsibility, probably for your family, for the rest of the world, because you wanted the best for everyone. So you put your own happiness into the furnace. And you were just a little kid. So how do you feel toward this little one who was trying to help their parents be happy, help keep the world on its axis? How do you feel toward that person now? Martha Beck
When we go out to eat, I look at the menu and I’m like: Okay, so here are my options. I order from the menu. Then the waiter turns to Abby, and she’s like “Can you please do that but add that, and then can you take away that?” Then she gets her dish, and it’s always so much better than mine. Every time I secretly feel jealous because it’s like she’s broken the rules and been rewarded for it. I thought we were supposed to stay on the menu to be polite. That is how women feel when another woman goes off the menu and she seems to have this delicious, creative life in front of her. We look at her,
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If you can’t tell the truth directly, it comes out sideways—which
The need to belong—to be safe and protected by our people—is primal. Belonging kept us tucked safely inside the herd. The last thing we wanted was to stand out and get picked off.
real belonging—which requires withstanding the tension of surrendering to community while maintaining individuality—we
If you have to trade your integrity and abandon yourself for belonging, it’s not belonging.
It’s like life is the sinking Titanic and everybody’s scrambling to stay at the tippy top, to stay in our minds and our dogmas because we know if we let go of these structures, we’ll sink, too—and land in our bodies. Our bodies are where all of our memories, trauma, wildness, and messiness are. But our bodies are also where healing is.
It’s like we’re sitting on the couch with a puzzle in front of us and we’re hunched over and our brows are furrowed and we’re trying, trying to solve it. We have to stop trying. We have to abandon the puzzle in front of us and sit there on the couch empty-handed and still. This feels panicky and terrifying at first, because with our hands and minds no longer busy, all we’re left with is who we are and what we have to heal from.
We finally learn that our problem was never that we couldn’t solve the puzzle of life; the problem was that life was never a puzzle at all. Life is a dance. There is no solving life, there is just letting ourselves feel and move to the music.
We have such an insatiable craving to be seen and understood, but it’s impossible—we don’t have language to translate the fullness of who we are.
We have to figure out what conditions have paved over the fertile ground that allows that thing that is naturally in us to sprout, to grow. And it’s not that we were an acorn and then we fell on some concrete and now we’re never going to grow. It’s not that. Sonya: It’s that we were already a growing plant and then somebody was like “You’d be better as a parking lot.” And then enough people said, “You’d be better as a parking lot.” And we were like: You know what? Maybe they’re right. Maybe whatever it was that I thought I was, maybe that’s a lie. Maybe that’s not true at all.
I’m not crazy or sane. I’m not good or bad. I have all of these parts inside me. I am more of a community than an individual. I have a part who wants to control, a part who wants to let go, a part who wants to hide, a part who wants to be seen. And then I have a capital-S Self, who is my wisest, original intelligence. Not an alter ego, but a consciousness I can always tap into. The real me. Now when I’m making a decision or choosing a reaction, I feel like I’m sitting at a long conference table with all of my sweet little frantic parts and they are all trying to lead—trying to get control,
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This Self in you has wonderful qualities. I call those qualities the Eight C’s: Calm Curiosity Compassion Connectedness Confidence Creativity Courage Clarity It turns out that virtually every spiritual tradition knows about this Self, whereas almost no other psychologies do. It’s inherent in you. You always possess all of these qualities, and you can always tap into them. Richard Schwartz
If you are noticing a tree, you know you’re not the tree. If you are noticing a thought, you know you’re not the thought. The noticer is your soul, your spirit, your consciousness. You can’t be the subject and the object at the same time.
At my center, there’s a place where safety lives. There’s a place inside of me that can trust my belonging. There is a place inside of me that is wise, where all the lessons of my life have been learned. I can live from that place. I can settle into that place. Prentis Hemphill
So God’s like: I’m going to play this incredible game of hide-and-seek with myself. I’m going to see if I can hide myself so thoroughly from myself that I forget that I am myself. And where better to do it than in the mind of a human being, which is the most chaotic arcade game of consciousness?
Our daughter just had her seventeenth birthday, and she said, “I can’t believe I’m never going to be sixteen again.” I said, “Honey, you’re going to be sixteen for the rest of your life. You don’t just become seventeen and let go of all the other yous. Now you get to be seventeen and sixteen and fifteen and fourteen and thirteen.”
