The Journey of the Inner Landscape (Story)

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I was about 29 years old when I started my “healing journey”. I hoped it would fix whatever was broken in my spirit that kept me from connecting in my life. 

It was 5 years later when it finally clicked for me that this was a false path.

To explain why, I have to tell you the story. 

It’s no secret that I had a big “mental breakdown” aka “spiritual awakening” in 2017.

Prior to that, my lifestyle largely consisted of things like:

• “fucking & fighting” with romantic partners
• having meltdowns
• partying
• and projecting my shit everywhere in the party scene and all over my relationships.

Broke, reactive, anxious, and triggered, with little to no direction in life, I was drowning in my trauma and it was on display for anyone who was paying attention to see.

In 2017 I finally descended to rock bottom where I had no choice but to take a good hard look in the mirror.

From there I could do one of two things. I could change my life, or give it up altogether. Literally.

Luckily I rose to the occasion of living, and I was determined to leave the “Toxic” version of me, and the life she lived, behind.

What a lot of people don’t know is what happened next. 

After the breakdown I went through a tremendous growth phase that lasted the next 3 years. A proper glow up, if you will.

All that energy I put into my “toxic season” I now put into, you got it…

Growing. Becoming a better person. And prioritizing my mental & physical health along the way.

Turns out, I really can do anything I put my mind to.

Now my life consisted of things like:

• Building and leading businesses with an A-team network by my side
• Controlling my emotions and making rational, healthy decisions
• Stepping outside of my comfort zone and facing my fears
• Making more money than I'd ever made
• Cultivating not one but two solid friend groups outside of the party scene
• Working out & eating healthier
• Staying sober
• Being a generally nicer and more grounded person
• And doing all the “right” things.

Needless to say, by the end of 2019 everyone around me was proud of me. More importantly, I was proud of myself for the first time in a long time.

I was no longer the Toxic version of me.

The growth was evident. I was a “better person” now. 

This new version of me was refreshingly unfamiliar.

I was Competent. Strong. Grounded & easy going. Disciplined. Fair. Nice. And Fun.

This was all true. But a lie by omission is still a lie. Especially when we’re doing it to ourselves. And I felt the lie following me around daily. Hiding under the blanket of my new cover life, I was terrified to look.

See, I’d gotten control of my old emotions. The fear, anger, shame, and insecurities. 

But they didn’t disappear. They were simply my enemies now. 

I was determined to put them out of my mind and not let them get the best of me.

My daily job was to overcome them. So I would work on my “mindset”, which meant talking myself out of believing those old shame stories, not giving them too much attention, and most importantly: proving them wrong. 

Naturally I stayed very busy, hyper-productive and hyper-avoidant, all in an effort to avoid that old, toxic version of myself that was drowning in those feelings.

I saw this old version of me that I was running from as unsafe, immature, chaotic, unattractive, and downright unlovable.  

I felt disgusted and ashamed of ever having been that. I felt afraid to ever return to it. And I didn’t have any kind words about it.

So all this time I spent growing, fixing, building, and bettering myself to get away from it seemed like the right idea. And this idea was reinforced across the board by the external validation I was getting. 

You’re thriving now. You’re living a good life. You’ve grown so much.

I'm so proud of you. 

I followed the same societal script I think most of us do. The script we hand to each other and ourselves.

And the script reads: If you want to love yourself, be more lovable.

I made this script look really good. I made it look true. 

Until I didn’t. 

In the beginning of 2020 the new version of me started to crack like a mask, and the “demons” I was running from started to seep through.

These demons showed up, largely, as anxiety at the time.

The anxiety was always there, keeping me alert to what I was running from so I could stay ahead of it. But I noticed that the more I “grew”, the more my anxiety grew right along with me. 2019 was huge for me in personal and financial growth, so naturally, my anxiety was booming as well when we entered 2020.

My inner monologue gave the anxiety a voice, and it started telling me things I didn’t want to hear about the choices I was making for my life.

Telling me “this wasn’t it”.

Telling me “don’t get too comfortable, this won’t last”

Pointing out to me that I didn’t feel connected to the life I was building for myself. I didn’t feel fulfilled.

I got this sense that I was “going to fail” and it was all going to come tumbling down if I kept it up.

I got the sense I was living a lie. “Who do you think you are?”

By the end of 2020 I knew I had to make this anxiety go away before it caused me some serious self-sabotage, so I started looking into how to do that.

Childhood Trauma? Me? 

Long story short, the rabbit hole, which included professional articles and studies, led me to suspicions that the anxiety was something more. 

Complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I learned that this type of PTSD is due to prolonged suffering of abuse and neglect, most often in childhood.

Having my doubts, I brushed it off at first.

So much about my past had been normalized for me. And I experienced so many privileges growing up. We lived on 3 acres with an in-ground pool in South Carolina when I was a small child. That home was paradise. 

When I was 9, we moved to Maryland. We went through a poverty season, living in an apartment complex where my mom fought to have the leasing office move us to a unit that didn’t have roaches. But within a couple years my parents had saved enough money to afford a down-payment on a house. This house was in a “safe” middle class neighborhood where we got 4 bedrooms and a yard again.

I experienced some levels of abuse on paper in the home, sure. I got beat when I didn’t listen, and wasn’t allowed to talk back. It was unwise to cry in my home or they’d “give me something to cry about”. My Dad and I had a very difficult relationship. His temper was unpredictable on a good day. 

But I saw a lot of other kids living similar experiences and expressing similar struggles at home. And a lot of us seemed to turn out alright. Myself included, since I’d gotten through my “toxic” era. 

So, I didn't have it that bad, did I? PTSD is for war veterans, I thought. I hadn’t been through anything like that.

So like I said, thinking this diagnosis was a little dramatic for me, I brushed it off at first.

But no matter how many doubts I piled on, the thought kept creeping up on me for a few months. 

While one part of me thought it was dramatic, another part of me couldn’t resist the notion that something about this idea just felt… true. 

Figuring it couldn’t hurt, my resolution was to look into it with a professional and just see. So I scheduled an appointment with a therapist for the first time in my life. 

In February of 2021, I started trauma therapy. 

A Different Kind of Therapy

For those of you who’ve never been in trauma therapy, it is not that place where you show up to chit chat about life every week and have your therapist head-nod everything you’re telling yourself. 

Trauma therapy is where you square up and prepare to get your ass beat by your insides. 

But I didn’t know this, and I’m pretty sure my therapist knew that I didn’t know this. So she gently guided me down a path I didn’t realize I needed.

See, I thought she’d tell me how to get over my anxiety and give me some tools to work it out of my system. 

I thought we’d go back into the old traumatic memories, do “EMDR” (this weird tappy thing that helps you “reprocess” traumatic events), and it would clear up my anxiety like magic. That’s how people talk about it, yeah?

I thought within a few months I’d be able to get on with my life, exactly as it was without the anxiety and demons following me around. Then, finally, I’d feel connected and truly happy with the life I’d built for myself.

Yeah, that’s not at all what happened.

The Diagnosis

It turns out I did get a C-PTSD diagnosis with possible generalized anxiety, which is what qualified me for EMDR to begin with. 

What surprised me was the biggest factor of my trauma diagnosis. It was something I didn't realize at the time would be hugely important: 

The emotional abuse & neglect I experienced in childhood. 

This wasn’t even on my radar. I barely knew what that meant. 

But it turns out I'd been made, my entire life, to suppress and repress my own emotions for the sake of pleasing others, belonging, and surviving.

This often showed up in the smallest, seemingly most inconsequential ways that I didn’t even count as traumatic at first.

Like not being allowed to “talk back” (ask questions, state needs, talk about how I feel). 

And other harsher forms of being ignored, dismissed, harshly criticized, and beaten for expressing feelings I didn’t know what to do with.

When you’re punished for expressing and trusting your feelings and your inner knowing as a child, the caregivers don’t become the enemy to you. You need them. And if they say they love you and this is love, you trust them. 

So instead, your own feelings, your own sense of knowing, and your sense of self trust become the enemies. And we handle those enemies by learning to repress and suppress them.

Because this was so normalized for me, I was repeating the pattern of emotional abuse on myself by continuing to run from (suppress and repress) my emotions now. 

It took me much longer to really figure this out, and you’ll that see my journey. But this information feels important to me so I wanted to say it up front.

Studies are now showing that emotional neglect and abuse is the most impactful kind of prolonged abuse there is. 

Which can be difficult to grasp, but like I said, as you dig further into this story I think you’ll see why this is true.

We can’t really build a life we feel good about without understanding how it is we feel to begin with.

The Work

No matter what people said about embracing & feeling your feelings, when starting trauma therapy, I genuinely wanted MY hard feelings I was running from gone.

They were my enemy and, as far as I was concerned, they were blocking my ability to really live my life.

So when my therapist would mention her love for feelings I had a “to each their own but you’re the expert” kind of attitude about it.

But…

I pride myself on at least trying to be coachable and open-minded. Plus, I really was curious. I wanted to understand all of this trauma stuff and how I got here. Psychology was a big special interest for me and I found this all to be very intriguing.

Simply put, my assignment was to do the hardest thing yet...

Stop running from the anxiety. The shame. The pain. And the past.

It was time to turn around and face it.

So, braving up, I followed instructions to the best of my ability.

The First Step Was Emotional Literacy:

In the beginning I mainly associated my emotions with sadness, happiness, and anger. This is true for most people. But it turns out our feelings are a lot more nuanced than that. 

So first I learned to name and understand my feelings. 

I started having interesting realizations. Like how resentful felt different than judgmental. These words also started to mean something different to me. 

This was true for all of the feelings. Feeling happy is different than feeling engaged. Feeling sad is different than feeling hurt. And so on. 

We have a lot of feelings, and our feelings inform us of our needs. They tell us which needs are being met, and which ones are going painfully unmet. 

The picture below has been saved to my favorites on my phone ever since. 

I was learning to name and understand all of these words, and this felt important and useful for my logical mind. It helped me think through how I was feeling, start communicating it, and start doing something about it.

Feeling The Feelings Was Next:

Through EMDR (the weird tappy thing) I also learned to feel these emotions in my body instead of repressing and suppressing them.

I started to realize that a LOT of the big emotions I was running from were very, very old. They’d been pent up in my body for decades because I never got a chance to express them. This includes the big shame, anxiety, heartbreak, terror, grief, and other pain. Many of which I forgot I even experienced as a child. 

The brain and body have a tendency to block out feelings we aren’t prepared to handle. 

The more prepared I became, the safer my body and mind felt to open up to me and let me deal with them.

We did EMDR to process those old feelings and get them out of my body. It really does work, it can just be a lot more painful than people let on. Especially for those of us with complex trauma.

Still it was definitely worth it. With the old emotions out of my body, this created space for me to focus on feelings that were showing up in real time, today. So I could deal with them directly.

This was far from as simple as it sounds, though.

Before these old emotions could be gone, they had to be felt. In full. 

Suddenly I was facing my shame. My pain. My past. 

I was feeling the things that had happened to me while also grieving the things that should've happened for me. Worse yet, I was feeling the things I’d done and was continuing to do as I repeated my patterns. 

At the height of this my therapist kept with her script of embracing emotions. And I kept with my question of “Girl. Whoooo are you talking to? You don’t see me over here fighting for my life!?”

Try as I might to embrace them, I still, ultimately, wanted these feelings gone. They were just too damn painful.

And this makes sense. Pain can alert us that a bone is broken. When the pain is gone, we take this to mean the bone is healed. So wanting the pain gone makes sense. 

Emotional pain at the magnitude of trauma tells us something is broken in our spirit. That we need to heal it.

And what we think that means is “fix” and “improve” the bad feelings. 

All different words we say in place of the word we really mean: “disappear”.

I wanted nothing to do with this pain. I wanted these parts of me to be gone.

But they didn’t leave.

And every time they didn’t go away, I’d go back to my therapist for a new tool or some new insight to make them go away.

She walked the tricky line of saying yes to helping me cope while also redirecting me to a truth that hadn’t set in just yet.

The pain is here because the bone is broken. You don’t fix the pain. The pain is serving you.  Informing you.

Instead, you reconnect the bone. 

But I had no idea how this worked with emotional pain. Not yet, anyway.

As I continued to resolve my past pain, all of that pain, and my current pain was at the surface. No matter what I did, I couldn’t escape it. 

Suddenly, all of that strength, groundedness and perseverance I showed in my glow up season started to unravel.

The life I'd felt so proud of building started to feel really, really heavy and misaligned in ways I couldn’t explain.

I started feeling massive internal friction in different areas of my life even if nothing had changed about them externally. 

On top of all of this, I had a really hard time distinguishing current pain from past pain. 

“Am I just triggered and overreacting, or is this really not okay with me?” is a question I began asking myself damn near once a week.

But no matter how much I tried to rationalize it as a trigger, these areas of my life just didn’t feel aligned anymore. And I started letting them go.

First with my business. My hobbies and interests. My routine and lifestyle. Everything started to feel different. Hard. Heavy. Misaligned. They didn’t fit and I had this now irrepressible urge to change them.  

All of these changes were different levels of scary and difficult. It was all exhausting. But they all felt necessary, and alleviated the tensions in the end. 

Then, finally, some of my closest friendships came into the spotlight for me. 

And I’m talking about chosen-family, 10 years+ sisterhood, lean-on-each-other-for-everything kind of friendships. 

This part was painful. Terrifying. And really, really hard.

It came about because with everything going on with me internally, I stopped pretending to be grounded when I wasn't. I stopped being the "let it go" person. I stopped being easy. 

I just couldn’t repress and suppress it anymore. 

Still, I was a much healthier communicator now and had grown a lot in my relational skills. Using that, I started expressing my feelings more. I let my vulnerability show.

In a nutshell, I started to become more emotionally available.

To me, emotional availability means being more in touch with how you feel, being able to share that with the people close to you, and being able to receive their emotions in return.

Our emotional availability impacts all of our relationships, romantic and otherwise.

My friends rode with me the best they could. Every single one of them. But that doesn’t change what I started to notice.

As I was becoming more emotionally available and expressive, some of my friends were becoming more defensive, reactive, deflective, dismissive, distant, or sometimes downright cruel in my direction. 

This especially happened when I would voice things they did that bothered me or ask for what I needed. 

The people who I’d found so much safety in suddenly were not safe for me anymore.

I felt attacked and rejected. Blindsided. Confused about who I could trust, including myself. 

Because to be honest, as much as I’m trying to explain this in a way that makes sense, it felt chaotic at the time. None of it was making sense to me.

A part of me wondered if I was regressing back into the old, dramatic, unlovable me that couldn’t be trusted. Like “maybe that’s why they were treating me this way?”

A part of me even lowkey wanted this to be right. Then I’d at least be in control so I could just fix this myself. Take accountability, shut up, get my shit together, stop causing trouble, and fit in again.

And that right there - that point of second-guessing myself and looking for reasons to abandon myself - is exactly where I encountered my second rock bottom.

When I started fighting with my friends I tried to reflect on my actions. 

My intention was to be accountable to my own actions and how I was showing up. I didn't want to unfairly spill all of my triggers on them and make my issues theirs to clean up.

So I did what I was learning to do in therapy. I zoomed out, and observed how I’d handled myself. 

I observed who I’d been. I observed where my feelings were really coming from.

I did not like what I saw.

The Meltdown

First, I saw how I brushed things under the rug to keep the peace in my relationships.

But there's a part of me that heavily values honesty, courage, and integrity. And that part of me felt hot with anger at the sight of me being such a coward. 

Then I saw how I jumped in to “mediate” other peoples’ conflicts, and how this wasn’t just to help them. It was because I couldn’t handle the tension and needed their challenging feelings to go away.

And a different part of me that carries shame around being self-serving, controlling and manipulative felt shocked and horrified at the sight of this.

I saw how I would hastily offer unsolicited advice when people just wanted support. I noticed how a part of me was seeking to feel valued and appreciated by this.

And a different, hyper-independent part of me that wants me to be able to validate myself and not need others felt deep, deep regret and humiliation over this. The angry part was pissed again about the manipulation of it all.

I saw how when I got feedback from my friends about how some of these behaviors felt condescending, controlling, and pushy to them -  I received it as character calls and got defensive. 

And a different part of me that values accountability and being able to receive feedback felt really, really fucking ashamed of this.

I’d entered a classic shame spiral, and it felt as confusing as it reads. :) 

It was like my mind had split into several versions of me. And they all ganged up on the main version of me that I had become over the past few years. 

The version of me I'd built to run from all those demons. But here they were, front and center.

And here I was again, falling apart.

This is Parts Work: Letting It Come Apart

Many of us would admit we’ve been different versions of ourselves throughout life. We go through “villain eras” and "good girl" eras. We go through “toxic eras” and “soft girl eras” just like what I’ve described. 

In each of those eras, we notice major differences in our personalities, values, behaviors, and how we feel. We’re still us, but it’s almost like we’re reinventing ourselves. 

This goes deeper, though. We also naturally talk about different parts of ourselves when we feel torn. 

For example, many of us have expressed something like: “a part of me really wants to say yes and help this person, but another part of me thinks I should set a boundary, but I don’t want to be mean!”

It’s like two parts of our Self are fighting. 

Believe it or not, there’s a healing modality (type of therapy) that leans into this natural way of seeing ourselves. It’s called “Parts Work”.  My therapist also introduced me to this.

Like many people, I already had heard of Inner Child Work, Inner Critic Work, and Shadow Work. These are all minor, more simplified versions of parts work. 

The kind of parts work I picked up, called Internal Family Systems, was more complex. Giving us room to conceptualize literally any internal conflict that comes up as a conflict between two parts of us. 

It doesn’t have to be the inner child. It can be the inner Tiger as far as IFS is concerned. As long as we’re able to identify it, connect with it, and understand why it’s fighting us on something. 

Parts work helps us sort it out. 

I’m not here to sell parts work to you. Every person finds their own path. But I did want to explain that, for the rest of the article, I’m going to be speaking through this kind of lens. 

I’m going to share with you the story of me and my psyche, to illustrate the most critical aspect of the healing journey: how we heal our relationship with ourselves. 

I’m going to be referring to different parts of myself as if they’re whole people, outside of me. And I’m going to share with you how I interact with them.

I’m doing this for two reasons.

For starters, because I really was doing parts work. Which means I really was practicing the things I’m going to tell you, intentionally.

And secondly, because it’s also the easiest way I know to explain the true complexity of what happens in the inner landscape of human beings as we heal. I think most stories about the healing journey miss this piece of information, perhaps for fear of coming off out of touch or “crazy”. 

I’d rather take the risk. 

Without explaining it this way, I’d end up over-simplifying and leaving some important shit out.

So try to follow along, and feel free to read this twice, and leave comments at the bottom of the page if you have any questions. 

Back to the Story: 

So, one part of me was getting singled out by other parts of me, and they did not like what they saw. 

If we simplify this piece of the story, it really just felt like my inner critic was raging and kicking my ass. 

“Who do you think you are? Trying to control everyone around you. Wanting them to love you for it? Playing victim when they don't like it? What are you, a narcissist?”

Effectively putting my character to shame, here I was again. Even the new and improved version of me couldn’t cut it. I still wasn’t good enough, even after all this hard work.

This moment felt so reminiscent of the 2017 breakdown for me. Back then I also looked in the mirror and didn’t like what I saw. It’s what led me to become something different. 

But something changed this time. 

Yes that Inner Critic in me wanted to make this part of me disappear. But I stopped it. And with some support from my therapist and this new practice of parts work, I did something different instead. 

The time had come. This was the moment I finally stopped running and started to face myself.

Instead of continuing the shame spiral, I asked the more critical parts of me to step aside. 

Then, I turned to face the part of me that was getting shamed. I turned to face my self. This version of me I'd become.

Instead of just believing what these other parts were saying or making any hasty judgments, I decided to take my time and get to know this part of me that was being called out, for myself. 

Setting the judgment and fear aside for just a moment, now, I got curious. And I felt a lot more open to self-compassion as I did this.

When I looked at this now beaten and bruised part of me, I didn’t see a part of me I’d call manipulative and narcissistic like my critical parts were a minute ago.

I saw a part of myself I’d call a Compassionate Leader. 

This part of me was a bit of a people-pleaser, and this was definitely something to be mindful of, but there was so much more to its story. 

This part of me had been leading just about every aspect of my life since my 2017 breakdown. It was in charge of the entire glow up. And it turned out, this is a part of me that carries extremely genuine intentions and some really heartwarming qualities.

Looking at the Compassionate Leader in me, I saw a side of myself that really did care about other people. It could see the good in just about anybody, had genuine empathy and compassion, and seldom felt threatened by human beings doing human being shit.

It absolutely loved being a part of something larger than itself. It loves community. A true sense of purpose, and service. It wanted to make a real difference in the lives of the people it came in contact with. This drove a lot of its behavior.

It actually took a "no thanks" really well, and never got upset with people for not following its advice. It just liked to contribute, "in case it's helpful". And was okay with people keeping what worked, and leaving the rest. It was also okay with people saying "no, I'm not looking for advice right now".

Personally, I don’t think that’s pushy or condescending at all. I think it's just excited to help and that's okay.

There genuinely was compassion and a love for showing up there, among other qualities I’d grown to really admire about myself. 

More critical and fearful parts were about to ignore these qualities or write them off as lies, but it turned out, all of these qualities were real. They were true.

The Compassionate Leader in me was truly a Compassionate Leader. And it showed! In my work, in the friendships, and even in my familial relationships. Even my Dad and I were doing better by this point, and the Compassionate Leader played a huge role in changing that dynamic.

This part of me had done a lot of good, and it did so with the best of intentions.

I saw all of this very clearly. AND, I saw the issue at hand.

The issue is that it also happened to pick up some faulty societal scripts and training along the way.

See, as good and eager as this Compassionate Leader was to care for others, it didn’t know what it meant to take care of Self in an honest way at the same time.

Especially emotionally.

And this is when the “emotional neglect in childhood” thing started to really make sense to me. 

See, when you're not emotionally neglected in childhood, you experience emotional presence from your caregivers. Your feelings are allowed to exist, and their feelings are allowed to exist too. 

And through this, you learn to balance caring about other peoples' feelings and opinions with caring for your own. 

You learn how to love yourself and others at the same time. These are largely emotional acts.

Somewhere along the way, very early on, this Compassionate Leader part of me got the script that there’s never enough space for two peoples’ feelings to exist. Especially when big feelings are in the room.

So it would shrink and bend, be ultra grounded and ultimately neglect the feelings of "self" to be able to do what it loved most: be loving in community with other people.

This part of me had its own ways of avoiding conflict, basically. To be lovable was to be easy-going. To not cause a fuss. And to cause a fuss was to be unlovable. 

It believed we had to choose.

And that script was heavily reinforced my entire life up to that point. Since childhood.

So I realized this part of me wasn't trying to give anyone a hard time or manipulate them and no, it didn’t make me a shitty person. It made me a human one. Many of us experience the same kind of stuff. 

It’d just been following the script of "good personhood" that wasn't actually founded in the whole truth. 

The whole truth was that how I felt not only deserved to be considered by others. 

How I felt was actually my own #1 responsibility and consideration.

Meaning, it was always my responsibility to consider how I feel, first. Something you’ll see in action throughout the rest of this article.

This part of me, the Compassionate Leader, was neglecting its responsibility to Self and my own feelings. And other parts of me that felt those feelings were finally getting pissed about being ignored.

Hence the inner conflict.

This illustrates the inner conflict I was feeling. This kind of parts work gives me deep and thorough context of what’s going on inside of me in this way.

I forgave this part of myself. These were all innocent fumbles. But since several other parts of me didn’t trust it to lead anymore because it neglected them, I asked the Compassionate Leader to step aside. 

One of the reasons I say parts work is real because the change in behavior when parts switch positions is damn-near instantaneous. 

It’s subtle, like moods. But it’s clear. 

I see this not only in myself, but also with my own clients and friends who are in the same work.

The moment I asked this part of myself to step aside, my parts - or my mood - had shifted. 

Suddenly I stopped second guessing myself for having a feeling or need, and started standing more firmly in it. 

I noticed that this didn’t feel empowering though. I didn’t feel at peace and regulated.

I felt… defensive. In fact, I noticed I was feeling a little indignant about it all.

This is when I realized another part of me had arrived. 

Not just anger. “Rage” had entered the room. 

Most people struggle with healing work because it’s overwhelming. The feelings are overwhelming. And, the thoughts and beliefs that come with those feelings are also overwhelming. We struggle to see straight, regulate, and trust ourselves with our choices. 

I noticed how my parts work practice actually helped with this, naturally.

In this practice, I learned to interact with parts of myself as if they were separate from me. Hence the way you see me talking about the Compassionate Leader as if it's a friend to me, instead of me.

This is a twist on an old therapeutic technique called “externalizing”.  

Externalizing helps us separate ourselves from our feelings and inner thoughts, just enough to not be overwhelmed by what we’re feeling and thinking. It’s like boundaries for the psyche.

In parts work, the idea is to speak to these parts of ourselves as friends, without becoming them. 

I started to see my parts more like roommates. We live in the same body, but I’m not you. And I’m not feeling what you’re feeling or thinking what you’re thinking.

Therefore, we can have a conversation, and I can really hear and pay attention to what's going on inside of me without getting too wrapped up in it or take it too personally.

This sounds really weird, and was really weird at first. But I find it wildly helpful for self awareness and emotional regulation. I see the same in my clients who take to this work.

When we’re less reactive to what we find inside of us, we’re able to be more observant and objective about how to deal with it. We’re able to stay regulated, and work through things that would otherwise overwhelm us.

With that being said, when I noticed Rage was at the surface, I acknowledged it as a friend & roommate asking for my attention about something. 

I touched my stomach and said, “Rage? Is that you?” inwardly toward the feeling itself.

In confirmation, the feeling expanded. It all but filled my whole body. 

It stopped right before the point of being overwhelming. And suddenly I was fuming, for no discernible reason. While also being aware that I was fuming at the same time, so I didn’t need to act on it. I wasn't becoming it.

The psychological boundary was working. 

Over the next few weeks I was full of rage and running lower on compassion. Naturally I felt deeply disconnected from other people. I felt deeply angry all the time, everyday.

It was almost as if existing in this world was a violation of my humanity.

I did struggle with this rage. Other parts of me were scared to feel this way. I feared I was losing touch with humanity. I feared I cared only about myself now because it was hard to see outside of myself. And I didn’t know how to tap back into that “Compassionate Leader” part of myself, which normally would help me cool off. But since asking it to step aside, it felt so far away. 

I worried I would be stuck in this feeling, and I spent more time cocooning to protect myself and others while I figured it out. 

But the key was this:

I wasn’t the rage. And I wasn't the fear. I was the part of me that was aware of my Rage & fear without being overwhelmed by either of them. And I trusted the process. Being more present now, I didn't spiral. And I was able to lead the way. 

I did the same thing with Rage that I did with the Compassionate Leader part.

Instead of giving into the fear and judgment, instead of trying to make my Rage go away or trying to fix it, I faced it, gave it some boundaries, got curious, and got to know it.

My therapist calls rage “deep anguish”. 

The more I learned about my Rage the more I realized how right she was. This part of me was deeply anguished over how I’d been treated. How much pain I’d endured. 

The diagnosis of C-PTSD was not far-fetched as far as this part was concerned. It was pissed for my inner child. My inner teen. And any other part of me that had endured pain.

What made it more intense was looking out at the world, I saw similar abuses, oppressions, and lack of genuine love and connection everywhere.

This didn’t feel like a whole truth. Like I said, I could sense that only a part of me felt this way, so I didn’t run with the notion or fully buy into these stories. 

But it was the predominant feeling and sense showing up in my body for a few weeks. And its energy felt big in my body as I walked with it from day to day.

My job was to hold space for it.

So I got to know this deep anguish that the Rage was expressing.

And just like before, it turned out my Rage was not trying to give anyone a hard time. 

It was having a hard time. 

Worse, for so long it had felt completely alone, unheard, and misunderstood about this, which just deepened the sense of anguish. My avoidance of rage all these years hadn’t helped with this, of course.

This is when I learned that when emotions get big, it’s not to scare us or even overpower us. It’s their way of screaming for attention. Our attention.

This part of me had been neglected for too long. 

Before 2017 in my own “toxic era” I was quick to express rage in all kinds of ways that got me into all kinds of trouble. So then I repressed it because I was afraid of “bEiNg tHaT pErSoN” again. 

Turns out I was the kind of person who needed support I wasn’t getting from anyone else, and didn’t know how to give myself. 

But now, having different tools and more awareness, it was time for that to change.

I understood that this part of me just needed to feel seen, understood, and given some safe forms of expression, so I focused on that.

I walked with my rage, like a roommate in my own body. It was my inner monologue, and I conversed with it, making it an inner dialogue. 

With this kind of presence in mind, we (the rage and I) hit the punching bag.

We spent more time in nature.

We wrote fuck you letters and a couple rant pieces here on the newsletter. 

We screamed in pillows.

We went into EMDR and dove into old memories, where we could safely take out on the people who hurt us to begin with.

After a few weeks, the rage and anguish started to subside and settle down naturally. I was getting the energy out of my body.

Then, to my surprise, the rage stepped aside willingly, allowing some light to come back in for a couple of weeks. 

And making space for the next part to come forward without me having to ask.

Here I met my grief. I followed the same script, I walked with it just the same. 

I learned that grief was here to show me what I love, what I value, and what I need to prioritize in this life. The depth of my grief directly correlates to the depth of my love. I need to feel grief to really know love. And I need to feel love to know grief. They’re a package deal, and I’m grateful for them both. 

And after that, I spent time with the Inner Critic. Same process. She’s my inner teen. Very bold, righteous, courageous, and refreshingly direct. She means well and wants to keep me in line with my values, and she very much wants me to get on with life. She wants me to live. 

I find myself mediating between her and my more sensitive parts often. She’s also worked a lot on her delivery. I’m very proud of her.

I met pre-2017 me. That “toxic” version of myself I was so disgusted by in the beginning of this story. 

She’s not toxic. She’s a warrior.

I look at her in awe of how she made it through those years. It was another time in my life where all this same pain was at the surface, but that version of me didn’t have the awareness, tools or support I had this go round. She didn’t have access to therapy or social worker friends like I did now.

Instead, she had alcohol and other numbing mechanisms. And she was surrounded by people who didn’t know what the hell to do with her pain any better than she did.

She knows firsthand that you can’t expect someone experiencing tremendous emotional pain and abuse to just “make better choices”.  When someone doesn’t have any “good choices” you expect them to survive. 

She built the Compassionate Leader with her bare hands in that first rock bottom. Something I never gave her credit for before. She’s a large part of the reason this deep well of compassion inside of me exists. 

She’s a part of the reason I’m able to do this work. Look people in the eyes when they’re at their lowest points and show them where their humanity is. To see humanity in them when they’ve lost sight of it within themselves. 

Because I know firsthand what it’s like to be drowning so deeply in your own shit you can’t see straight to even know what path to take.

She is not toxic. She is everything. I had deeply, deeply misjudged her. And I’m grateful I got a second chance. 

The journey through my inner landscape went on and on with realizations like this.

I met so many different parts of myself that I previously judged harshly and tried to escape.

Parts of me I previously saw as just bossy, judgmental, weak, helpless, hopeless, chaotic, scary, toxic, and everything I had avoided becoming over the past few years.

Parts I wanted to disown, because to own these parts of myself would mean that I wasn't "healed" or "becoming a better person".

Parts I realized were so much more than anything I initially thought they were.

Finally, I was surrendering the old societal scripts. Finally, I was learning the truth.

One by one, all my parts came to the surface and spent time with me.

One by one, I got to know them more deeply. Looked into their stories. Learned their motives. Their values and their intentions.

One by one, I stepped back to really see them with fresh eyes. I just observed them and let them show me who they are. 

One by one, I realized I’d previously misunderstood every single one of them.

And one by one, I’ve fallen in love with them all.

Finally, I stopped trying to fix them. They are not broken bones. 

I stopped trying to run from their pain. Their pain was alerting me on how to help them.

When I actually, truly looked deeply into myself, there was nothing to fix. Nothing to be afraid of. 

Now I could just relax into loving them. Finally, the way they deserved to be loved. 

Coming Into Self-Love

This love is felt, and it is also action.

Continuing to be intentional in interacting with my internal landscape, I held space for my parts. I gave them support. I gave them boundaries to keep them safe. I gave them guidance on healthy and safe forms of expression so they could exist in a way that allows them to feel seen, heard, and understood.

I listened to them. I believed them. I trusted them.

And I tried my best to surround them with people who would be healthy for them. 

Which ultimately meant letting my more dismissive friends go, allowing myself to grieve those friendships, leaning into the relationships and friendships that really held it down for me through the thick of this, and using this experience as a lesson on what kind of people would actually be healthier for me to connect with moving forward.

This is called “reparenting”. 

I was correcting the patterns of emotional neglect that I picked up in childhood by giving myself the treatment I should have been given in childhood. 

I was no longer telling myself to “shut up” or “suck it up”. I was more committed to hearing myself out, and incorporating what I found there into my life and my decisions.

It wasn’t easy, but over time I learned to trust myself well enough to know that every part of me means well, and actually feels and behaves the way it does for a reason. 

I’m much, much slower to judge myself. And when I do, I also know that a part of me is judging another part of me, and my role is to mediate this conflict within myself so that both parts are heard, instead of taking sides. 

Self love is founded on self trust for me. And I trust that every part of me, and every feeling they’re showing up to represent, has a meaning and a role. 

What’s even more fun is they all have the other parts to support them in those roles.

From Inner Conflict to Inner Collaboration: Reparenting

It turned out, those parts that were in conflict before, are often the best partners for one another to balance each other out.

For example, parts of me that feel helpless aren't "weak".

They're alerting me to where I need support so I can ask for it - like we all need to do sometimes. This is what community is all about. People helping each other.

These “helpless” parts of me balance out my hyper-independent parts and vice-versa. 

Parts of me that feel angry and prioritize my own needs aren’t "mean" or “selfish”. 

They're usually protecting my boundaries and advocating for my needs and values in some way. They understand that I matter.

My more compassionate parts help balance them out and remember other people also have needs, values, and boundaries of their own. 

These parts work together toward constructive, healthy outcomes. And I’m able to take that practice outward in my relationships, which has been beautiful, and I'm really looking forward to deepening that skillset.

Parts of me that really can be lashing and verbally violent aren’t "bad". 

In fact, they tend to give me a reasonable heads up that I’m about to “blow” before I do so I can catch myself and make a choice.

But what they are doing is alerting me that whatever situation I've found myself in is categorically, red flag, full stop entering into abusive or dangerous territory for me, and this is unacceptable. Period.

These parts have my back and they know what emotional abuse feels like. And they are very good at picking up on covert forms of abuse before I consciously notice. 

When these parts show up, my body starts boiling before I say anything, and I know this is the signal. 

I need to decide quickly how to address it or remove myself. No exceptions, even if I do think the other person’s intentions are innocent. Their impact on me still matters. It doesn’t have to be a judgment of anyone else to be a critical form of care for me to remove myself from their behavior.

Parts of me that are more compassionate, fair-minded, and relationship-oriented balance this out to make sure I try to make the safest, fairest moves for everyone involved if I can. 

But if I catch that signal of body-boiling, I will not be brushing the situation under the rug or letting it go on. This is a serious warning and I must address it, first within myself. Then, with the other person if that's necessary.

My anxious and fearful parts aren't trying to ruin my joy or hold me back. 

They just want me to be mindful of my risks and how to navigate them. 

I have more adventurous, courageous, and even reckless parts that are willing to throw caution to the wind. My anxious and fearful parts balance these out and help me make wise choices. And vice versa, the adventurous parts and courageous parts help me not live a fearful life. 

The list goes on.

A big role for me is helping these parts find a middle ground so that no part of me is neglected, and every part of me feels safe, heard, and fulfilled. 

I realized through this process, again and again, that there are no bad or broken parts in me.

Nothing needed to be “healed” the way I thought it did.

I was not the broken thing.

My connection with myself was the broken thing.

That is the only thing I needed to "fix". And that’s what the pain was alerting me to. I’m glad it didn’t give up, or I would never have known. 

And I didn’t need to grow into some better or different person.

I was born into whole humanhood and developed a whole identity. It’s all already here. And it followed me everywhere no matter how hard I tried to get rid of the parts of it that I didn’t like.

So no, I didn’t need to grow my Self. 

What I actually needed to grow was my capacity to hold space for the entirety of who I am.

This put a totally different spin on the term “window of capacity” for me.

Bringing It Back Together

It took about a year total of mostly cocooning and meeting my parts before revisiting the spot where we began. I’d asked The Compassionate Leader to step aside at the beginning of this deep dive into my internal landscape. 

And by now, it really showed. 

With all of these other parts at the table and getting along I felt way more enlightened about myself and my story. I felt much more in alignment. But something was still missing.

I didn’t have the sense of direction and drive I once had. I believed in my ability to rebuild my life in spirit, but doing so in action was a different story. I felt insecure about creating content. About meeting new people. About a lot of things. 

And this shut me down and caused me to feel depressed. 

I was afraid to make mistakes. I was lacking a deeper sense of confidence and self-leadership.

See, the Compassionate Leader had some people-pleasing tendencies, sure. And it definitely needs some good boundary-setting parts and parts that are aware of my needs to balance it out.

But like the other parts, the Compassionate Leader isn't just a people pleasing part.

It’s also the part of me that helps me stay grounded. Zoom out. Get out of my comfort zone. Give myself some grace as well as everyone around me so we can be creative, learn, and collaborate.

This part of me really understands that as human beings, we’re meant to make mistakes. It’s how we learn. Part of its motto is to “fuck up fast, so you can learn fast”.

Without the Compassionate Leader at the wheel, my Inner Critic is a little more front & center to fill the space. And my Inner Critic has a hard time with mistakes. It sends my anxiety into a panic and causes me to shut down. The Compassionate Leader understands, soothes, and reassures my anxiety. Which helps me get out of my protective shell, and into my life.

The Compassionate Leader is the part of me that knows when not to take things personally that weren’t meant for me. 

Where my Inner Critic will send me into a shame spiral, the Compassionate Leader actually takes constructive criticism really well. 

It’s able to hear what people really mean when giving hard feedback, not just what they’re saying and how other parts of me might internalize it. It’s also able to see when others are projecting and let that stuff roll off. 

It’s the part of me that’s confident in its ability to see other people clearly, meet them where they're at, and support them deeply.

It’s also the part of me that’s good at giving me direction and motivation. And getting me energized to walk the path I’m meant to walk in this life. 

It’s the part of me that’s excited to build a business, build community, build a home, build a life. 

This part of me wears compassion as the brand, yes, and it feels that compassion deeply.

But its role is the Leader.

It likes to be at the wheel. 

And that part of me, with all of those amazing and incredible qualities, had been missing since I asked it to step aside.

With the other parts at the table, it was time we asked The Compassionate Leader to come back.

And we did. So it did. Parts Work is genuinely wild that way.

And for the first time since all of this began - and perhaps in my life - I suddenly felt whole. 

In parts work they call it “Self Energy”.

In Somatic Trauma work this is the “regulated nervous system” everyone’s talking about.

In Buddhism we call it equanimity or awareness.  

For most of us, we call it “inner peace”. Meaning, we are at peace with our decisions, our path, and who we are.

Whatever you call it, it’s just riding along here effortlessly. 

My more anxious parts are of course keeping an eye out for the other shoe to drop, and they’re welcome here. They even asked me to hold off on writing and releasing this story “just in case”, and I did.

But I’ve encountered more stressors, more bad days. I’ve felt more grief and pain and fear.

And yet this sense of wholeness and the equanimity it brings has yet to go away. 

It’s sticking it out through them all. 

Most of the time I’m walking with this sense of “alignment” and inner awareness.

I'm still a whole human, with whole moods and experiences.

But I feel more in touch with myself while experiencing them.

It feels like my intuition is in close reach and there’s a deep sense of self trust here.

I picture my intuition as all of my parts sitting at a table that’s tucked away in my subconscious. And the intuitive nudge comes when they’re in a unanimous agreement on an answer or direction for me. 

It shows up as when something just feels “true” and “right”. 

Life just feels “true” and “right”, right now, even in the ups & downs.

Stress feels like stress instead of danger. 

Grief feels like a moment of honoring instead of a dark hole of inescapable pain. 

And happiness feels so exciting, and safe enough to lean into. 

And there’s this understanding that it’s because all parts of me exist, and more importantly, they’re allowed to now. 

For the first time, they’re all allowed to be here. They’re safe. And they’re committed to being safe for each other, including my inner critic parts. Every part of me is on the same page about this commitment, finally.

The trust that comes from this is implicit.

For example, more outwardly “challenging” parts of me don’t even want to take the wheel for real. They like resting. So I know that if they do take the wheel, they’re doing so for a reason. 

I trust them implicitly. I’m still reflective, but I’m not overly worried, overthinking, or second guessing my choices under stress like I was. 

I feel much less internal conflict. Parts that used to fight and compete with each other seem to respect each other now. They navigate things differently. It’s easier to find resolve when internal dilemmas pop up.

I'm able to give myself the benefit of the doubt, and there’s a patience for everything that happens inside of me.

And this is all felt. As in…

I don’t just believe I trust myself. I feel trust in myself. It’s not something I need to rationalize, question, or check in on.

I just know the trust is there, same as I know the wind is there. I feel it. 

I don’t just believe I love myself. I feel loving toward myself. 

And I don’t just believe I have a good life. I’m feeling good about my life, even on stressful or gloomier days.

For no other reason than I’m walking through it as a whole human being.

People talk about feeling like the universe has their back, while simultaneously saying they are source energy. 

This is like the internal version of that, honestly. I can feel all of these parts of me having my back and guiding me, and I have theirs. And it feels good. I feel supported. 

Where I once had to pick myself up, I now feel like my Self is picking me up. This is what it feels like to be able to trust and rely on yourself. 

I feel connected to myself, my life, and the world through this.

Which brings me to the lessons and outcomes. 

The Wisdom & The Outcome

The big lesson is this:

We can’t build a life that feels right, feels true, and feels good, without being connected to how we actually feel to begin with. 

When I started this journey I had little to no awareness of my feelings, what they meant, or where they were coming from.

I usually assumed that my more challenging or painful feelings were wrong or broken and needed to be fixed.  

But they weren’t. They were neglected. 

A pattern I’d been repeating since I was made to repress them in childhood.

They were screaming and overwhelming me for a reason. Because they needed me to hear them. So that they could be understood, held, and honored in my decisions about the life I was building for myself. 

My parts represent my feelings. And they care about everything in my life. From the work I do, to the hobbies I engage in, to the people I engage with. The thoughts I think and the way I treat myself and others.

These parts of me hold my values, my beliefs, my instincts, and all of the wisdom that’s been packed into this body through experience and generational inheritance.

The role I took on before was to ignore them and build my life based on society’s scripts. 

I realize now that my role is to build my life for these parts of me. 

To build and live a life spacious enough for every part of me to exist. The adventurous parts and the parts that value safety. The ambitious parts and the parts that value rest and play. All of these contradictory parts aren’t here to compete with each other. 

They’re here to help me shape a balanced, healthy, whole life for my balanced, healthy, whole self.

My life is for them.

And because of this, I’m learning for the first time, that I don’t need to think too hard. 

I need to listen.

Listen to my intuition. My gut. My feelings. My experience. 

I need to listen and make sense of myself and then navigate the world according to what I find there. 

The moment I realized this, everything I’ve been searching for on this journey clicked into place for me. 

It felt like an arrival. My shoulders started to relax.

I am not the broken thing. My connection to myself was the broken thing. I just needed to listen.

Listen to know how I feel about the kind of work I want to do. The kind of contribution I want to make to the world. The hobbies and adventures I want. What rest and joy look like for me. Where I want to live, because I’ve moved from Ohio now. Columbus is a great city, but it didn’t feel right for me long term. 

So I listened to what I needed, and now I’m closer to nature, closer to family, and exploring my options for my next chapters.

I need to listen and know how I feel so I can surround myself with people who feel right for me. And listen in to see if I trust that I also feel right for them.

And listen for what it means to set thicker boundaries and spend less time with people who are not a good fit without second-guessing myself so much.

Having more harmonious relationships moving forward won’t be because I changed myself or healed myself or bettered myself to fit in.

It’ll be because choosing people in my life is now an extension of honoring the whole of myself as I already am, who I really am, how I really feel, and what I really need.

Learning communication and relational skills is 100% necessary for just about everybody. But for a lot of us, we don’t need to overdo those and change who we are to fit in and find connection. 

We just need to find where we fit in and learn what it means to be loving toward those people. 

Knowing ourselves allows us to be our own best matchmakers in the end.

I’m also aware that this is life. Real life in a real world that isn’t designed to accommodate me. Far from it. So I will find myself in spaces where I will hold back. Where I will mask. Where I will need to survive.

And that’s okay too. Because I deserve to survive those spaces and there are parts of me that know this, without question.

If the people in those spaces wanted me to be more emotionally available or authentic they might want to consider being more emotionally safe before demanding that of me. 

I'm not going to shame myself about surviving anymore. We are all surviving this capitalistic, oppressive world.

My aim is simply to navigate those spaces consciously, within my values, in moderation, and commit to finding my way back to spaces I thrive in. And where I can feel safe, and I can feel free.

I’m also aware that there’s more life to live, more parts of me that haven’t been called back to the surface yet, and perhaps even more that have yet to be born later. The Compassionate Leader came about after 2017, after all.

We’re always evolving.

My wiser, more cautious parts like to remind me that I’m doing well, but I’ve got my kryptonite and there’s more to this journey. 

And for that, I’m grateful to have this practice to return to, because getting to know and integrate different parts of myself is the key.

The rest of this shit is just life.

And this is all based on my feelings and understanding the meaning behind them.

I didn’t feel so much before. And I barely understood what I did feel.

I feel everything now. And I have the tools to unpack it.

For this I am grateful.

From now on, I’m letting go of the old definition of “healing” that calls us to fix broken parts of us.

From now on, I choose to focus on wholeness instead.

I write this story to invite you to do the same, if you feel up to it.

My Contribution to You, Moving Forward

The world conditions all of us from a young age to abandon different parts of ourselves. 

And to make enemies out of these parts of ourselves that we abandon.

It shows up in our relationship with ourselves. Our relationships with others. And our relationship with our lives as a whole.

We can see how impactful it is now, as so many people we meet see an enemy within themselves, and enemies in other whole humans. 

To me, the enemy isn't ourselves, and it's not other people. The enemy is disconnection itself.

Disconnection from wholeness. From what it means to be fully human. And from ability to recognize that humanity in ourselves, and one another.  

It's important to me to contribute to creating a world where whole humanhood is allowed to exist.

Where our humanity is allowed to show up in our own bodies without us attacking it, or imploding on ourselves.

And by extension of this, a world where we learn to exist safely with other whole humans and the natural challenges this inevitably brings.

I'm talking big shit. I doubt I'll see this world in this lifetime, but this is the world I want to contribute to, anyway.

This is my commitment.

The ever-evolving question for me has been, how? 

I’ve been thinking about how inconsistent I’ve been with content. If you’ve been following me for a while I’m sure you’ve noticed. 

In my process of finding alignment I have decided that this inconsistency, like everything else, is for a reason. And it’s about time I honor and integrate it.

I love writing and creating content, some of the time. And I don’t plan to stop. The reality is, I just need to do it when I actually have something meaningful to say to the masses. Which isn’t always the case.

But what I love more, and more consistently, is being in direct conversation and community with people. 

I know this because my client and community work has been thriving even when my content has been low and when my mood is also low. I haven’t missed a beat with clients. I’m much more consistent up close. Much more in touch. More attuned. 

The feedback loop of direct contact keeps me connected to you. It fills me with inspiration and understanding for how to support you.

And that’s what I want to do. Support you.

Support you in developing your own self confidence, inner peace, self trust, and your own wholeness.

Not feel pressured to come up with a list of content topics and perform as a content creator, which is what focusing on content does. 

Yes I have this voice. This ability to write and share messages and break shit down, and I love to use it. I know its value and I’m grateful for this part of me. 

But this part of me doesn’t want to be a talking head or a performer. And the pressure of content creation puts me on exactly that kind of hamster wheel. Parts of me refuse to participate. I did try. They said no. lol 

I think content creation would be more beautiful if we were all able to create when we actually had something meaningful to share. Instead of being pressured to create to keep up with capitalism.

So that's how I'm going to show up.

I don’t want to be a content creator. That’s not why I got into this. I want to be a supportive member of community who happens to create some content. 

I want to be a whole human who’s supporting others in finding whole humanhood.

That is my contribution, and I don’t have time to take everyone on as a one-on-one client, but I do have time to build a more cohesive, connected community where this contribution can come to life. 

So, moving forward I’ve decided to do that. I've asked myself what feels right, what feels true, and building an online community off of social media on a platform called Circle feels like the right fit for me right now.

This is a space where we can start, and continue, our journey of wholeness together.

I’ll create some mini-courses sharing the tools, resources, and education that have helped me make it to this place of inner peace, trust, alignment, and wholeness.  

I’ll give you everything I have. There won’t be a bunch of needless, opportunistic upsells. 

More importantly, I’ll be active there personally. It’ll be less about content and more about conversation for all of us.

I’ll be both posting and responding to your posts and questions to help you discover and integrate your own wholeness, your feelings, and your conflicts. 

I’ll do Q&A’s, other classes, and hell, maybe invite some guests for interviews. We’ll see. I’m going to let a lot of it unfold organically to keep it in alignment and true.

But the plan is for it to be a genuine community, where you will also be invited to support others and be supported by them. We’ll be a circle of support for one another. Not a tribe of Tori Followers. I’m not too keen on that. Even if I do own my role as leader, there is a difference between a community and a cult. 

I’ll have more for this soon, so if you’re interested, keep tabs on the content you do see from me moving forward and sign up for the waitlist below.

A Path to Healing, and Wholeness.

If the road to healing is feeling scary, chaotic, confusing, or isolating for you right now, please read this in full then make the decision that feels right & true for you. Healing our wounds isn’t just about trauma or the past. It’s about discovering how to feel more

Perspective by Tori ReidTori Reid

And if you have any questions, shoot them to my email tori@torireid.org or post your comments below.

I love you, thank you so much for reading. 

Talk to you soon.

Tori

Acknowledgments:

To Crissy, Jon, Marcus, Karen, Erin, Micah, Heazy, and of course, Heather.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for giving me love and community. For holding space and for having my back. For believing me, and believing in me when I struggled to believe in myself.

Thank you for seeing me in some of my worst moments without judgment and without ever telling me I'm "too much" for feeling.

Thank you for giving me your nudges of guidance when I needed them most.

Thank you for reminding me of my humanity, and helping me remember who I am when I've struggled to see myself when the Universe was handing me my ass.

Thank you for sticking it out with me, and for showing me that, no, the world isn't just bad and scary.

The world is beautiful. It must be, if it's made of humans like you.

Thank you, mostly, for your presence. That was already enough.

Thank you. <3