“I just can’t tell what my shoulders are doing,” my client said. “I have no idea what’s happening back there.” She gestured at her left shoulder, and then raised it comically toward her ear. “Up here, it feels like I know what it’s doing.” She let it drop. “Down here, no clue.”

This wasn’t a surprising comment. My client, despite her high somatic (body-based) intelligence, was describing a challenge that many of my clients face: Sometimes, we just can’t feel what our body parts are doing. .

Existential anxiety

To a certain degree, this sense of “I don’t know what my body is doing” is true for all humans, especially with certain regions of our body. Our back, for example, has fewer sense receptors than our fingers, which we use to explore the world— which makes it difficult for us to tell exactly what is going on back there. And our scapulae (shoulder blades) can be very tricky, particularly on the left-hand side, where our ribcage sits more forward, making it harder for the shoulder blade to feel a solid connection. This means that, as my client was noticing, we tend to feel a little lost in general with that left shoulder (you can read more and play with these concepts at the link below).

Other individuals, especially those with hypermobility spectrum disorder, can find themselves even more challenged. Their ability to sense where they are in space— which we call proprioception— often doesn’t work as well as it does in others. And while this can be trained and assisted, there will always be a greater challenge, or, as this article puts it, “more noise” in the way when they’re trying to sense those signals.

(It’s also true that if you’ve had an injury to a joint— such as a broken left elbow and wrist, in my case— proprioception will be impaired in that joint. It will always be just a little bit more work to know what exactly is happening there.)

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So why does this matter? We’re not all trying to be Olympic athletes, right?

Frustratingly, this actually matters a lot, for one singular reason that underlies all aspects of our lives: When our brain doesn’t know what our body is doing, it feels less safe, and it will automatically try to create safer circumstances for you.

This can mean that if your body doesn’t sense the ground under your feet so that you can walk efficiently, it will stiffen up your muscles to try to stabilize you. You won’t have full range of motion; your body is trying to keep you from being hurt. This can result in chronic aches and pains that never truly resolve, no matter how much you stretch or massage them.

Your brain may produce pain signals to prevent what it thinks might be an injury-producing movement. That twinge in your knee doesn’t necessarily mean there’s any tissue damage at all— it’s just as likely that your brain is concerned that you are going to hurt yourself if you squat too deeply. Yet the pain is real either way.

As a result, our movement options become more limited. We grow more fearful, and our lives get smaller. We are less likely to take risks— even small ones, like walking up and down the stairs without holding on to the rail— and so our bodies become less conditioned and less mobile.

And, on a meta-level, if we have a difficult time knowing where we are in space, we may feel existentially displaced, or lost, or, perhaps, just more anxious in general.

“End range”

All of the above are happening at an autonomic level— that is, we don’t consciously make choices around stiffening muscles, or creating pain (after all, who would do that?).

But these symptoms often lead folks to try to find relief— in a yoga class, or physical therapy, or with a trainer. And because proprioception is a challenge, these individuals can feel even more lost, especially if the practitioner isn’t well-versed in addressing these types of challenges.

This brings us to a second existential truth about individuals who feel a little bit lost in their bodies: for many, the only place they can really feel what’s happening is at what we call “end range.” For example, in the image below, it’s possible that this individual has a difficult time feeling what is happening in her elbow unless she straightens it all the way.

Proprioception can both be trained, and supported, through exercises and feedback. Using bands, for example (as in the video below), can provide additional feedback; using a nubbly ball to stimulate the sense receptors is another favorite way for some of my clients.

And it’s not inherently wrong, or scary, or bad, to have hypermobility, or joints that extend past 180 degrees. It’s just a human variation. At the same time, if this person is proprioceptively challenged, she may experience some other symptoms that she’ll want to address.

“Life at end range”- the dopamine connection

We’ve already discussed the correlation between the physical symptoms of “feeling lost” and the mental/emotional symptoms, which can feel like an existential displacement, or anxiety, etc. We’ve established that, without specific proprioceptive training or support, they need to “feel” “end range” in order to know where they are.

This same pattern- needing to reach an extreme before we feel anything at all— is true on another level, as well. For some folks, especially in the case of both shock and complex trauma, it can be difficult to “feel” life itself when it’s not “at end range.” This can be true of individuals with or without proprioceptive challenges (but it’s a bit of “double whammy” when it’s both).

For example, individuals who were raised in chaotic environments may feel really uncomfortable when life is stable and things are going well. Instead of feeling peaceful, they feel uneasy, bored, or even anxious. One reason for this may be our dopamine system.

We tend to think about dopamine as that feel-good chemical hit we get when we’re getting something we really want. But dopamine release actually not about acquiring the thing itself so much as it is about the search. Once we’ve got whatever it is we’ve been seeking, the pleasure fades quickly, and we find ourselves feeling a “dopamine lull”: low energy, flat mood, kind of blah.

This dopamine “lull” is normal; it’s what lets our system “reset.” For individuals who live with the effects of chronic stress or complex trauma, it’s more complicated. Because consistent stress and trauma lower our dopamine baseline, our brains produce less of the chemical over time. We feel more and more “flat” after the dopamine wears off. And for individuals who live with addiction, there’s an added problem: our dopamine receptors don’t work as well, so the negative effect can be intensified.

This means that we’ll gradually need increased doses of that pleasure-seeking activity (gambling, shopping, substance use, scrolling social media)—just to feel kind of normal, or eventually, not to feel completely depressed. We’re living life at end range, seeking the extreme sensations that let us know we’re alive.

When you add in a culture (like this one!) that absolutely cannot tolerate quiet, rest, stillness, or boredom of any kind, we have a recipe for a very destructive cycle.

Risky behavior—that chaotic feeling-- stimulates the release of adrenaline, as well as dopamine. The two systems fire together, coupling the experience of chaos and pleasure—which, although stressful, feels both exciting and familiar.

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The “boring” middle

The good news is that our brains are incredibly pliable and can change at any age. Just as we can train our bodies to “feel” when they’re not at end range, we can train ourselves to “feel” life in that boring middle place where nothing is really wrong.

Our dopamine system itself can be trained quite effectively. Exercise has been demonstrated to increase our dopamine D2 receptors, and in addiction cases, may reverse the damage to dopamine receptors.

In my own work with clients and complex trauma, I’ve found this to be very effective. Working somatically with movement provides a great template to “feel” into the more subtle sensations that we may be less conditioned to notice. But it’s tricky, too: because these folks are often quick to push past their own limits into the familiar and chaotic “adrenaline zone,” a slower pace is required to avoid further exacerbating the cycle. So, for some individuals, group classes or traditional fitness spaces will be a great fit; but for others-- especially those who live in the high-activation end of the spectrum-- working in a titrated way with a trauma-informed practitioner really is essential.

Learning to tolerate life in mid-range can be a long-term project for individuals with C-PTSD. At first, especially, as we’re adjusting, it can feel like nothing is happening; that life has little flavor, or color. But, like my client moving around that niggly left shoulder, we start to notice: oh, there is some feeling there, if I really pay attention. And (over time!), the more I pay attention, the more there is to notice.

In the same way, we may become aware that we enjoy the bitter taste of unsweetened iced tea, or the sound of our cat purring on a weekday afternoon— sensations that previously flew under our radar, because we were so attuned to more intense feelings. Backing away from the stimulation of “end-range,” we find, in reality, these “boring,” everyday, “mid-range” moments make up the bulk of our lives. When we are able to sense, and even savor them, our lives become much richer.

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I remember finding similar research about ten years ago and feeling extremely anxious about it— largely because at the time, I was heavily invested in both practicing and teaching meditation, and it was distressing to think that something that seemed like such a cure-all could cause serious harm. The subject of the piece, Dr. Olga Khazan, had a similar experience— so much so that it took her decades to accept, and finally publish the results of a study that showed that meditators, in fact, have worse sleep than non-meditators.

As I read through the article this week, I recognized that something in me had changed. I no longer felt defensive about meditation in the same way that I had previously; in fact, I agreed with Khazan’s findings, and believe firmly that intense meditation (like any mind-altering substance) is not ideal for many people, especially those who are prone to dissociation, or who feel, well, less grounded generally.

I also recognized this whole dynamic, both in myself and in the wellness community at large. When we find something that works for us— as yoga had, for me, fifteen years ago, so spectacularly— we tell EVERYBODY how great it is, that they need to be doing it. We re-post memes about how life-changing just 10 minutes of yoga a day can be, and that if everyone would do it, world peace would surely follow quickly. And then many of us become yoga teachers, who are also financially invested in this dynamic. We’re underpaid, but earnest, and highly incentivized to think that yoga is the thing that will fix everyone we know— if only they could be convinced to do it.

Who knows what’s “right” for us?

It didn’t take me more than a few years as a yoga teacher before I had to accept that not everyone was going to like yoga. It wasn’t that they hadn’t found the “right kind of yoga,” or “the right teacher for them.” Some people just don’t want to do yoga. In a way, this realization was kind of a relief. I could stop trying to convince people and let them go do something else. After all, there are plenty of people who DID want to do yoga, and I could help them.

But it also got me curious about what we ARE drawn to.

When I closed the yoga studio and began to offer more individual sessions, including different kinds of movement, I had the opportunity to get to know people more intimately, and to understand what it was they were drawn to. Some people, for example, got really excited about strength training. Or they loved the Indian clubs. Or gardening, or horseback riding. And all of those things could qualify as what I was calling “mindful movement;” a way to get in touch with embodied present-moment awareness.

It also became clear to me that even though people would come to me and specifically ask for my advice, or for “a routine they could do at home,” they almost never followed through.

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One of my professors captured this brilliantly:

“Maybe you got into this field because your friends said to you, ‘Oh, you give such good advice.’ But if you haven’t figured it out by now, nobody’s gonna take your advice. No, they’re not. They’re going to tell you how they want to cheat on their wife, and all you can do is listen to them and say, ‘So what you gonna do?’ Because you know they’re gonna do whatever they wanna do anyway.”

-Dr. Patrice Leopold, Nova Southeastern University

People are gonna do whatever they wanna do.

“You cannot save people from committing certain nonsense.”

Coming around to this viewpoint can be humbling, as a helping practitioner. How many times have I felt that if this client could just do this one thing, their lives would be improved. And how frustrating it can be to watch the same client continue to struggle, ignoring your well-intentioned advice!

Jungian psychology recognizes that each of us has to follow our own path— what Jung called individuation— in order to achieve wholeness. The mistakes are, in fact, essential:

“You cannot save people from committing certain nonsense because it is in their grain. If I take it away they have no merit. We only gain merit and psychological development by accepting ourselves as we are and by being serious enough to live the lives we are trusted with. Our sins and errors and mistakes are necessary to us, otherwise we are deprived of the most precious incentives to development.”

—CG Jung, The Tavistock Lectures

Oh, those sins, and errors, and mistakes!

I am reminded in particular of a relationship I struggled with for several years. Everyone around me could see that I was making what seemed to be terrible choices; prioritizing someone else’s needs over my own; failing to recognize my own worth; jeopardizing long-term friendships. But nothing, and I mean NOTHING they could say ever made a dent. I just had to work my way through all that frustration on my own and come out the other side with some painfully hard-earned wisdom.

There wasn’t a shortcut to that growth. I didn’t need more external advice. I needed to figure out what I needed— no matter how many “mistakes” I made to get there (feel free to read about these at the link below):

A non-directive approach

The truth is that I have had to accept that, in general, I have no idea what is best for my clients, or for anyone else.

I might think they would benefit from meditation, or yoga, or strength training; or that they should stop talking to that toxic friend; or spend more time with their cat. But those are just my ideas about their life, which have little to do with what they actually will do, and even less to do with what they are meant to do.

Humans are endlessly complex: what we say we want consciously often bears no resemblance to our unconscious desires and needs. So, for example, when a client tells me that they “keep trying to get back to their yoga practice,” I know that there is probably an underlying reason that they are not “getting back to their yoga practice,” and it’s not just a matter of scheduling or willpower.

This is where approaches like CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)— as helpful as they are in so many ways— can sometimes fall short: they presume that the client wants what they say they want. In fact, most of us are likely to be ambivalent; to have mixed feelings, or even contradictory urges that need to be explored.

When we take a non-directive approach as helping professionals, we are working with the client to determine what it is that they really need, or want. There may be an intra-psychic conflict to be addressed, for example (“I always wanted to be an artist, but my parents insisted I do something practical”). Or we may be supporting the client in making new choices, or trying new things— so they learn to trust their own internal wisdom.

The phrase “non-directive approach” is more Carl Rogers than it is Carl Jung, actually— I have met Jungians who had no problem directing their clients’ lives!— but, at heart, Jung believed that true change, or healing, had to come from within the client themselves, and not from the therapist:

I had given up hypnotic treatment for this very reason, because I did not want to impose my will on others. I wanted the healing processes to grow out of the patient’s own personality, and not out of suggestions of mine that would only have a passing effect. I wanted to protect and preserve my patient’s dignity and freedom so that he could live his life by his own volition.”

—CG Jung, Symbols of Transformation Paragraph 492 (emphasis mine).

What’s right for you?

I want to be clear that being “non-directive” isn’t a cure-all, any more than yoga or meditation is. There is a clear time and place to be directive, especially if a client is in danger, or unable to make decisions themselves, for example.

“Directive” also isn’t a bad thing. There are times when we need someone else’s expertise in a directive way. When I decided that I wanted to learn to nose-breathe, for example, I needed my Integrative Breath Therapist, , to tell me how to do it. And I am training for a competitive 2k row now— I am grateful to follow the direction of another excellent coach to help me improve.

But when it comes to deciding what we need to do, and how we should live our lives— especially in questions of deeper meaning— external advice can only take us so far. We have to turn inward.

Mary Oliver put the question better than I ever could, in the closing lines of her poem “The Summer Day”:

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

You can read the full poem here.

Unlike my peers, I was entering the field in sort of a backwards way: I had a career’s worth of information about working with clients and their bodies, and the ways in which their psychological experience manifested as physiological symptoms (the larger challenges, for me, were about setting aside my own preconceptions so that I could practice educational humility and learn the clinical side of the mental health world!).

There was some overlap. One of the core competencies that any therapist should be able to offer their clients is “Grounding Skills.” Now, these are often pretty basic (“feel your feet on the ground;” “count five things you can see,” etc.)— but it encouraged me to see that there was some understanding of the importance of the body, and grounding, in the mainstream mental health world.

What is “grounded,” anyway?

Grounded is one of those fantastic words that is a complete, direct metaphor in and of itself. To be grounded is to have a direct connection to the earth; to feel solid, supported, rooted (there’s another wonderful metaphor!), connected to something wholesome and natural. To be grounded implies a sense of presence and awareness.

Alexander Lowen, who created the early somatic psychotherapy modality known as “Bioenergetics,” was the first person to use the term in a psychological sense. He notes that some individuals are “connected to the ground, not ‘up in the air’ or ‘hung-up.’”

To be ungrounded, then, is the opposite— untethered, flighty, scatterbrained, unfocused, unstable, head in the clouds. This person might be anxious, fidgety, hypervigilant, unable to rest, or they could be dreamily dissociated, floaty, emotionally absent.1

As we can already see from the descriptions above, whether we are ungrounded or grounded, the experience occurs on both physiological and psychological levels. We can feel heavy and solid in our bodies, or light, or absent. We can feel anxious, or fidgety; present and responsive, or depressed and hopeless. We might use substances deliberately to try to induce a feeling of groundedness, or escape (bringing us into our “faux window of capacity,” as described in the post below).

Who gets to be grounded?

I don’t know exactly why some folks are more grounded than others. Sometimes I think it’s physiological— individuals who live with hypermobility, for example, are almost always less grounded. Other times, it seems to me that it has just as much to do with our typology; as though we were born with our feet an inch away from the ground, metaphorically. Then again, trauma— or just life experiences— taught others of us that the ground wasn’t a very safe place for us to be, metaphorically. We learned to space out, dissociate, never quite touching down.

While I might look like a pretty solid person, I am someone who is naturally a little bit ungrounded. Like many of my clients, I find it literally very difficult to feel my feet on the ground.

Jung spoke about this phenomenon specifically. During the Visions Seminars, in 1933, he recalled a patient of his:

“I remember a girl who was by no means insane, who informed me that she was rather upset by the fact that when she was walking on the pavement she did not feel her steps. She was twenty-eight years old, and in the course of her examination she said she had never seen her body.”

“But you take baths, you must see it then,” Jung protested. “No, I cover the bath tub in order not to see it,” she replied.

Jung goes on:

“So I told that girl to go home and undress and study her body. Then she dreamed she was on top of a balloon and I was aiming at her and brought her down.

That was an exceedingly intuitive type.”

Ungrounded people not only have a hard time feeling their feet, but, as Jung says here, they are less grounded in what we might call reality itself- or, at least conscious, grounded reality. Like Ursula LeGuin, these individuals are “realists of a larger reality.” Highly intuitive, these individuals live rich internal lives. They are far more interested in the unconscious world of dreams, thoughts, and possibility, rather than the day-to-day world of facts, objects, and things. I love this world. I really do. But without some balance, it can’t pay the bills, respond to an email, or remember to show up to work. I can get into trouble because I’m not paying enough attention— “my head is in the clouds,” as they say.

And so interestingly, when one is really too ungrounded, and we are out of balance, the psyche knows it. Like Jung’s patient, we dream of flying, living in airy towers, being on top of a mountain, or on top of a balloon— until a helpful therapist brings us back to earth.

The relational aspect

There is one more piece to consider when we think about chronically ungrounded individuals, and that is the relational element of grounding.

If we think about electricity, to be grounded means to have a connection to the physical earth, so that excess or stray electricity can escape safely. An ungrounded outlet can cause an internal short circuit, or pass along an electrical shock when someone else touches it, as they become the grounding element.

In the case of complex trauma or PTSD, some individuals may be holding an immense charge of live energy— like electricity— that has nowhere safe to go. It can loop endlessly, short-circuiting, in repetitive behaviors and patterns, in nightmares, all attempts to release this unprocessed, raw, electric energy.

In my experience, these individuals struggle to connect to ground to the earth (metaphorically, or perhaps even directly). It doesn’t feel safe enough, or, in the case of developmental trauma, they never learned how to do it. They sizzle with ungrounded energy, exhausted, until they collapse.

This is where right-hemisphere, empathetic attunement is necessary. Another human— a trauma-informed practitioner, loved one, or trusted friend— can act as a grounding wire to help them diffuse the energy until they can contain it, and ground themselves. While this might sound pretty “woo,” it’s based in the research of infant attachment; babies learn to regulate their systems through their caregivers, who regulate for them until they can regulate themselves. This is how we learn to ground, developmentally.

For these individuals, no matter how many “grounding techniques” they are taught, they will consistently struggle to achieve the results a well-intentioned practitioner is offering. This can be incredibly frustrating for both the client and the helper, as the helper runs through their bag of tricks and the client feels like a failure.

While there are many robust techniques that can be helpful for these individuals (I’ll share a few below), in my experience, it takes tremendous patience and time as the clinician must act as the “grounding wire” for the client until the client is able to start to ground themselves. This is not easy work for either party, but it is incredibly rewarding.

Finding our feet

So, returning to our “grounding exercises,” what does it take to bring an ungrounded person “back to earth?” Well, for folks who are chronically ungrounded, a simple exercise like “feel your feet” isn’t gonna do it. Remember? They can’t feel their feet in the first place.

These individuals need a better connection to their body. Perhaps, like Jung’s patient, they need to spend some time reconnecting to it— actually looking at it, for a start, or getting a massage. Self-massage can be a good technique, especially for hypermobile folks, to wake up the sensory map of our body in our brain. These individuals have a less acute sense of proprioception, which tells us where we are in space; rolling a ball under their foot, using stretchy bands, or giving them direct sensory feedback can help to improve that, at least temporarily.

These clients may also need more permanent assistance. In my case, I have to wear shoes that have an arch and a heel cup that my feet can feel, rather than a pure barefoot shoe. And a surprising thing that helps some folks is chewing gum, especially if they don’t have good molar contact. Our brains have a better sense of grounding when we can feel those teeth. Perhaps you, like many of my clients, are someone who’s already been chewing gum while they exercised— not knowing why it helped, but that it felt better.

De-pathologizing ungroundedness

“The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains its equilibrium just as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth compensations, and without these there would be neither a normal metabolism nor a normal psyche.”

-CG Jung, CW 16, par 330

I remember one particular session with my physical therapist. She had tested me for grounding— a simple, side-lying test where one’s feet are on the wall, and the examiner attempts to move the feet from the wall. Despite all my muscle— and I have a lot— I couldn’t resist the light push of her hand. Watching me walk across the room afterward, she said, “You walk like you’re floating… like you are trying not to touch the ground.”

The physical consequences of being ungrounded are quite real. In my own body, my ungroundedness makes it difficult for me to stabilize my body, literally. I tend to compensate with less-optimal movement patterns, or brace with my pelvic floor, neck, and jaw. These, according to Jung, are the very compensations he speaks of in a process that has gone too far; symptoms that are indicating my system is out of balance.

The truth is that I do consider myself, like Jung’s patient, “an exceedingly intuitive type.” If I had to choose between living on solid earth and walking on air, I’d pick the latter every time. This one-sidedness of my psyche (and body) must be balanced if I am to maintain equilibrium.

This lens— that we are simply self-regulating systems— is one of the reasons that I love Jung’s work so much. There’s no judgment, pathologization, or shame around the symptoms; simply the understanding that a process has “gone too far,” and must be adjusted. Jung goes on to say, “We do not stop feeling thirsty by repressing our thirst.” Just so, a lack of groundedness calls for more grounding; a process that some of us will repeat countless times throughout our lives.

I felt like a failure for many years.

• I failed to do anything constructive with my bachelor’s degree in Spanish.

• I failed to become the author or artist I thought I should be.

• I failed at two marriages (both ended in divorce).

• I failed to be a big success in the banking world, though I did hang on for 13 years.

• When I went and got a culinary arts degree next, I failed to turn that into a career.

Looking back, I’m kind of amazed that I was able to try new things. I had so much shame around my failures that I sometimes didn’t know how I could keep going.

But somewhere along the way, I realized that all these failures had also been successes. That each of these endeavors, no matter how painful or expensive, was a necessary part of my path.

And so, although I was scared to buy and run a yoga studio, I did, for over a decade.

And when I realized that I couldn’t keep running it, I saw it not as a failure, but as a necessary next step in my coaching career.

Most recently, I wasn’t afraid to embark on a masters degree in psychology, with the goal of becoming a therapist— because I understood that no matter how weird and tangled the path had been, it’s all been leading me here.

For some of us, all decisions are high-stakes

When I started my personal chef business (“The Happy Fork”), my brother Seth said to me, “Most businesses fail. It’s not a big deal if this isn’t a success.” What a tremendous comfort this was! At the time, even the smallest decision for me could feel incredibly high-stakes— let alone investing time and money into a second degree before I could even pay off the loans from the first degree, and into this new business.

Taking risks— even small ones— is harder for some of us than it is for others. In my work now, I meet a lot of people who tell me they are “overthinkers.”

“I just second-guess myself,” one of my clients said to me this week. “It seems like no matter what decision I make, it’s not the right one.”

Another client describes it as “analysis paralysis:” “I just don’t know what the right thing is to do.”

I find that in these cases, “overthinking” is less about actual “thinking.” It’s not that we don’t have enough information, or even that we don’t have enough experience to make a good decision. It’s about an underlying lack of trust in ourselves: we’re afraid to get it wrong.

Overthinking as survival strategy

For many folks, this kind of second-guessing, inability to make a decision, overthinking is rooted in childhood. In our earliest years, when we lack the complex understanding of why our caregivers aren’t able to meet our needs (whether physical, emotional, or social), we have no choice but to assume that we are the problem— and that if we can just get it right, we may be able to stay safe from a caregiver’s anger, or earn love from a distracted or tired parent, or survive in a hostile system (school, for example).

I know many people for whom this worked really well, actually. Being very careful about every decision earned them approval, got them good grades, helped them to succeed in their career, let them survive abusive relationships.

So, “overthinking” can be a brilliant strategy. We try to consider every angle; seek external advice; consider what other people would do. We’re always trying to get it right; meet some invisible, impossible standards; earn approval and acceptance from an unknown audience.

As adults continuing to use this strategy, we can spend hours in a mental back-and-forth, even for the smallest decisions. Which protein bar should I buy? Should I text this person back or not? Should I take a week off? Does my dog need arthritis medicine, or am I going overboard? Put the item in the cart. Take the item out of the cart. Read more reviews. Try again tomorrow.

Even these tiny, almost meaningless, decisions feel very big, because we put a tremendous amount of pressure on ourselves to get it right. We haven’t yet recognized that we’re operating under outdated logic. If I can just get it right, the thinking goes, I’ll be okay, safe, loved, protected.

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The cost of overthinking

For chronic overthinkers, there is a high energetic cost to using this strategy. Not only is it literally exhausting to always be second-guessing ourselves, we waste a tremendous amount of time and energy on things that we logically know don’t even matter that much. As one of my clients said to me recently, “My brain just never stops.” This is a huge drain on our minds, bodies, and souls.

At the same time, it’s hard to even imagine a different way of working, because it is so deeply ingrained in us to always do this extra work. And we’ve spent so long considering other people’s thoughts and views— perhaps even tailoring our decisions to someone else’s standards— that we’ve never cultivated our own sense of “what’s right for me.” Case in point: after my first divorce, I stayed in the next relationship well past its expiration date simply because I was afraid of what people would think if this one failed, too. Who was I pleasing? Were the people pleased? I certainly wasn’t.

Whenever we’ve overdeveloped our overthinking muscles, our “self-care” muscles are sure to be atrophied. We may even find it hard to imagine wanting something for ourselves. The idea of wanting something— just for us!— and making a decision to have it, with all the potential consequences that might bring, can feel foreign, frightening, even completely overwhelming.

“But what if I get it wrong?”- reframing failure

For overthinkers, the fear of getting it wrong can be completely paralyzing— because, in childhood, “getting it wrong” had such serious consequences.

Movement artist and improv instructor Elke Schroeder reframes this beautifully: “Failure is just going someplace you’ve never been.”

It can feel terrifying, even annihilating, to risk failure— but an important part of reclaiming our own agency is recognizing that we determine whether something is a success or failure.

Every “failure” I’ve experienced taught me something about who I was:

• who I needed to be internally;

• who I was in relationship with others;

• who I am in my work;

• who I am in the world.

Every one of my failures is an important part of my success story.

Exploring another way

So how do we work with this?

One of the simplest ways I suggest that clients start exploring overthinking in their own lives is to simply notice when we’re putting pressure on ourselves about a decision. That’s it! Just notice.

Simply noticing helps us to recognize that we are making a choice to pressure ourselves about this; and that the possibility exists that we could do this a different way. This may not be a choice we feel we can act on right now, but at least we can see what we are choosing to do in this moment.

Second, when we find ourselves stuck in an endless loop of overthinking, we can ask ourselves: what’s the scariest thing about making the wrong decision? What am I afraid of here?

There may be real consequences to consider— if we’re buying something expensive, or considering the end of a relationship, it makes sense to be thoughtful. But asking ourselves what we’re really afraid of can help us to identify why we might be stuck, and to remember what’s most important in making that decision.

Above all, understanding why we are using these strategies, and how they evolved in the first place, can help us to be more compassionate toward ourselves when we’re feeling frustrated and stuck with our thought patterns.

Free to fail

I was terrified to buy that yoga studio. In fact, I really didn’t want to. I had been running it for someone else, and he needed to sell it. “If you don’t want to buy it, I’ll find someone who does,” he told me. It felt like more than I could handle— the paperwork alone felt completely overwhelming, and I cried over QuickBooks more times than I care to remember. But what I learned, and gained, from that decade of business ownership, and client work, was priceless.

Our culture values positivity and certainty so much that we forget how important “failure” is. If failure is, as Elke says, going “somewhere we’ve never been,” how else could we possibly arrive at a new place in our lives?

Each of us has to find our own way, of course, and I have come to trust that as my clients reclaim their sense of agency and power, they naturally begin to find what’s “right for me.” They can take bigger “risks;” they spend less and less time overthinking; they’ve given themselves freedom to fail.

A yoga class may seem an unlikely place to encounter what Jung called “the shadow,” but it’s actually a great place to observe these dynamics at work.

What is “the shadow?” According to Jung, a person’s shadow holds all of the split-off, repressed, disallowed parts that they were never able to integrate consciously into their personality. This can include what we think of as our negative qualities— anger, for example, if we are someone who long ago learned to be “nice;” stinginess, if we’re someone who feels we always have to be generous and giving.

You spot it, you got it

Jung believed (and I agree) that our psyches are “a self-regulating system that maintains itself in equilibrium;” that is, we’re always seeking wholeness. While our ego might think it’s running the show, our shadow is generally leaking out all over the place, trying to express itself. So, the person who thinks they’re generous could be stingy with tipping; or the person who’s always so sweet has a passive-aggressive streak when it comes to gossiping. Still, these are like secrets we keep from our conscious selves, so while others might see these behaviors, we manage not to “know.”

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So then, the easiest way to recognize our shadow is by the classic AA aphorism, “You spot it, you’ve got it.” The very things we complain about most bitterly; the qualities we loathe in others; that detestable thing that person does— these are clear flags proclaiming, “That’s my sh*t!”

But it works in the other direction, too. Who are we envious of? Who do we put on a pedestal? About whom do we think, “Oh, I could never do what they’re doing.” 1This, too, is a red flag: what is it in this person that we are refusing to consciously own?

When we can't own these disowned parts of ourselves, they go looking for somewhere to land, and often that somewhere is another person. This is what we call “projection”: seeing our shadow material in everyone else while denying it in ourselves.

Projections aren’t bad. They can be demonizations, but they can also be hopes, expectations, or idealizations: all of the ways in which other people hold an image of someone else.

We are always engaging in some level of projection; seeing in others the parts of ourselves that we are unable or unwilling to claim.

The human experiment that is group fitness

This brings us tidily to today’s subject.

Can you recall a group exercise instructor, or yoga teacher, or team coach, from your past? Think back and recall what you thought or felt about that person, or, perhaps, how others seemed to conceptualize them. Were they treated as a real person, or as an idealized version of what others think or feel they should be? It’s likely that at least some of the class participants (if not you) were engaged in some level of projection.

In my experience, fitness instructors are uniquely positioned to hold a hefty burden of projection. Why is this? Because they can seem to have something that certain others want, but find difficult. Health, enthusiasm for exercise, mobility, strength, a positive attitude, determination— these are just a few of the projections I can think of. And yoga teachers in particular may be particularly subject to what can feel like an almost unbearable burden of others’ projections, because of the additional (pseudo?-) spiritual element that yoga entails.

In my 13 years owning a yoga studio, I consistently witnessed yoga teachers being treated as though they were an idealized someone else rather than an actual person. They held projections of what students think their yoga teacher should be. Healthy, spiritual, relentlessly positive, natural, vegan, a good listener, able to hold others’ pain, wise, compassionate, understanding, caring.

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We could also see it as a specific role that is being projected onto the person: guru, messiah, therapist (despite a lack of qualifications), teacher, mysterious would-be lover, the mother they never had, or the child they wish they could relate to.

If teachers hold personal projections, studio owners also hold the projection of being responsible for the space itself-- the holder of the sacred flame, so to speak. For me, this was a community projection so big it threatened to swallow me whole. Even six years later, when someone talks to me about the studio, I am aware of the weight of their memories, and how different theirs are from mine. It’s meaningful to me that the studio served so many people in so many ways; but the reality of cleaning up sweaty mats and dealing with the seasonal flux of clients (feast or famine in our snowbird FL town!) long ago collapsed the projections I personally held for the space.

The mechanics of projection

For the teacher or instructor, this can be pretty heady stuff. We may really want to identify with that projection. I can think of several teachers who became completely inflated with their idea of themselves in this role. And I’m not immune, either, of course. Who doesn’t want to be seen as wise, compassionate, etc? This is how we can get ourselves into pretty big trouble, not to mention scope-of-practice issues.

Still, some amount of projection is healthy, and even helpful. In a therapeutic relationship, projection is called transference. This is the means by which a client can work through old relationship or internal patterns in a safe environment— by projecting thoughts, ideas, and roles onto the practitioner. Similarly, it can be tremendously helpful for a student to see behavior modeled in their yoga teacher, coach, or fitness instructor that they’d like to take on themselves. To a certain extent, it doesn’t matter that it’s idealized, if it helps us to imagine that we might be able to do that, too.

How do we recognize projection? One clue is that it feels as though the person holding the projection isn’t actually talking to the real person-- it’s like they’re talking to someone else, or their idea of who they’d like them to be. As a yoga teacher, for example, when a student would talk to me, it would sometimes literally feel like they were talking to someone else. I didn’t feel seen for who I was.

Taking back (or, handing back!) the projection

In my experience, holding these projections can feel comfortable, at least for a while; an illusion of a relationship that may serve both parties. But it can also feel like a tremendous amount of pressure. As the holder of a projection, we may unconsciously feel like we have to live up to unrealistic expectations, or risk disappointing others. One of my early mentors taught me to question this by asking, “What is my conscious agreement with this person?” This reframe helps us recognize where shadow material is operating, so that we’re not absorbing what isn’t ours to carry.

Some projections can fade away harmlessly. Sometimes, however, projections don’t allow us to grow into our authentic selves, and they hold us back from true intimacy with others.

We may find we need to hand back a projection, or refuse to hold it. This can be tricky in certain situations. I can think of one yoga teacher I know who had to duck out of an unwelcome kiss multiple times. And I’ll never forget the client who called me “b*tch” in the lobby of my own studio when I let him know I didn’t want to date him.

Inevitably, most projections collapse. We recognize that the person we have on a pedestal can’t live up to what we’ve imagined. We see our spin instructor smoking a cigarette in her car, or our yoga teacher guru is caught sleeping with a student. At this point, the energy that we have invested in that projection returns to us, and we can decide what to do with it. Is there a more realistic, grounded way to appreciate that individual? What was it we so admired in that person— and can we cultivate that in ourselves, now that we recognize it consciously? This is a critical moment for growth. Perhaps we can develop a healthier working relationship with another while expanding our own view of ourselves.

We see in others what we cannot face in ourselves.

Withdrawing projections and reckoning with our own shadow is difficult and painful work. Jung said, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” At the same time, I believe, this is necessary and moral work that we can do to decrease the level of suffering, not just in our lives, but in the world.

During the years that I held others’ projections of a yoga teacher and studio owner, I sometimes felt that not only did people not know me, they didn’t WANT to know who I really was. At the time, I didn’t know what to do with all the projections that I was holding for my clients and students. I wish I could go back in time and tell studio-owner Laura that she can relax. My conscious agreement with my clients was to teach yoga and maintain the studio. Other people’s projections are their business, not ours.

Yes, when our projections fall away, and we see the other as a human, it can be disappointing. But it’s also a tremendous opportunity. We’re forced to see what’s missing in our own lives-- or we find somewhere else to hang that projection.

“If there is no enemy within, then no enemy from without can harm you.”

-Kwame Scruggs

I woke up at 6:30 am last week, rolled over, and picked up my phone. I had ten missed texts, and as I opened “Messages,” I saw another one pop onto the screen. Each was identical.. “You have received a new message from Susan Johnson1,” it said, cheerily. “The message is in your Cantata Health Solutions Inbox.”

Walking into the kitchen to start the dogs’ breakfast routine, I found myself smiling, even as I shook my head. Susan— my internship supervisor— who’d been on family leave, was apparently back to work, and catching up on a month of my documentation. Each of these messages meant a separate error for me to address in a client file— often something as simple as a typo or an extra space. Still, the corrections were sure to be time-consuming, on a day when I had countless other things to do.

What a way to start the day, I thought. But at the same time, I noticed something different. My stress level hadn’t spiked at the incoming texts. I wasn’t feeling a rush of cortisol, paranoia or fear about what exactly the messages might be. In fact, I found it kind of funny— and typical— that my supervisor was up at 6 am taking a metaphorical red pen to all of my work.

Things looked quite different nine months ago, when I sat in my supervisor’s office, reviewing these same client files. She pointed out error after error, as I scrambled to write notes quickly enough to keep up. I finally gave up trying to write down what she was saying and just let her words wash over me. I felt, in turns, hopelessly ashamed, furiously angry, and completely numb. It was not a high point in my career.

Because we are a community mental health agency who receives funding from Medicaid, our documentation must be bulletproof. Client statements must be included, and worded in a particular way; a minimum of three sentences in each of the (many, many) sections; everything pointing back to the treatment plan, and diagnosis, so that it was always clear that what we were doing was “medically necessary.” This is critical both so that the agency continues to receive funding, and so that the clients can continue to receive care.

Yet for me— a Jungian-oriented practitioner— it felt like the world’s most massive waste of time. Not only do I prefer not to diagnose, my notes are more likely to include client dreams, images of their drawings, and my own shorthand— none of which was Medicaid-approved. Worse, I hate details. I’m terrible at them, and filling out all of these fields in a precise way is exactly the kind of work that I will always mess up. In short, I was terrible at this part of the job.

But there was something else going on, too. As my supervisor, Susan’s job was to make sure that I learned how to do this, and do it well. She was relentless in pointing out every error (“You should have said ‘stated,’ not ‘reported’”). I chafed under this scrutiny; I was in a near-constant state of stress around it. Any email, text, or even the thought of her, spiked my blood pressure and sent my pulse racing.

I asked myself again and again, ‘Why am I letting this stress me out so much? Why can’t I just let it go?’ Glenn, my partner, said (correctly), ‘I think it feels like time is passing more slowly because you’re thinking about it even when you’re not there.’ My peers suggested I just ‘play along’ and not let it bother me. I just couldn’t do it.

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My “good girl” complex

Long before Internal Family Systems popularized the concept of “parts,” Jung recognized that each of us contains a variety of inner figures or personalities, which he called “complexes.” These complexes operate like automatic programs that step in as needed to help (or hinder) us. When we’re triggered by a thought or a signal in our environment, the complex comes online, making us behave in ways that are often quite contrary to our usual way of being.

I have long known that I have what some people might call a “perfectionist” complex. I actually think of it as my “good girl” complex— one that dates back to kindergarten, when I learned that it was desperately important for me to “do a good job” in school; to (literally) color in the lines; to follow the rules. This strategy served me well— I struggled with fitting in, being part of the group, and conforming to school rules. My complex helped “keep me in line,” making sure that I was always working hard, doing my best, earning good grades, getting approval.

Complexes aren’t a bad thing, actually. A little bit of a “good girl” complex is healthy. But mine had grown so outsized that even at almost fifty years old, the idea that I was not doing a good job, making mistakes, not being a good girl — this was enough to send me into a near-panic.

Finding the enemy

For some of us, it’s easier to rail against the “enemy without.” We see injustice at every turn; we blame others, rather than ourselves. Often, this takes the form of projection, where we see in others the qualities that we don’t want to face in ourselves.

For others— especially for those of us who were raised to be “good girls and boys”— we are far more likely to blame and shame ourselves. In these cases, it can be an important developmental step to recognize that there actually is an enemy out there, in the form of racism, misogyny, ableism, classism, etc.

For the first few months of the internship, I clearly felt that Susan, or at least the Western mental health industrial complex, was “the enemy.” I was resentful that I had to participate in this system that often felt like it was doing more harm than good. I was angry that I had to waste my time with repetitive, banal documentation rather than doing “real work.”

But on the inner level, more than anything, I was defending myself from my own shadow; from my own fear of inadequacy. Every meeting I had with my supervisor forced me to recognize that I was just not that good at some of these things: diagnosing, making treatment plans, writing notes for managed care. And while I really didn’t care about these skills at all, what I was responding to was an ancient— or very young, actually— fear. Because the fear of not being a “good girl,” is really a fear of not being loved, accepted, as I am.

Terrifying, actually.

“If there is no enemy within, then no enemy from without can harm you.”

For an integral part of the work is the… “black shadow” which everybody carries with him, the inferior and therefor hidden aspect of the personality, the weakness that goes with every strength, the night that follows every day, the evil in the good. The realization of this fact is naturally coupled with the danger of falling victim to the shadow. But the danger also brings with it the possibility of deciding not to be the victim. A visible enemy is always better than an invisible one.

—CG Jung, An Account of the Transference Phenomena Based on the Illustrations to the ‘Rosarium Philosophorum’

My year of internship, then, served as exposure therapy. The constant discomfort of the situation forced me to face this complex head on. In it, I found the enemy— a scared little five year-old, who was afraid she’d never fit in, never be “good enough.” I brought her into the light of consciousness, and found that together we could make mistakes, and still be loved.

Mythologist Kwame Scruggs, who uses myth and storytelling to assist in human development, frequently shares the following quote:

“If there is no enemy within, then no enemy from without can harm you.”

I return to this quote frequently, and share it with so many people, because it so perfectly encapsulates the concept of the complex, and the choice that we have to work with it.

Our complexes often form at early ages, as we learn to split off the parts of ourselves that are unwelcome, or untenable in our lives. These can stem from personal or family dynamics (expected roles in the family, etc.), or larger cultural ones (racism, homophobia). In many cases, they may originate from “an enemy without”— something potentially harmful in the environment or family system that poses a real threat.

As we mature, we carry these complexes with us. Sometimes they are integrated easily; others, like the one I’ve shared here, operate largely in the shadow until they become a problem that can no longer be ignored.

The “enemy without” often still exists. There was, in my case, a real threat and consequence to not adhering to the internship guidelines. Similarly, a failure to comply with documentation rules carries a penalty for the agency itself. Yet it was “the enemy within” that was the real problem.

One of the hallmarks of a complex, Jung wrote, is that it is "the image of a certain psychic situation which is strongly accentuated emotionally and is, moreover, incompatible with the habitual attitude of consciousness." The "good girl" complex, when it takes over, feels like a fight-or-flight situation.

Returning to last week— and the eleven texts notifying me of my mistakes— it is remarkable to notice how much more energy, space, and life force is available to me now that there’s no “enemy within.” Correcting the errors took some time, but it wasn’t a big deal. On the other hand, living with an activated complex, as I had been earlier in the year, is exhausting. The enemy without is far less burdensome when we’ve befriended the inner one.

I also want to thank those of you who have upgraded your subscription. Your support is so incredibly helpful. Writing these pieces from scratch is a labor of love. As a thank you, paid subscribers get unlimited access to my library of streaming recorded classes (like the one at the bottom of this post!)

Finally, here’s a periodic reminder that all of my writing is educational in nature and not a substitute for qualified mental health support. Please seek out support if you need it.

In the mental health world, when we talk about dissociation, it’s often as a negative thing. This is certainly not true of all practitioners (thank goodness), but speaking in generalities, the idea— as with all symptoms— is that dissociation is a problem that needs to be addressed.

What is dissociation? The DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) defines it as “a disruption of and/or discontinuity in the normal integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, perception, body representation, motor control, and behavior.”

In other words, dissociation is a way in which we disconnect from our present moment. As you can see by the broad definition above, this can mean a lot of things. Some of us just kind of “space out,” or “go somewhere else” for a while. We may still be able to pilot our bodies, but we’re not really present.

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Some individuals may know that they’re dissociating; others are not aware. Some people are floating above their bodies; others just feel really, really tired, or inexplicably sleepy. And at the far end of the spectrum, in what the DSM-V calls “Dissociative Identity Disorder,” there may be distinctly different personality states that emerge.1

Dissociation could be seen as the shadow side of embodiment— which, in the wellness world, can lead to the misguided notion that dissociation is bad, and embodiment is good. Of course it’s not that simple.

Dissociation is an adaptive response

Like all neurobiological responses, dissociation serves an important purpose. When faced with danger, all animals engage a basic defense system. Allan Schore, citing researchers Gabrielsen and Smith, says that

“In reaction to an environmental threat (a predator), an organism can respond in various ways: It can display offensive behavior, aggression (fight) or locomotor flight (associated with a fear state). In addition to the active defense of fight-flight, these authors also describe two different types of parasympathetic passive defenses: freezing and paralysis.”

Allan Schore, The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy

It is in this paralysis response, which Schore calls “deep freeze,” that we are completely dissociated, no longer alert or present to the danger. This can be life-saving with regard to the predator (i.e., we’ve successfully feigned dead), but it also preserves us from the terror or pain that would otherwise overwhelm us.

C-PTSD and dissociation

In the case of developmental trauma, says Schore, emotions themselves are a life-threatening event. Without a caregiver to co-regulate them, an infant’s brain must initiate a dissociative shutdown because the overwhelming emotional response is greater than their biological systems can handle.

Dissociation, then, is a life-saving strategy. Yet there is a high cost to our nervous systems and overall health if we are continually engaging this system when it’s not absolutely necessary.

For those who live with C-PTSD or PTSD, dissociation can be triggered by events that feel threatening even when the individual logically “knows” they’re not. A text message from a friend or family member can literally feel like life or death. And because the response is autonomic and below the level of conscious control, we feel completely helpless.

This is where right-brain, relational work— the kind we do with an attuned teacher, coach, therapist or other helping professional— can be used to rewire our right-hemisphere emotional regulation system. Schore’s work affirms that, over time, we create greater capacity to regulate ourselves and stay present, so that we no longer have to dissociate.

Mindful dissociation

Now that we understand why involuntary dissociation happens, we’re in a better position to think about why we might choose to dissociate.

Right now, as you’re reading this, you are dissociating. I am, too! In every moment of our lives, we have the potential to be inundated by sensory data. This can be external: the hum of the air conditioner, the barking of a dog, far-off thunder in the distance; or internal: an ache in a muscle, the beat of your heart, the throb of a dehydration headache (I’m pausing to drink some water right now). Then, too, there are the emotional and mental events: that thing your friend said, what’s for dinner tonight, should I buy a new pair of shoes?

Can you imagine how overwhelming it would be if we were able to pay attention to all of these at once? We have to dissociate in order to focus on what’s essential for us in each moment.2 This is where what I’m calling “mindful dissociation” comes in.

Mindful dissociation is an aspect of meditative awareness. It’s a tricky thing: if someone says, “don’t think about your breathing,” what do you immediately do? You think about your breathing.

The practice is to be able to hold your awareness on something else instead. Rather than tell you not to think about your breathing, I would ask you to notice something else: the texture object in your hand, or the sound of a ticking clock, or whatever. We get better at paying attention to something else, so that we can “dissociate” from the other thing.

This kind of dissociation is a skillset that all endurance athletes possess. In order to run, or bike, or swim long distances, they have to find something to focus on that is not the signals their body is sending them about how bad they’re feeling.

You’ve probably experienced this, too. When you go for a long walk and your feet start to hurt, the more you think about your feet hurting, the worse it gets, right? We train ourselves instead to listen to our music, or to count our steps, or to focus on how good we’re going to feel when it’s done. 3 We are retraining our brains to dissociate for our own benefit.

Mindful dissociation has a great carryover effect to all areas of our lives. We are learning to focus on what we choose, rather than being caught up in stressful thoughts or sensations. Wouldn’t this be helpful this might be the next time someone at work, or the grocery store, is getting on your very last nerve?

I have found this especially helpful in working with individuals living with the effects of PTSD and C-PTSD. The simple practice of focusing on a neutral (non-threatening) stimulus, coupled with relational support, becomes a template for greater embodied presence over time. It builds agency, capacity and confidence for increased emotional regulation.

Dissociating body parts

There’s one last way that we sometimes talk about “dissociation” in the movement world that might be helpful to consider. Okay, it’s a little bit of a reach, but I think it actually works— because it’s going to give us an opportunity to explore mindful dissociation in our bodies.

Unless we have a lot of experience in movement, or a background in athletics, most modern humans are kind of clueless about “what’s happening” when we move our bodies. We find it difficult to know how to (for example) twist our torso without moving our hips, or our head; we try to move just our big toe, and the whole foot has to come along.

Learning to dissociate one body part from another can be an interesting (though often frustrating) experiment. Even if we “fail,” it inevitably generates more awareness. We are learning to pay attention to something, and practicing letting go of something else at the same time.

In the video below, you can practice with me as we try to dissociate our ribs, shoulder blades, and spine (skip to around 2:55 to get right to the movement stuff— I start out by talking about what you just read!).

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“It is a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, ‘homeostasis,’ i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him… if architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.”

—Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning ‘

When I was first learning to be a yoga teacher, it was common to hear cues like, “relax your jaw,” “soften your face,” and “let your shoulders melt down your back.” Like most other yoga teachers, I began to include these in my classes. After all, the goal was to feel better, right? We want to let go of all of that tension, and really relax.

As I spent the next decade (and more) learning about humans, neurobiology, physiology, and psychology, I began to use these “let go of your tension” cues less and less. Instead, I would say, “notice where there’s tension,” or “see if you can just observe your experience, without needing to change it.”

Why would I shift from “release your tension” to “notice your tension?” Because I found that rather than trying to get rid of the tension, inviting people to accept themselves as they are in the current moment was a better solution to eventually change that tension pattern for good.

Reconsidering tension

When we talk about tension, it’s almost always as something to be eradicated, soothed away, released, dissolved. Guided meditations encourage us to smooth our forehead, or relax our jaw. We ask our massage therapist to help us get the knots out of our shoulders and neck- “I’m just so tense!,” we say. We invest in Botox treatments to soften our tension, and the tell-tale wrinkles it creates.

The truth is much more complicated. Tension is an essential element in our lives. Tension is engagement. Not only do we tense (engage) our muscles in dynamic patterns to move our bodies— each of us is literally held together by tension. Our myofascial tissue is suspended around our bones in a dynamic, tension-dependent system that flexes, stretches, compresses, balances, and propels us through the world. Without tension— without engagement— our skeleton would collapse in a heap on the floor.

At the same time, it’s true that tension often feels very uncomfortable, and it can have negative effects. I can attest that jaw-clenching, tooth-grinding, shoulder gripping, and tension headaches are all really unpleasant.

In Jungian psychology, we understand all symptoms— including muscular and psychic patterns of tension— as meaningful and useful communications from our body/mind system. With this in mind, rather than trying to eliminate tension, we can ask: what is this tension trying to tell me? What problem is it trying to resolve? What does this tension need, or want, and where is it trying to take me?

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Fight or flight: the physical tension of unresolved stress

Much of what we think of as negative tension is the result of an ongoing or habitually unresolved stress cycle in the body. When our bodies are under threat, our nervous system reacts by engaging muscular tension— either to run from danger, or to defend ourselves. As a result, we breathe with our accessory breathing muscles (neck and shoulders); another pattern of tension. This is an incredible physiological process designed to keep us safe.

When defense systems become overwhelmed or we are unable to complete the stress cycle, we can get “stuck” in these patterns of tension. However, attempting to soothe away the tension will only have limited or short-term results because we haven’t yet dealt with the underlying issue.

If you’ve ever had the experience of enjoying a really relaxing massage or a relaxing restorative yoga session, only to be swept up afterward in a rebound of anxiety, stress, or panic afterward, then you are familiar with this mechanism. "Relaxation-induced anxiety" occurs when we artificially override the stress response through deep breathing or massage—essentially turning off our alarm system. But when environmental stressors remain, the alarm comes back on more insistent than ever.

Rather than treating our tension as some sort of wrinkle to be ironed out, we can recognize it as a useful and protective adaptation, and find ways to discharge the stress energy (through movement, for example) so that our nervous system feels safer. At the same time, we might work on ways to create more of a sense of felt safety in our own body by integrating mindful strength work. Core strength, posterior chain engagement and hand/grip strength are just a few of the ways that we can increase our sense of internal capacity. When the body feels more capable of dealing with threat, the nervous system has less of a need to armor against it. We can use our internal systems of tension to support us.

Tension makes a meaningful life

“The greater the tension, the greater is the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.”

—CG Jung, “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon”

I was speaking to a friend this morning about one of our favorite current TV shows, House of the Dragon. We were discussing the possibility that our favorite character— Daemon Targaryen— would be killed off soon. “I don’t think they’re gonna kill him off next episode,” my friend said. “We’ve barely seen him this season.”

What she was reflecting was that this particular character lends a necessary tension to the series. Without him, the plot line (or at least certain parts of it) would be flat, boring, uninteresting. In fact, the series is hinting at his upcoming demise to introduce even more tension. We know it’s coming, and we can’t wait to see what’s going to happen.

Tension may not feel good in our bodies, but it is what creates interest and meaning. Remember that we defined tension as “engagement”— tension tells us that something is happening. Take Joseph Campbell’s quote below (taken from his incredible interview with Bill Moyer on The Power of Myth):

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”

Yet holding this tension can be deeply uncomfortable, as I wrote about in the post linked below. We have to find ways of being comfortable within this discomfort.

Finding Balance

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.”

―Jelaluddin Rumi

We’ve established that tension is a necessary part of our lives— but at the same time, I’m not recommending that we must simply white-knuckle our way through life. When we are in pain, or suffering, or tension is wracking our whole system, there may be moments where we need to ease that tension in order to keep going. Here, I always think of Rumi’s quote (above), which reminds us that life is a series of expansion and contraction, tension and relaxation.

If all things are going well in our lives, we should be able to engage with challenge, experiencing more tension. Then, the tension resolves temporarily, and we get to rest and live life with a little more ease for a while.

However, there are times— especially when systemic forces feel they’ll overwhelm us, and there is no reprieve in sight— where we will need to seek refuge from tension. In these moments, we should absolutely engage in self-care: massage, restorative yoga, whatever it is that helps us to sustain ourselves so that we can engage in the longer-term work of our lives. My argument here isn’t that we should necessarily encourage more tension, or avoid practices to feel better.

Rather, it’s that our culture’s tendency to treat tension as some sort of moral wrong, or as an existential threat is, ironically, a threat to our own species’ survival. In fact, Jung saw this ability as existentially critical:

“I think it depends on how many people can stand the tension of the opposites in themselves. If enough can do so, I think the situation will just hold, and we shall be able to creep around innumerable threats and thus avoid the worst catastrophe of all: the final clash of opposites in an atomic war.”

-CG Jung, quoted in Barbara Hannah’s Jung: His Life & Work

Our ability to tolerate tension is precisely what will save us.

My client paused on her way out the door. She set down her empty tea mug, and began to arrange the artist’s model that sat on the shelf nearby as she talked to me. “I don’t know why this was so hard for me today,’ she said. “I keep wanting to justify why I struggle with what we’re doing. But I guess it doesn’t really matter.”

As she stepped away, I looked at the way she’d rearranged the wooden model, and I began to laugh helplessly. “Look at its limbs,” I said. “Is that right?” “Oh my God,” she responded. “No. I just can’t seem to GET it.”

Trauma & movement

Unless you’re someone who specifically works with the body, you might be surprised to hear that trauma- whether it’s the shock trauma of PTSD or the longer-term, pervasive trauma of C-PTSD— has a profound effect on how our bodies function and move.

But trauma affects more than just our minds or our emotions— it creates new patterns of breathing, movement, and posture. This isn’t a mistake, or some kind of design flaw— these patterns are either a part of a strategy to keep us safe in the world, or they are a side effect of some other physiological change that our bodies have taken on for survival.

These patterns in the body can include armoring of various kinds— a kind of continuous bracing against life’s challenges; breathing patterns (you can listen to my colleague and I talk about these here). One common stress pattern that I see is one of external rotation and spinal extension (you can read more about this here). But really, each of us has our own particular body signature, the ways in which our life stories are stamped into our patterns of moving, breathing, and being with others in the world.

Developmental trauma, “early walkers,” & adult movement patterns

In the case of developmental trauma, our movement patterns may simply never have had a chance to develop as they would have otherwise. Developmental trauma refers to chronic, early-life stress, or an environmental or caregiver failure during those early years which disrupts our emotional, neurological, and relational development.

Even under almost-ideal circumstances, things can go “wrong” in these early years that may be easily missed. One of the most important milestones that can happen in a child’s development is crawling. While parents may brag that their kids were “early walkers,” a child who does not spend adequate time crawling is missing a critical part of their development for both brain and body.

Contralateral movement: why does it matter?

Crawling is important for many reasons. It’s our body’s first iteration of contralateral movement. Contralateral movement is a pattern in which we move our opposite arms and legs in opposition— so, we crawl by moving our right knee with our left hand, and then switching to left knee with right hand, and so on. It also sets us up for proper adult gait, using the same contralateral pattern: our right leg steps forward as our left arm swings forward, etc.

Learning to crawl helps babies develop an internal rhythm that will guide them throughout their lives. It teaches us how to use our stabilizing muscles of the core: hip, abdominal, diaphragm, and paraspinal muscles. It gives us better balance and stability overall— something that can be noticeably missing in individuals who missed this step.

In the video below, I’m practicing a simple variation where we pick up the contralateral limbs, feel the wobbliness, and then take them for a crawl. If you try this with me, you may be surprised to see how very difficult it is. Even individuals who had an optimal developmental period and crawled well may have picked up some compensatory patterns over the years that make this hard.

And for individuals— like the client above— who were not able to learn to crawl due to what we might call “environmental failure”— it can feel almost impossible to know how to do this. They’re learning something that is fundamentally human, but feels, as my client says, “really wrong.”

The corpus callosum- the bridge between our brains

Contralateral movement—such as crawling and walking, which both engage opposite limb movements—engages the corpus callosum1, the structure responsible for interhemispheric activity. Connecting the right and left hemispheres of the brain, the corpus callosum underlies a wide range of cognitive and motor functions that depend on both sides of the brain working in concert, including reading, writing, balance, spatial awareness, and emotional and cognitive processing.

Its development and integrity have meaningful implications across the lifespan. In infancy, corpus callosum size is positively associated with rolling over—a precursor to crawling—suggesting its role begins early in motor development. Yet this development is not guaranteed: children who have experienced abuse during key developmental periods, or who carry a PTSD diagnosis, have been found to have a smaller corpus callosum than their counterparts23. A smaller corpus callosum, in turn, is associated with delays in response time4, and in elderly individuals, atrophy of this structure corresponds with decreased motor coordination, including mobility, balance, and proprioception5.

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While research remains limited, there is some evidence that physical therapy—particularly when it includes aerobic exercise—may help prevent or delay this atrophy, pointing to movement itself as a potential protective factor for the very structure that movement depends on.

All of this is not enough evidence to suggest that learning to move contralaterally as an adult can ameliorate the effects of early childhood trauma on the corpus callosum6. In my experience, however, there is still tremendous benefit to re-learning these basic human patterns.

Learning to walk

So how are these folks moving through life, if they’re not walking with contralateral gait? To be fair, most of us don’t have anything close to “optimal” human gait, for a variety of reasons. We are profoundly asymmetrical; we have injuries that change how we walk; we carry something (like a phone )in our right hand all the time; we wear shoes that change our stride; we lack the strength in our core, hips, etc., to properly support us. Psychological patterns show up here, too, of course— we slouch, we shuffle, we sway. Intentionally or not, our walk conveys something about who and how we are to the world.

So there’s a lot of value to “re-learn” how to walk for all of us— because walking well is more than just how we move through the world. Walking contralaterally with a more optimal gait helps us to maintain our core and hip muscles. It creates natural stability to support our back and organs. It maintains healthy pressure in our gut and pelvic floor— so we don’t have digestive or reproductive issues. It’s not exaggerating to say that changing your gait can be profoundly life-changing for all dimensions of our lives.

In the video clip below, I’m demonstrating how we can practice contralateral movement in walking by stepping the back foot forward as we swing the arms (feel free to practice with me here- it’s five minutes of stepping your foot forward and back, and again, you might be surprised what you find).

It was a variation on this activity that had my client feeling so frustrated. What looked so simple was mind-blowing. Over and over again, she reverted to swinging the same-side arm forward with the same leg as her brain fought to hold on to a pattern that had been keeping her safe for many, many years.

A trauma-informed approach

Unwinding patterns of any kind can be a discouraging task— there are so many layers that need to be peeled back. In the case of C-PTSD, there are often additional barriers that need to be met with kindness and patience; we want to be mindful not to blast through a protective layer that has been guarding emotional vulnerability. Dissociation, frustration, rage, and overwhelming grief are common as we travel back with the client to a time period when they should have been able to learn how to move and breathe, but were simply not able to.

Even more critical is that practitioners— whether that’s personal trainer or body worker, therapist, coach, or physical therapist— have a unique opportunity here to “reprogram” the client’s brain through relational work.

The first 24 months of our lives are both when we learn to crawl, and when we form attachments that will create the neuronal foundation for affect regulation. That is, if we have what Winnicott called a “good-enough” attachment figure at that age, we’ll be better able to regulate our emotions as grown-ups. Clients who struggle with fundamental patterns- like the one we’re discussing— may also be likely to struggle with emotional regulation.

This is incredibly important: not only can we relearn movement patterns as adults, but we can also relearn attachment patterns by changing the underlying brain structures through psychobiological attunement. Clinicians who can successfully recognize, resonate with, and regulate their clients’ emotions are creating change in their clients’ brains that leads to better self-regulation7. This has profound implications for client work; we can address physical, mental, and emotional patterns on multiple levels simultaneously. In fact, for those clients who do live with C-PTSD, if we fail to address the relational patterns, we are unlikely to succeed at shifting any of the other patterns; it’s that foundational.

That incident with my client happened several months ago. She said of the experience of working through the contralateral exercises together, “I was surprised how emotional that was… how difficult.” She has continued to practice on her own— and she’s thriving in all kinds of ways.

I had left the artist’s model the way she left it, as a reminder to myself to keep it in mind for our work together. Just the other day as she was leaving, she paused again to look at it.

“Oh,” she said. “This isn’t right.” And without a second thought, she easily rearranged it to look like this:

What more is there to say? The pattern she’d never gotten to learn was finally as natural and easy as it was always meant to be.

“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

In recent posts, I’ve discussed how Jung’s transcendent function brings mind and body together to make meaning— and how difficult this can be in a materialistic world. Add on to this the challenges of our day-to-day lives, and the very real financial and logistical challenges most of us face, and we might ask: who has time, or money, to try to find meaning in our lives? I’m just trying to survive.

But it’s meaning itself that gives shape to our suffering; that contextualizes the ongoing pain of growth; that allows us to understand why our suffering matters in the first place.

The privilege of higher needs

This was highlighted recently during a group class for adults with disabilities that I was co-facilitating at my internship site. The topic was “Money Management.” The group had been tasked with differentiating “wants” from “needs.” We were sitting outside at a park, with a whiteboard we’d brought with us.

This group of people, all of whom were living on a limited income— and who are facing drastic cuts due to our government’s changes to Social Security and Medicaid— were having to decide what in their life constituted a “want,” and what was a “need.” Some things were easy: food, transportation, housing costs. These all went down on the board under “Needs.” Then one young woman (let’s call her Jenny) called out, “Dance classes,” and my co-facilitator paused. “Is that a need?” he prompted. “Or is that a want?”

“I need those classes to keep me mentally healthy,” she said. I wrote “dance class” under “Needs,” and the class moved on, but I kept thinking about Jenny’s comment. I happen to know that this client’s dance classes do indeed represent a need for her. They offer a physical and mental benefit, but more importantly, they offer her an important source of meaning in her life. She loves practicing, dancing, performing, being part of a team.

Our cultural ideas about “wants vs. needs” are based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which positions our “basic needs” at the bottom of the pyramid, and the “higher needs” at the top:

Maslow’s “self-actualization” correlates to Jung’s idea of individuation— where we get to become who we were always meant to be. According to this pyramid shape, we only get to care about “meaning” when alllllll of the other needs are met.

This kind of hierarchical thinking pervades our social support systems, down to the details of what kind of food we will let people buy with food stamps. It’s built directly into our managed care systems as well. In order for a client to receive mental health services through Medicaid, providers must prove that the services are “medically necessary.” Due to scarce funding, sessions are parceled out meagerly, and as soon as possible, clients are encouraged to “graduate” from therapy so that others with more urgent needs can take their spot. Within this system, mental health support is a first-aid situation. The idea of finding meaning, self-fulfillment, or self-actualization feels frivolous; a privilege most of us cannot afford.

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Of course, it is most urgent to feed hungry people and get them out of danger. But the idea that “higher” needs such as social needs, self-esteem, and self-actualization must be completely set aside until their “survival” needs are met is a dangerous oversimplification. The need for human connection, for life’s meaning, is inherent to all beings— not just those who can afford to make it to the top of a pyramid. A life without these higher needs is bleak; it becomes mere survival. Take, for example, the Romanian orphans who were deprived of human contact as children. Despite being fed and sheltered, the lack of early attachment led to profoundly detrimental effects on their mental and physical health. Connection and meaning are necessities. We’ve got our “basic needs” wrong.

Making stress meaningful

When Jenny said, “I need these dance classes,” she challenged everything that Maslow, and the United States government, would suggest she should have on a limited budget.

I was facing a parallel dilemma. I was deep in the final stretch of grad school. The previous semester, I’d had Covid and just could not seem to recover— at a time when work, family, and school stress were extremely high, and the relentless news cycle was only making things worse.

I’d cut back on my group exercise classes, in an effort to conserve both financial resources, and my own energy. But rather than make me feel better, this cutting back felt worse, and my health continued to decline. Finally, in frustration and desperation, I decided I’d pick up a few classes again: rowing, strength training— just to see what happened. And it was just then that our trainer suggested that we start preparing to row a 10k. I thought, “This might be a terrible idea, but what the hell?”

It felt completely counterintuitive, at a time when my stress was incredibly high, to add more stress to my life with increased physical activity (not to mention the mental and emotional stress of pushing myself— I find cardio very stressful). I added two more days of intense rowing per week. I was rowing further, and harder, and faster, than I ever had. I thought I might end up getting sick or having to stop training.

But within a few weeks, with the added stress, my metrics began to improve. My heart rate variability, which had been steadily decreasing since August, finally began to move back upward. My resting heart rate settled down to a level I hadn’t seen in years. And my mood improved drastically— though my life was actually more stressful than previously.

“Beautiful suffering”

The experience of deliberately choosing to undergo a difficult challenge is what some ultra-endurance athletes called “beautiful suffering.” One participant in a 2023 study described it this way:

“This was when I discovered something about myself that I knew was there but I was not consciously aware that all my reasons (for racing Ironman) were deeply internal and I had hundreds of them. All life experience that I had, all the suffering that I had seen, all the joy—it all lives there.”

While an ultra-endurance race is an extreme example, each of us may choose our own opportunity to “suffer beautifully.” Returning to school to complete our B.A. after raising four kids; signing up for an art class that we’ve always been afraid to try— the choice itself is ours. Part of what makes it meaningful is that it’s a challenge specifically for us. If external circumstances— such as an already-high stress load make it even more challenging, then perhaps the potential rewards are that much greater.

Why did this work so well for me? I believe that in my case, the physiological stress of the training I added to my life became a way to use the stress hormones that were already being generated as a response to the mental and emotional situation I was in. By channeling that stress into something physical, my whole system was able to release and finally complete a stress cycle where I’d been stuck for months.

From a physical standpoint, doing any kind of movement is often the very last thing we feel capable of when we’re exhausted, burnt-out, etc. And it’s not the right solution for everybody— individuals with chronic fatigue, for example, will need a different approach. But in some cases, adding physical stress may be just what we need to “make sense” of the experience our bodies are already having.

During the four months of training that led up to the 10k race itself, I can’t say that I enjoyed my experience, particularly. But the suffering— the intense training, the muscle soreness, the sweat, the tendonitis— all meant something. I was working hard, doing something that mattered to me; something I had committed to; something that I hadn’t thought was possible before. And when I completed that race, I wept with joy, even as my heart rate was pounding out of my chest, and my body hurt, and the breath was so fast it felt like I was dying. That’s beautiful suffering.

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Regaining control of our lives

The psychological benefits of “beautiful suffering” are profound. As one participant from the study linked above said of the race, “(A)fter that I knew I could do anything.” By challenging ourselves and overcoming obstacles to complete a meaningful task, we can change the way we experience ourselves and the world completely.

Researchers in a 2025 meta-study reviewing elite ultra-endurance athletes found that these individuals are more likely to possess an internal locus of control, which is associated with higher pain thresholds, greater psychological flexibility, and less likelihood of avoidance behavior and hypervigilance.

This may be especially potent when we are living through circumstances that feel outside of our control, or when the suffering we see in our own lives, or in the world around us, feels senseless and chaotic. A balanced internal locus of control is the antidote to depression, helplessness, and nihilism.

Reconnecting with the inner compass

"The sailor cannot see the North –

But knows the Needle can”

-Emily Dickinson

Each of us is already having a somatic response to what we are experiencing in our lives. Perhaps you’re stuck in fight/flight, “tired but wired,” always “on.” Or you find yourself exhausted, dragging so hard you can barely manage to feed yourself, let alone make meaning of it all. Others still may be in a fawn/appease pattern, “going along to get along” to survive in a hostile system.

The question for each of us is, what is it that I need to make this experience meaningful?

If everything in your life feels kind of “blah,” what is it that you are interested in— no matter how off-the-wall that sounds? Was there something that you loved to do as a kid, but got disconnected from later in life? Or you might consider a recent dream. Was there something that was helpful in the dream, or was there something that was missing in the dream that would have been helpful for you to have?

You don’t need to try to find the meaning of life right now— we’re just looking for a starting point; something that feels alive in you. The inquiry is often enough to swing the needle in the right direction, so that we can start to reconnect with what does feel meaningful for us.

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“But God himself cannot flourish if man’s soul is starved.”

—CG Jung, “Woman In Europe”

“No one’s gonna starve me, tell me what I can and can’t eat.”

—Olympic Gold Medalist Alysa Liu

Several of my clients came in this week talking about body image stuff, saying things like, “I haven’t felt like this in so long.” Or, “I don’t know what’s going on with me, but I just feel so fat.” “I can’t figure out why I keep thinking about this.”

I have a few ideas.

Under Trump, fat is a four-letter word

While each of them certainly has their own personal experience, I know one thing these three clients have in common, because I share it too: we’re living in an age where, more than ever, thinness is not only glorified, but is conflated with wellness, and thereby (by virtue of healthism), with morality.

If it weren’t so harmful, it would be laughable. Take, for example, the Dr. Oz ad for walking that suggests that if we all walked 20 minutes a day we could “save our country 100 billion in health expenditures.” As Josh Johnson points out, “nobody exercises to save the government money.” Yet the consistent messaging is that if we’d all just get off our asses and stop being so lazy, we’d be better humans.

And the face of wellness from this administration— as seen in THIS literally unbelievable commercial— I mean, what? What? WHAT?! Kid Rock? RFK Jr? What the actual hell is happening? “Get active and eat real food.” Drink whole milk in the hot tub in your jeans?

(If you’re screaming, “Make it make sense,” here’s a thought: this administration has consistently demonstrated a eugenicist agenda that prioritizes white, male, able-bodied, thin bodies over all others.)

In yesterday’s Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson reported that Trump is seeking troops to attend his upcoming UFC match at the White House and that they have to “meet height and weight requirements to be eligible.” That sounded familiar to me, so I looked back at some saved posts and found this from reporter Jane Coaston, describing guidelines for an event last year:

Then again, many of you will probably remember the soundbite of Trump calling a female reporter who was asking about the Epstein files “Piggy:”

I could cite many more examples, but I hope this gives enough of a sense of what we’re receiving in the U.S from a systemic level in terms of cultural messaging around body size and type.

(For another take on “fat”— including a rebuttal against the idea that “fat” is inherently“unhealthy”— please read this recent piece by Savala Nolan, “Some Things I Wish People Knew About Fatness.” She shares many thoughts here that I didn’t have space to include myself).

”This administration is weaponizing hunger.”

RFK Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign sounded good to a lot of people— and for good reason. Who could argue with “eat whole food” and “move more”?

But the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” already signed into law, cut $186 billion from SNAP — the largest cuts in the program's history. Now the proposed FY2027 Agriculture bill would cut further still. This begs the question: How are people going to afford this “whole” food, let alone any food at all?

“So there it is: launch an initiative under the guise of healthy eating that reduces what SNAP recipients can buy, claim you’re going to fix longstanding infrastructure and supply chain problems that help create food deserts in the first place, wait for the public to forget about those promises, then publish a federal mandate that all stores not complying with your invented policy will be dropped without making any substantial fixes to the system.”

-Derek Beres, “The gutting of SNAP is about to get much worse.”

Trump bragged recently that he has “lifted five million people off food stamps.” As says, this is “a really weird way to say that you cut off food access.”

Registered dietician Jessica Wilson said this week,

“This administration is weaponizing hunger. Undernourished people have less energy…. cognitive capacity decreases with nourishment. There is heightened anxiety with hunger.. Creating a(n) undernourished class of people is exactly what this administration wants.”

—Jessica Wilson on Instagram

Wilson was also referring to ICE detainees who are protesting the “horrific conditions,” including inedible food, at Delaney Hall Jail. At a Texas facility, where (as of March) a family with children had been held since June 2025, the children report worms and mold in their food, as well as recurring nightmares. As Wilson says, “serving unsafe food to detainees is strategic.” It’s hard to protest on an empty stomach.

“An undernourished class of people”

Reading this post from Wilson yesterday, I was struck by this phrase: “an undernourished class of people.” Yes, it is clear that this administration is systemically withholding nourishment from individuals in detention and those of lower socio-economic status— at the same time that it is making it more difficult for those individuals to vote for change.1

At the same time, this administration has been encouraging undernourishment on a second front— both through its fatphobic messaging, and through its efforts in making GLP-1s more affordable.

You could be forgiven for forgetting about this, among all the other bizarre stories— but do you remember back in November 2025, when Trump announced that prices on popular weight-loss drugs would be slashed. This picture may jog your memory:

(Perhaps we should have paid more attention to the odd portent that upstaged the announcement— the person in the background who passed out cold as Trump gazed dully at the cameras).

Is it a coincidence that a weight loss drug— one that suppresses appetite and keeps us in a calorie deficit—- got cheaper, while insulin, cancer medications, and drugs for autoimmune conditions remain out of reach?

GLP-1s are everywhere, and being prescribed so casually that it’s frightening. One of my friends’ kids went to the gynecologist this week to find out why she hadn’t had a period in months. Without inquiring about anything else, the doctor said, “You need to get on a GLP1 and lose weight.” Again, this feels borderline bonkers to me, but I have heard similar things from others. When it’s now so easy and accessible to lose weight, the thinking seems to be, shouldn’t everybody?

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This is extremely difficult to write about, because I am not at all interested in shaming anyone for their personal choices. I have many friends and clients who are using these drugs. As I’ve said many times before, I completely support each individual’s personal autonomy. These drugs have been tremendously helpful for many folks’ health, and in a culture that fat-shames us, choosing to make ourselves smaller is an adaptive choice for many reasons.

At the same time, GLP-1s can keep us from eating enough to stay healthy. I’ve heard from those on the drug that they forget to eat, finding themselves dizzy, dehydrated, and fatigued. It takes a concerted effort to avoid deficiencies in important nutrients like Vitamin A, Vitamin C, calcium, and zinc. Muscle loss can also be a real danger.

The net effects of all of this are that we can become, completely unintentionally, an “undernourished class of people;” a fact that is tremendously convenient for an administration that can only benefit from a less-engaged, more-passive, fatigued, distracted, population.

Reclaiming power

“The psychology of the individual corresponds to the psychology of the nation. What the nation does is done also by each individual, and so long as the individual does it, the nation also does it. Only the change in the attitude of the individual is the beginning of the change in the psychology of the nation.”

—CG Jung, The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes

One of the things that is so appealing— and so insidious— about the idea of losing weight, dieting, changing our body size, is that it feels like taking control of our lives. This is especially true when we feel powerless or helpless to create change. “If nothing else,” we think, “I can control this.” This is exactly what makes the now-more-accessible weight-loss drugs an ideal tool for a state that wants to distract and control the population. Our personal body complexes are thoroughly hooked, pressured externally by cultural messaging and relentless marketing, and internally through our own deep insecurity and desire to do something.

Yet at the same time, there is a counter-cultural complex at play: the strong feminine who will not be bound, starved, held back. We feel it rise in us when we watch “The Handmaid’s Tale,” or when we read “Nobody’s Girl.” We hear it in the words of Alysa Liu, who came back from a retirement— fatigued at the age of 16!— to win Olympic Gold. “No one’s gonna starve me, tell me what I can and can’t eat,” she said. She reclaimed her own power— but she knew she needed to nourish herself.

In my experience, it takes a tremendous effort to work with a cultural complex as pervasive as the one we’re discussing (call it Fatphobic, Thinness, Body Image, whatever you like). And (as is the nature of complexes), just when we think we’ve got it figured out, it pops up again in unexpected ways. It can be helpful to notice and name when it’s in play, especially if you have a friend (or coach, or therapist) who can help you to notice it). Then, we can ask ourselves: is what I am thinking really true? Who benefits from this thought or behavior? And what might be possible for me without it?

“Many people ask themselves why they feel so depressed or unwell, disconnected and lonely. It is because this closed system slowly drains us of well-being, like a potted plant that is never given any fertilizer. In the Dreaming Way, the soul informs our choices, and we move into life from that soulfulness.”

―Toko-pa Turner, The Dreaming Way

The average person dreams about 4-6 times per night; 1,400 to 2,000 dreams per year. Most of these dreams are not remembered, because the mechanisms that would “record” them are offline. However, if we are able to remember them— and if we bring them into conscious awareness by writing them down, or sharing them with someone else— there is a literal world of meaning to explore.

Because dreams can be so difficult to remember, when a client says, “I had a dream last night,” I immediately know that their psyche has some information to share. As we re-enter the dream together, we have already dropped below the defenses of our ego consciousness into a layer of the psyche that is full of vitality and growth— an inner garden, wild and overgrown, or a mysterious desert with an oasis just over the dune. Here is where we can spot the hidden desires, the secret longings, the glimpsed path forward, that we so desperately need, but struggle to access in our waking lives.

Dreams are mysterious, and wonderful. They don’t always tell us what we think we need to know, but I find that even the act of revisiting them can be enough to bring fresh air into a stale or stuck attitude— the very thing so many of us need in times of despair and fear.

Layers of meaning, awake & asleep

“I began to warm and chill
To objects and their fields”

-Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Mercy Seat

One of the thoughts I’ve been turning over and over recently is the idea that on some level, everything already has meaning— and that perhaps it is our ability to recognize that meaning that is most important when we have lost our way.

Pre-industrial cultures understood that all things— humans, animals, plants, minerals, weather, even abstract concepts— possess a spirit, soul, or conscious life force. In our dreams, we step into this animistic world, where we understand the deeper meaning of symbols.

In dreamtime, our brain enters what Ernest Hartmann calls "a hyper-associative state,” in which it makes connections that help us to make sense of our experiences by contextualizing them. Here, in the world of metaphor, we understand that our relationship is “on the rocks,” as we find ourselves in a leaky canoe, stranded with our partner on a desert island. We recall friends and neighbors from our childhood who remind us of the parts of ourselves we’ve forgotten, or cast aside. We try on new hats, or shoes, as we explore new roles in our lives. Or we find ourselves lost in our own homes, marveling at all the rooms that appear before us.

Thinking in this way (or perhaps better said, feeling in this way) is an older, preverbal way of understanding the world. When we “begin to warm and chill,” like Nick Cave sings in The Mercy Seat, “to objects and their fields,” we are dropping into the animistic imagination that we don’t always let ourselves feel in our waking lives.

“In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes.”

—CG Jung, “Problems of Modern Psychotherapy”

It’s little wonder dreamwork struggles to achieve legitimacy in a materialistic world. Yet on some level, we all understand this language; we recognize the underlying meaning that is inherent in even the most mundane objects. That’s why we would choose not to wear a shirt that was worn by somebody we disliked, even if it’s been washed. Or, perhaps, why black cats are less likely to be adopted (at least in the US) than other color cats. No matter how enlightened we want to be consciously, some part of us is always making associations.

Jung’s statement is borne out by research that demonstrates that the same processes that are operating at night during dreams are also operating all day, behind the scenes, merely eclipsed by the brightness of our daytime thinking. In daydreams, fantasies, “Freudian slips,” in body language, in the movies and books we read, in all of our unconscious and semi-conscious processes, we glimpse that symbolic, metaphorical, imaginative world of our dreams.

The more time we spend working with our dreams, the better able we are to recognize the currents and pulls of our lives— and to understand where our own personal meaning lies.

The '“Transformation of Things”

“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chuang Tzu. Soon I awaked, and there lay Chuang Tzu on his bed. But whether I am really Chuang Tzu dreaming I am a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming I am Chuang Tzu — that I do not know. Between Chuang Tzu and a butterfly there is necessarily a barrier. The transition is called the Transformation of Things.”

—The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, translated by Burton Watson

Zhuangzi’s dream, recorded in the 4th century BCE, asks the question: what is the dream, and what is reality? Millennia later, Jung recorded a similar dream in which he steps into a chapel, where a yogi sits in meditation:

“When I looked at him more closely, I realized that he had my face. I started in profound fright, and awoke with the thought: ‘Aha, so he is the one who is meditating me. He has a dream, and I am it.’”

—CG Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

We take the waking state as “reality,” and our dreams as delusions. But even waking “reality” is quite subjective; consider how different the world looks and feels, depending on your mood! As neuroscientist Anil Seth points out, perception itself is a kind of controlled hallucination — the brain's best guess about what's out there, filtered through expectation and memory. It's only when we agree on the hallucinations that we call it reality1.

What is dream, and what is real? We each decide for ourselves, and in this way make meaning of our lives.

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Dreams and Jung’s transcendent function

To dissolve the barrier between ourselves and the butterfly, as Zhuangzi says, is “the transformation of things.” This is a more poetic way to understand what Jung called “the transcendent function.”

It is through the transcendent function that we become more mature, whole humans by synthesizing the “opposites” in our lives. For example, when we face two seemingly irreconcilable truths (I want to leave/I’m terrified of being alone). Rather than choosing sides, or suppressing one of the truths, the transcendent function helps us to hold the two opposing ideas until a third position arises. Jung suggested that each of us is always striving to balance ourselves out; that if we appear to be too one-sided in any regard, there is undoubtedly a compensating side operating unconsciously.

The transcendent function operates in dreams by showing us a picture of our psyche just as it is, rather than the way our waking mind (what Jung would call our ego) prefers to think of itself. And often, through these images, the “transformation of things” begins to take place as we recognize the meaning of our experience.

In fact, research indicates strongly that through their metaphoric language, dreams allow us to process and integrate emotional content. As strange as they may be, dream images are the means by which we make sense of our lives by acting as a kind of emotional processing lab. There is a catch, however: the researchers found that these benefits only apply to those who remember their dreams. It is when we bring their images, their bizarre storylines, into our conscious awareness, that we retrieve the meaning they’re meant to convey.

In my work with my own dreams and those of my clients, I’m often astounded by the creative wisdom of our dreams:

In this dream, the dreamer recognizes “B” as their work supervisor who is overcompensating for mistreating the dreamer in other ways. The dreamer’s “protest” helped them recognize that in the past they would have said no to the “cash” out of habit. “As miserable as this work situation is,” they said, “It’s forced me to learn to make the most of a bad situation, to recognize where I can take advantage.” Their internal attitude is shifting; something that they had not recognized until we worked this dream. Not only did they feel more empowered, but they recognized the meaning in the suffering they’d been through.

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A few thoughts on working with your own dreams

Working with a dream therapist or coach can be quite powerful, especially as dreams unfold over time. But you don’t need to pay someone to get benefit from your own dreams. Here are a few things you can do to begin to work with your dreams.

1. In the morning, immediately record anything you remember— even if it’s just an image. Writing down “red scarf” can lead to more images, either immediately or later on in the day. This is a skill you are sharpening— be patient.

2. Read the dream out loud to yourself, or to someone else. Ask yourself (or have them ask you) questions about the dreams. Notice especially what seems boring or unimportant— these are often details our conscious mind is “blind” to.

3. Try asking yourself, “Why did this dream come to me now, in my life?” and see what answer arises. You may be surprised.

Even if we don’t fully understand the dream (and I’m not sure that’s actually, completely ever possible), there is benefit in simply starting to unspool the thread of meaning that is there. We are honing our “hyperassociative” mechanism. Sometimes, a connection will flash into your mind later, or you’ll “recognize” a meaning unexpectedly. Remember that dream research tells us that by processing our dreams consciously, we are also processing our emotional experience— even if we don’t quite “get” it yet.

The meaning we need to live our lives fully is always present, both in dreams, and in waking life. By working with our dreams, we can begin to metabolize and live our soul’s purpose.

“(Mr. Duffy) lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances. He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense.”

— James Joyce, Dubliners (”A Painful Case”)

Another way to conceptualize our cultural mind-body split is to say that we are suffering from a collective state of dissociation. Like Mr. Duffy, most of us find it far more comfortable to see the body from “a little distance”; to treat it in the third person, as something to be dealt with, managed.

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Jung understood that the body is a wealth of information and meaning that we often prefer to avoid:

“The body is a most doubtful friend because it produces things we do not like; there are too many things about the body, which cannot be mentioned. The body is very often the personification of this shadow of the ego. Sometimes it forms the skeleton in the cupboard, and everybody naturally wants to get rid of such a thing.”

—CG Jung, Analytical Psychology— its Theory and Practice

How often the body betrays us! Despite all of our efforts, it refuses to be the shape we prefer; it catches colds when it’s least convenient; it requires rest, and sleep, and proper nutrition. And how devilishly it reveals our secret thoughts and emotions.

Recently, a woman I know patted me on the back unexpectedly— and before I could stop myself, I flinched involuntarily. My body reacted without my consent.

Is it any wonder that we would prefer to stay disconnected from “this doubtful friend”?

Somatics = our lives in this body

At the end of last week’s post, we looked at the rise of somatics over the past decade. What a bizarre time in human history, that we’ve had to invent a modality to use our bodies in the way our ancestors always have!— and yet, it makes sense that there is a collective movement toward healing that large-scale dissociation.

“Somatics” itself simply means, “pertaining to the body.” Yet, like so much of the right-hemisphere’s domain, the term has been co-opted by our materialistic culture. Adding the word “somatic” to a modality-- like, “somatic yoga,” or “somatic movement,” is an unnecessary redundancy. We already come equipped with the technology to use our bodies both to feel better and to understand our role in the universe.

How do we integrate somatic awareness into our bodies? It’s really, truly simple. Notice if you’re hungry-- give yourself permission to eat something. Feel like you need to stretch? Stand up and do it. Want to pet your cat, or hug your partner? That’s somatic, too-- go for it.

Ironically, as modern humans, we may need some assistance, or practice in reconnecting to these impulses because we’ve had to disconnect from our internal wisdom for so long.

We learn to override hunger and thirst cues because we’re following someone else’s meal plan; or we’re taking medication that suppresses our body’s natural messaging system. As children, we’re forced into unnatural stillness for long hours at a time— and as adults, our jobs, and social conventions, don’t allow us to stretch and move the way we would normally do-- so we learn to shut down the part of ourselves that would like to do those things. And many of us have to wear a mask that disconnects us from others, and, at times ourselves— for safety in a hostile world.

A doorway to the unconscious

“So defined, the unconscious depicts an extremely fluid state of affairs: everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; and everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things that are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness: all this is the content of the unconscious.”

—CG Jung, On the Nature of the Psyche

Jung understood that our bodies hold more than just physiological information— they’re also a doorway to our unconscious psyches. In one of his most fascinating studies, the word association test, he found that his subjects would display unconscious reactions to particular words— through physiological changes, slower response time, or even just a bizarre or unexpected response.

You can try this yourself by reading the words below and writing down a response word. Which ones cause you to pause? Where do you draw a blank? Where is your response unexpectedly…odd?

At any given moment, our bodies are responding to the circumstances of our lives, the sociopolitical situation, our personal histories. We’re often unaware, at the conscious level, of all that our bodies are holding. But our body always knows.

How can we can begin to touch into the rich storehouse of information that our body is holding us? Simply learning to sit down with ourselves and ask “how am I doing?” is not particularly complicated, but it can take a little patience.

Coming home to what is already true

It’s true that the body is, as Jung wrote, “a doubtful friend.” It is a relentless truth-teller; a companion we can never shake; the source of much pain and grievance in our lives. We resist hearing its messages because, we shy away from what is painful and hard. We’d rather not know.

At the same time, we are already aware, on some level, of the truths our body holds.

“What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.”

—Eugene Gendlin, Focusing

When we can look directly at what we’re already experiencing, rather than feeling worse, there is an almost-inevitable sense of relief.

In the video below, you can join me to visualize clearing some space (a practice adapted from Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing technique) to explore your inner landscape. There’s no wrong way to do this. In fact, once you’ve done this a time or two, you’ll find your own way that you prefer to ask, “what’s going on with me today?”

I hope you enjoy this exploration. As always, I look forward to hearing about your experience, and any thoughts and feelings that arise for you.

Until next time!

XO, Laura Beth

I was 10 years old when Madonna taught me what it means to live in a “material world.” We didn’t have cable TV at the time, so I never saw the video— (cue dramatic tone) until today:

The four-minute plot line is a simple one: A wealthy producer wants to woo the beautiful young actress, but overhears her saying that she doesn’t want mere material gifts. He throws aside his fancy gestures and pretends to be poor, eventually winning her heart and driving off in a vintage pickup truck.

So this is a lesson on cultural materialism: a preoccupation with physical possessions and wealth, and with the lifestyle and appearance that goes with it.

But there’s another type of materialism that’s not unrelated; it’s just a little more existential.

Philosophical materialism refers to the idea that matter is the fundamental substance of reality— that nothing exists beyond the material world. This is a left-hemisphere domain, which values reason, and measurable facts, and verifiable information.

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Mind/matter split: a cultural wound

The two concepts sound different, but at their heart, cultural and philosophical materialism are about things you can see, grasp, measure.

If we consider the etymology of the word materialism, we find “matter.” The word itself comes from the root mater: “origin, source, mother.” Matter is physical, earthy, tangible; it’s related to our bodies, which we use to literally touch and explore the world around us. I hope it’s not too big a reach to say that, in its origins, matter is also about the feminine ( mater, “mother”). In this sense, matter is the brain’s right hemisphere, the feminine principle, Jung’s Eros.

With the advent of the Scientific Revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries, Western culture began the long and messy divorce proceedings dividing matter and mind. Rationalism, which says that reason is the primary source of knowledge, converged with materialism (the idea that nothing exists beyond the material world).

Not only, now, are mind and matter split, but mind is prioritized over matter. Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” is a declaration that will pave the way for future behavioralists who believe that “mind over matter” is the key to a successful life. The left hemisphere, with its preference for reason, logic, and verifiable facts— ironically, which can only come from observation of the material world itself!— becomes dominant. This is Jung’s Logos, the masculine principle.

(More about this mind/body, left/right split at the link below:)

Recovering meaning

“What is split off, not felt, remains the same. When it is felt, it changes! Most people don’t know this… If there is in you something bad, sick or unsound, let it inwardly be and breathe. That’s the only way it can evolve and change into the form it needs.”

–Eugene Gendlin, Focusing

Lest we romanticize too much, let’s be clear that The Scientific Revolution was a necessary and beneficial step in our evolution as a species. I’m a big fan of not dying unnecessarily of preventable diseases. There were, however, some unexpected consequences. In splitting mind from matter, for example, I believe that in some sense, meaning was lost. An overly-rational, or materialistic worldview leaves little room for wonder or speculation about the divine. When we’ve reduced everything to particles and facts, what is left to stir our soul?

Here we come to Jung, who aimed, in his own way, to restore this split. He wrote extensively about what he called “primitive” cultures1, and how they did not differentiate meaning from matter. He used the term participation mystique to refer to the way in which these cultures “projected” meaning into inanimate objects. Speaking of an individual from this culture, Jung says,

“He lives in such ‘participation mystique’ with his world, as Lévy-Bruhl calls it, that there is nothing like that absolute distinction between subject and object which exists in our minds. What happens outside also happens in him, and what happens in him also happens outside.” 2

Jung suggests that in order to achieve individuation, we must withdraw these projections in order to become more conscious. Yet even this suggestion carries a judgment, coming as it does from a lens that values a left-hemisphere, logical view over a right-hemisphere, experiential one. Perhaps we might say instead that these cultures recognized that the material world has fundamental meaning— and that our role in becoming more conscious is not necessarily to differentiate from it, but to recognize the layers of meaning that are inherent within every dimension of our material experience?

Jung’s Transcendent Function & the mind-body split

“Whatever you experience outside of the body, in a dream for instance, is not experienced unless you take it into the body, because the body means the here and now.”

— C.G. Jung, Visions Seminar

While I may not agree with the language he uses, or the judgment he casts, the ultimate goal of Jung’s individuation process is a reuniting of opposites; a recognition, and integration, of unconscious content to create a greater, more conscious whole.

In other words, Jung asks us to bring mind and matter together to make meaning. He termed the mechanism for this the “transcendent function,” not because it transcends the human experience, but because each opposite can transcend itself to become something new (you can read more about this here).

This is also the mechanism at the heart of many somatic modalities, including NARM. We are using our awareness of the body to explore the unconscious attitudes, thoughts, and feelings stored in our tissues. Merely intellectual (left-hemisphere) processes become real when they are experienced through the (right-hemisphere) body. As we bring them into awareness, they can be processed, digested, metabolized into new ways of being; we heal the wound of our mind-body split.

A postscript on somatics— matter matters

The consequences of the great mind/matter split are still unfolding in ways I find fascinating. In researching etymology, I considered the difference between the following:

Matter (noun): Physical substance or material that occupies space and has mass, composed of atoms or particles.

Matter (verb): to be important, or to affect what happens.

Now, I’m not at all pretending this is scientific, but just for fun, let’s take a look at historical usage of the 2 (since 1800). Interestingly, use of the word “matter” as a noun has decreased since the 1920s. But sometime in the 1990s, things started to “matter” more, as a verb. What does this mean? I don’t know. But I’ve been holding it in mind as I write this, especially thinking about “meaning.” I think, at least in the English language, we want things to matter more.

This also led me to be curious about the rise of “Somatics” as a field. This graph shows Google trends on searches relevant to the topic. There’s been a massive jump in the past few years, as people are seeking different ways to support themselves:

Somatics isn’t a new modality. If anything, it’s the oldest modality. Long before we had words, we had bodies that we moved in instinctual ways. Again, I’m not trying to take us back to the Paleolithic, but just to say: our bodies are designed to support us. We’ve just gotten to a point in our human history where we’ve found a need to codify basic movements and internal awareness.

One of my clients said to me recently, “I had to grow up and pay mega dollars to learn how to do with my body all the things I was told not to do as a kid: shaking, rolling around, fidgeting.” Somatics, like so much of the right-hemisphere’s domain, has been co-opted by our materialistic culture. What was once ancestral knowledge is now commodified, its price point out of reach for the average human.

Returning one last time to that Madonna video— I can’t help but reflect that it takes a wealthy man to cosplay a poor one to win this beauty’s heart, and that is no mistake. The great privilege of the ultra-rich is that they can pretend they don’t care about possessions, declaring, like Madonna herself, that she was never actually materialistic at all. What does it say about our relationship to matter, to the body, to the physical, that the ultimate marker of wealth— what matters most on a collective level— is being able to change your body beyond recognition? The cultural wound cuts deep.

The murmuration model

Thanks to Descartes (“I think, therefore I am”) and his pals, we tend to think about the mind and the body as two separate entities. At one extreme, we think that the brain directs the body (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a good example). At the opposite end, we think that “the body keeps the score,” and that the vagus nerve directs all of our behavior. But I think it’s much more complex than that.

A few years ago, when and I began to put together our “Better Breathing for Trauma” program, we were struggling with a way to explain the way that we work with clients. The essential problem was this: humans are really complex. And while both of us have been trained in multiple modalities, we found that there is no “one-size-fits-all” explanation we could offer for why some people needed social engagement time (just talking!) before we could change their breathing patterns, or address their knee pain; or why others responded best to yoga nidra, or a drawing exercise first.

When Jennifer stumbled on the quote below from a paper by Thayer and Lane, she knew she’d found something important.

“From a dynamical systems perspective an organism is a complex set of reverberating circuits or sub-systems working together in a coordinated fashion… the emotional response ‘emerges’ from the interaction of the various subsystems with the environmental demands and this response is not orchestrated from a central command center.”

– Julian Thayer and Richard Lane, “A model of neurovisceral integration in emotion regulation and dysregulation”

What these researchers are saying is that within the human system, there is no one part that’s in charge. We can make adjustments to the whole organism at multiple points— through talking; movement; social connection; environmental changes— literally everything can be a way to change our emotional, physical, or mental experience. Each of us is a dynamic, complex system.

When Jennifer shared this with me, I immediately thought of adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy:

“Guided by simple rules, starling murmurations can react to their environment as a group without a central leader orchestrating their choices; in any instant, any part of the flock can transform the movement of the whole flock.”

—adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

Any part of the “flock” can transform its shape and direction.

Changing flight patterns

Ideally, the dynamic system of our body is fluid and adaptable.

When one part of our system perceives danger (our eyes see a threat, or we hear a gunshot), the rest of the “flock” mobilizes. Our bodies and minds shift into a pattern to fight, or flee, conform, or hide. Once the danger has passed, we should be able to return to our more “optimal” patterns— relaxed bodies, easy breathing— as we settle back in our “window of capacity.”

For those of us with a history of complex trauma, or chronic stress, the patterns of our flock can get “stuck.” We’re always circling, looking for danger; or we’re so tired we can’t seem to get off the ground.

thoughts & feelings by laura beth wenger

This is your nervous system on fascism

The care and tending of my nervous system is a big part of my life…

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8 months ago · 27 likes · 13 comments

Our body/mind systems are a direct reflection of our physical and psychological histories, and show up as patterns like chronic aches and pain, depression, anxiety, illness, exhaustion, and a thousand different diagnoses. And because we are a dynamic system— we are more than just our aching neck, our insomnia, our inability to take a deep breath— we can shift the patterns by addressing a different part of the system. That’s why talk therapy might cure your IBS, drawing a picture can make your headache go away, or working through dream imagery can shift your anxiety. The response “emerges” naturally as the whole system shifts.

Connection, disconnection

We can also think of our “flocks” in terms of connection and disconnection. Our bodies are both how we connect with, and how we disconnect from, the world, from each other, and from ourselves.

We connect with others through mechanisms like mirror neurons, which allow us to literally feel what others are feeling; or oxytocin, which helps us to bond to our loved ones. We can also mobilize patterns of disconnection to keep us safe from dangerous others, preparing us to fight, or flee. And in worst-case scenarios, we have a pattern that allows us to disconnect from our bodies through dissociation— a literally life-saving mechanism.

Notice that even imagining different social and logistical dynamics has a direct and immediate effect on our systems— yet another possibility for shifting patterns!

When our “flock” is mobile, fluid, and adaptive, it is able to connect and disconnect with others as needed. Before we can do this, we may need to get better at connecting to ourselves; by becoming more familiar with our own flock, the multitudes of sensations, emotions, reactions that comprise our experience.

In the practice below, we begin with a brief check-in to explore different parts of our system, and then engage in a "figure 8” practice (read more about this symbol here). After, check in again and notice how your flock may have shifted.

Freedom in the flock

“(T)he truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

-Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

One of the reasons I find this model so powerful is that it normalizes a full range of life experiences— as Ani Pema says, things “come together and fall apart” over and over again. An understanding of ourselves as a system that meets life where it is is inherently nonpathologizing in a way that many other models fail to grasp. It also allows for possibilities beyond what we might otherwise imagine.

One of the core teachings of Tibetan Buddhism is that we are not a solid, fixed, permanent “object,” but an ever-changing process. “Mind,” in this tradition, is not a noun, but a verb— something that is unfolding over and over again in new and perhaps unexpected ways.

The mere experience of thinking about ourselves as a system rather than a rigid identity loosens ideas about ourselves (“I’ll always be broken,” “This pain will never go away”) and can start to shift our “flock” in new directions. In this view, even our most entrenched patterns are not solid. Here, at the intersection of ancient Tibetan Buddhism and modern neuroscience, the visual image of the murmuration model resonates— each bird moving seamlessly as part of a whole, a living, breathing constellation.

My sense is that we feel these murmuration constellations reverberate with us on such a deep level because they embody truths our souls know, but rarely name:

We are an infinitesimally small part of something greater.

We are not the solid, individual things we take ourselves to be.

We contain multitudes.

I don’t know anybody who doesn’t feel stressed out.

Whether they’re in high school, retired, or just trying to figure out their social lives, everyone I know seems to be feeling a sense of urgency, frustration, or “I should be doing something differently, but I just don’t know what that is.”

Our culture reinforces this idea with countless articles, podcasts, and services marketed to create greater efficiency or performance in our lives, or to maximize our health, or earning potential. So many of my clients are asking themselves (and me!), “What should I be doing differently? Why can’t I get it right?” Unfortunately, this question, rather than solving the problem, often serves to cause greater anxiety and stress.

So today I want to offer a prompt that I have found really helpful to address this existential idea that something is wrong, we are wrong, we should be doing something differently.

It’s just this: Notice where you are putting pressure on yourself.

Sound too simple? Stay with me and I hope to show you just how transformative this can be.

Language of agency

In the NARM (NeuroAffective Relational Model) framework, one of the simplest ideas is also one of the most powerful. The way we speak to ourselves reveals how much power we believe we have over our own lives.

Somewhere in the space between "I have to" and "I’m choosing to," between "I can't" and "I'm making a choice not to," lives the entire question of our agency.

According to NARM, unresolved developmental trauma doesn't just live in memories or body sensations — it lives in the very way we narrate our experience. The language of survival is the language of no choice: I have to, I need to, I can't, I should, I must.

This is true not just for those who’ve lived through adverse childhood experiences, but for all humans who’ve had to make a choice between authentic self-expression and “fitting in” to a society that doesn’t value differences. We’ve learned that our desires can be dangerous. Somewhere along the way, we made a choice to cut off parts of ourselves that were not acceptable. We can think of this choice as an unconscious strategy that we knew we “had to” use to keep going.

These strategies, and their accompanying internal narrative, become so habituated that we can continue to use them for the rest of our lives— denying ourselves agency without even recognizing it.

In the image below, we can see exactly how our habitual “pressure” language (our old survival strategy) might sound if we shifted it into “agency” language. Agentive language doesn't deny difficulty. It doesn't pretend that everything is easy or that you can manifest your way out of real constraints. It simply insists on locating the truth accurately: Who is making this choice? And why?

Bringing our agency out of the shadow

From a Jungian viewpoint, the parts of ourselves that we’ve cut off live in the “shadow;” the unconscious part of our psyche that holds all of our unmet potential; everything that’s been repressed or undeveloped because it was unacceptable, shameful, or incompatible with who we felt we need to be.

Our ego— that is, our conscious mind— is heavily invested in maintaining its own sovereignty. It doesn’t like to look at what’s in the shadow, because it doesn’t want to change. This is one of the reasons why we continue to stick to our old patterns— like pressuring ourselves. We've internalized this strategy so deeply we can no longer see it as a choice — it just feels like reality.

It can be surprisingly uncomfortable to own our own agency; to recognize that we have more choice than we previously thought. This is where Jung's concept of the shadow becomes useful — because learned helplessness isn't just a behavioral pattern. It's one of the things we've tucked most carefully out of sight: the belief that we are capable, that our actions matter, that we are allowed to have needs of our own.

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Perhaps you’ve heard the term learned helplessness. This refers to the psychological state that develops when a person (or animal) experiences repeated situations where their actions have no effect on the outcome — and then stops trying, even when circumstances change and action would work.

It was first identified by Martin Seligman in the 1960s through experiments with dogs exposed to inescapable shocks. When later given a way out, the dogs didn’t take it. They had learned — at a nervous system level — that trying was pointless.

In humans, this looks like a deep conviction that effort won't change anything; passivity in the face of solvable problems. We may experience difficulty initiating, deciding, or advocating for ourselves. There’s a kind of flattened affect around possibility — not quite depression, but a collapse of the sense that you have any real effect on your life.

This is why agency language is so powerful. "I can't" isn't just a word choice — for someone with a history of learned helplessness, it's the voice of a nervous system that stopped believing in its own efficacy. Compassionately returning to what you are choosing and why is a way of slowly retraining ourselves to recognize where we may be able to make a different choice. We reclaim the power and agency that’s been waiting for us in our shadow.

Compassionate inquiry

“If you’re determined to think of yourself as limited, fearful, vulnerable, or scarred by past experience, know only that you have chosen to do so, and that the opportunity to experience yourself differently is always available.”

-Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living

Here’s a simple practice to explore.

1. Can you think of a time in the past few weeks when you’ve put pressure on yourself? “I have to,” “I should,” or even just a sense of “needing to” do something differently?

2. Sit with the statement for a moment. Notice any physical sensation — tightening, holding, shrinking.

3. With kindness, ask yourself why you are putting pressure on yourself. There’s always a reason— why does it feel like you “have to”?

4. Now try:“I’m choosing to ___ because ___.”Even if the “because” feels like it' doesn’t make sense. Even if it’s just “because I’m afraid of what happens if I don’t.”

5. Notice if the sensation in your body shifts at all. How does it feel to acknowledge that you’re making a choice? Notice that you may immediately begin to pressure yourself to do something differently— this is another choice, too.

6. Stay with whatever arises. Grief, relief, resentment, anger, exhaustion — all of it is information.

This isn’t about toxic positivity or pretending you have more freedom than you do. Sometimes the honest answer is: “I’m choosing this because I genuinely have no safer option right now.” That’s still agency. Knowing why you’re doing something — even under duress — is very different from believing you’re helpless.

‘Whoever you are, no matter how lonely’

Moving toward greater agency can be a slow process— we don’t suddenly feel free. This is actually, in my experience, a really good thing. It would be overwhelming to suddenly feel that we have too much choice— like a caged bird who doesn’t yet know how far she can fly. Rather, this is a developmental process that unfolds as increasing internal spaciousness. We glimpse greater freedom as our wings grow stronger to fly.

Within this process, we discover that we are not just surviving, but actually living our lives. We understand that while the choices we’ve made have always been for good reasons, we now have more choices, and better ones, available to us.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-Mary Oliver, ‘Wild Geese’

For those of us who have lived a lifetime of pressuring ourselves, these first four lines of Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’ are especially resonant. What would it be like, we might wonder, not to have to “be good?” To simply “let the soft animal of our body love what it loves?”

To ask ourselves where we’ve pressured ourselves— and why— does not mean denying our outer circumstances, or attempting to bypass the reality of injustice and oppression. Rather, by recognizing where we are making a choice, and why, “the world offers itself to our imagination.” There are possibilities we’ve never dared dream that we may only know when we “announce our place in the family of things.”

Happy Sunday— or whenever you get to this! Thank you, as always, for reading and sharing my thoughts and feelings. If you like what you are reading, please don’t forget to like, comment, and restack— it really helps. Finally, if you can afford to do so, please consider upgrading your subscription as well. It supports my work, and you get free access to my online streaming site.

“I am speaking just as a philosopher. People sometimes call me a religious leader. I am not that. I have no messages, no mission. I attempt only to understand. We are philosophers in the old sense of the word, lovers of wisdom. That avoids the sometimes questionable company of those who offer a religion.”

— C.G. Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, p. 98

“I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.”

— C.G. Jung, BBC Interview with John Freeman, 1959

Someone asked me recently, "What is it about Jungian psychology that is so different?” The answer to this question is almost too big for one post, let alone a paragraph or a simple response to a casual inquiry— but this morning, Easter Sunday, feels like a good day to sit down with the question.

Jung’s psychology is so vastly different that it’s not even taught in mainstream university programs. In our increasingly rational, materialistic1 culture, Jung’s metaphysical concepts, techniques of dream interpretation, and study of things like alchemy and fairy tales tend to make people uncomfortable. In my own grad school program, for example, one professor stated breezily, “We know now there’s no such thing as the ‘unconscious.’ People have behaviors based on cognitions, and we change those. That’s it.”2

As you can see by the two quotes at the head of this post, Jung struggled mightily with these concepts himself. He knew that in order to be taken seriously, his concepts had to be “scientific;” and yet in his own experience, and in his extensive experience with his patients, he found that there was evidence of something greater than Western science could grasp; what he called the Self.3

The Self, says Edward Edinger, is “the ordering and unifying center of the total psyche.” It has a transpersonal quality; that is, it is something greater than us, beyond us. The “ordering and unifying” aspect is what gives our life meaning. With this understanding, we can recognize that symptoms have what is referred to as a teleological function: they are moving us toward something; our life’s unique path.

“Intellectually the self is no more than a psychological concept, a construct that serves to express an unknowable essence which we cannot grasp as such, since by definition it transcends our powers of comprehension. It might equally well be called the ‘God within.’”

– C.G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

Jung believed that the Self operates as both the “center and the circumference” of the psyche. It is both our inner image of the divine, and the container that acts as its outermost limit.

Encounters with the Self

The Self, according to Jung, shows its presence in dreams, visions, creative products (such as art of all kinds), traumatic events4, and even in waking life, often in surprising ways. He believed that encounters with the Self always had a “numinous” quality— a word he borrowed from the theologian Rudolf Otto:

“The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its ‘profane’, non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of— whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.”

-R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy

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Numinous encounters, as Otto says, have a quality about them that is undeniable: we feel them in our body as terror, awe, or overwhelming love; they are beyond words. They have a relativizing effect; we are at once humbled and cognizant of our place in the order of things. As a result, Lionel Corbett says, these encounters restructure our psyche:

“Their efficacy in doing so is the result of their tremendous affective intensity, which alone is able to dislodge entrenched patterns with such speed… it is as if the intensity of the affect associated with the new experience disrupts and dissipates existing structures and defenses and replaces them with something new… The affective component of the experience is also the major vehicle for the cognitive level of the experience to be driven home.5”

Despite our culture’s unease with topics that stray into the realm of the “woo,” there is evidence that bears out these concepts. Researchers are studying awe as a “pathway to physical and mental health.” Of course, if you’ve had one of these experiences yourself, you already know what a tremendous impact these moments hold. Like Jim Lovell, Apollo 13 astronaut, whose 1968 broadcast from orbit summed up his own numinous experience. “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth,” he said.

If you click on the “researchers” link above, you can view a diagram that maps exactly how these states of “awe” affect our body’s systems, decreasing physical symptoms such as anxiety, stress, and pain, while increasing prosocial behavior, our sense of meaning, and overall well-being. But this was no secret to Jung, who knew that the “approach to the numinous” was, in fact, the “real therapy:”

“The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.”

— C.G. Jung, Letter to P.W. Martin, August 20, 1945. Letters, Vol. 1

Organized religion & the Self

Within this framework of Jung’s Self and the numinous, there are endless variations for spiritual diversity. Each individual can (and, he might even say, should) have their own unique relationship with the transpersonal. But what about religion? Where do Catholics, Jews, Muslims, fit into this schema?

The image below from Edward Edinger’s Ego and Archetype demonstrates how organized religion can act as a group container for the Self. In this configuration, each individual member (illustrated by the circles at the bottom) need not have a personal relationship with the divine, because it is carried by the Church itself. This, Edinger says, is a stable state for a community.

This is not at all a problematic situation, or a psychologically unhealthy one. These individuals have a relationship with the transpersonal that is quite functional.

But what happens when this system begins to break down? For example, when beloved religious leaders are found to be frauds, or spiritual abuse is revealed?

This second image shows how the individuals at the bottom are left to find their own relationship to the Self. While some of them (such as the circle on the far left) succeed in connecting directly to their Self-image (perhaps through an encounter with the numinous, as described above), others are not so lucky.

Some, like the second circle, become alienated from the Self: cynical, jaded, isolated.

Others, such as the third circle, decide that they are the Self: they become inflated, delusions of grandeur, etc; maybe they go set up their own new religion.

And others (illustrated by the rest of the circles)— do not seek a personal relationship with the divine, but instead, look for another container for their spiritual needs— like Capitalism, MAGA, Fundamentalism, Communism, Fascism, or Healthism.

Edinger goes on to warn about the dangers of this situation:

“When the archetypes have no adequate container such as an established religious structure, they have to go somewhere else because the archetypes are facts of psychic life. One possibility is that they will be projected onto banal or secular matters…. This is particularly dangerous because whenever a religious motivation is acting unconsciously it causes fanaticism with all its destructive consequences.”

This is very clearly the situation we find ourselves in now.

Finding our way to the Self

This is why I find that Jung’s psychology is so essential for our times. In his 1957 essay, The Undiscovered Self, he speaks directly to what happens when our collective container is no longer sufficient, and we find ourselves in that second picture of Edinger’s:

“Under these circumstances it is small wonder that individual judgment grows increasingly uncertain of itself and that responsibility is collectivized as much as possible, i.e., is shuffled off by the individual and delegated to a corporate body. In this way the individual becomes more and more a function of society, which in its turn usurps the function of the real life carrier, whereas, in actual fact, society is nothing more than an abstract idea like the State. Both are hypostatized, that is, have become autonomous. The State in particular is turned into a quasi- animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it. Thus the constitutional State drifts into the situation of a primitive form of society—the communism of a primitive tribe where everybody is subject to the autocratic rule of a chief or an oligarchy.”

He says that the antidote— the only hope for individuals, and for humanity as a whole— lies in our ability to connect to our own understanding of what he calls “God” (but can be read as “the Self”):

“The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass.”

In a later section, he goes on to add, in italics of his own, emphasizing the importance of these words:“Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself.”

How, then, do we begin to connect to the Self; to begin to understand what is our role in this resistance?

Dreams are one way (and one I use frequently with my own clients). But we can also dialogue with our unconscious through creative practices (like the one shown below); through divinatory work such as the I Ching, or the Tarot (my friend and colleague Amy Lawson is a wonderful resource); through journaling, meditation, and prayer.

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The practice below is from my online subscription site (as a reminder, paid subscribers get free access to all of the videos there, but I wanted to share this one with all of you today!). In this short video, join me for a simple creative practice based on Jung’s work. You’ll just need paper and some drawing tools (crayons are fine!), and a little quiet time to be with yourself.

If you do practice “with me” here, I’d love to hear how it went (or see your drawing, if you’d like to share!). And, as always, I really value your reflections on my writings and ideas.

Wishing you a special day, no matter what your spiritual orientation.

xo-

LBW

It's not that easy bein' green
Having to spend each day
The color of the leaves
When I think it could be nicer
Bein' red or yellow or gold
Or something much more colorful like that…

I was just a little kid, but my insides reverberated to the mournful tone of my favorite frog’s lament. It’s not easy being different. It’s lonely, it’s isolated, it’s terribly, terribly sad.

Since writing about the double bind last week, I’ve been thinking about the double binds of my own life: the mismatch between my own needs and our culture’s expectations for me, and what is created in the space between.

A triple bind

The essence of the double bind is that one is faced with two conflicting demands, neither of which can be satisfied. The situation is not one that can be avoided, and to name the bind makes it worse.

I remember being depressed as early as kindergarten, when I learned that I had twelve more years of school to live through. TWELVE YEARS OF MISERY. How would I survive, I wondered? The future stretched before me, a bleak, anxious timescape that had to be navigated, I felt, alone.

It wasn’t just school: I cried at sleepovers and had to be driven home, ashamed, but secretly grateful to get back home to my safe, comfortable bed. At the bus stop, one morning, a (horrible) little girl said to me, “My mom doesn’t like you.” Shocked, I asked, “why?” She shrugged. “I don’t know. You’re weird.”

I mean, by typical standards, I was weird. I was devouring books faster than my parents could take me to the library. I made elaborate mansions out of old shoe boxes and played by myself for hours on end. Attempts to get me to join Girl Scouts, 4H, ballet, etc., all ended with me dropping out— I couldn’t tolerate the experiences, and I couldn’t explain why. My parents were concerned and confused by my introversion. “You have to do something,” they said. What kind of kid doesn’t want to spend time with her peers? What kind of girl just wants to stay home with her dog? This girl. This girl right here.

I saw my first mental health counselor in the third grade because school made me cry. This was my first taste of bad therapy; the only effect I can remember is feeling more depressed, isolated, and anxious. I had no context to understand my unhappiness (and, sadly, my therapist didn’t know enough to provide it).

I couldn’t recognize that what I was experiencing was a shocking mismatch between my needs and the environment in which I had been placed. All I knew was that I was not having the experience that my peers were having. I didn’t know what was wrong, so I learned that I must be wrong.

This is what I think of as the “triple bind:” because the bind is unnameable (in this case, I was too deeply ashamed to even consider talking about it)— we internalize the outer expectation. We learn to put pressure on ourselves to perform, and to conform. We blame ourselves when we don’t meet societal standards. Some of us— many of my clients— bind ourselves so tightly that when we finally do meet someone who is able to mirror our experience, who is able to say, “there’s nothing wrong with you.” we cannot accept that this might be true.

It is too painful to recognize what we’ve been denied.

The individuation process

While my experience sounds extreme, this is a dilemma that each of us knows intimately, because it’s at the heart of being human. Each of us must conform, to some degree, to the circumstances of our family, peers, and society. This is how we achieve a certain amount of success in life, after all: we follow rules, get an education, gain employment, etc.

In traditional Jungian literature, this conforming is the essential task of the first half of life, and that the process of individuation takes place later, at midlife, when we start to question the values we’ve internalized. Later Jungians, such as , author of Quarterlife, argue that this timeline doesn’t make sense in current culture. that we must grapple with the issue of what she calls “stability” vs. “meaning” as part of our developmental task of individuation much earlier than Jung stated. This formulation makes sense when I consider how very lost I felt as a kid. I wasn’t able to conform— a problem I see a lot of quarter lifers are experiencing today.

Our personal individuation journey doesn’t always follow a tidy trajectory. I was a hot mess well into my thirties, when I finally learned how to play the game well enough to have a career, start a retirement fund, buy a house. But I was still struggling with social conformity. In one memorable vignette, my boss called me into his office to say: “I’m concerned that you haven’t made any friends here.” My stomach drops, remembering that feeling. I was that “weird” little girl, five years old all over again, just waiting to get home to hug her dog and cry.

The process of individuation, theoretically anyway, is to reclaim the parts of ourselves that we’ve denied ourselves, or that we’ve been denied by the collective values of our culture. This is very difficult when we have been convinced that we are the problem; even more so when we have convinced ourselves that we are the problem. In Jungian language, these ideas about ourselves are complexes that must be recognized and integrated, often with the help of a therapist, coach, or other professional who is able to see the truths we’ve had to hide from ourselves.

Neurodivergence and Jungian psychology

Unlike Freud, who framed deviation from the norm in terms of repression and dysfunction, Jung saw psychological variation as meaningful and essential to psychic wholeness. The concept of individuation itself implicitly honors the idea of neurodiversity, recognizing that each of us has our own unique blueprint to follow.

Jung’s early work with psychosis at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich put him in direct contact with patients diagnosed with “dementia praecox,” which we might now call schizophrenia. Rather than dismissing their experience as nonsense, Jung recognized that the symbolic content they shared was meaningful, and that the key to helping these patients lay in meeting them where they are.

The concept of the shadow in Jung’s work refers to the parts of our psyche that lie outside of our conscious awareness, and which contain the traits and characteristics we have not been able to claim. An important task at beginning the individuation process lies in exploring and integrating parts of one’s shadow (though it can never be eradicated— Jung believed that the more conscious we become, in fact, the more our shadow continues to grow to match it!).

Neurodivergent individuals, by definition, have a more difficult time conforming to the expectations placed on them by society. Many of them learn to mask, or to compensate in ways that are ultimately costly for their own bodies and souls. We tend to praise these individuals when they “succeed” at normative tasks, not recognizing that we are denying an essential part of their psyche. For this reason, these individuals may carry an especially large shadow. This can be especially true in high performers— like myself— who have convinced themselves, through the “triple bind,” that they are inherently flawed.

Meeting ourselves where we are

This is why it is so critical for helping professionals— or even just those of us who want to be better humans— to excavate our own internalized biases. What do we think is “normal,” and are we expecting others to adhere to those expectations? Can we be humble enough to say, I don’t know what this person’s path is, rather than judging or feeling hurt by them when they fail to meet our own standards?

I’ve chosen to use both Jung’s work and the NARM model in my client work because both offer de-pathologizing schemas for addressing our complexes. Each has a compassionate lens for recognizing that outer circumstances frame our experience, while respecting the individual’s innate capacity to grow and change. What is essential in both (in my opinion) is that the helping professional set aside any personal agenda beyond supporting the client. The less we have resolved our own discomfort around our own neurodivergence, or our bodies1, the more likely we may be to stand in the way of their progress. Yet there’s room for growth, here, too— Jung saw the therapeutic relationship as being beneficial for both parties, saying, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."

I don’t often claim my “neurodivergent” label— perhaps because of my own complexes around the idea— but the truth is that I have struggled my entire life to both accept myself as I am, and to assimilate to societal standards. This is an impossible task. When I hear my clients describe themselves as “too sensitive,” or “having a very gentle nervous system,” I listen for the implicit self-criticism that I know often accompanies these revelations, and I ask them to tell me about it.

It’s not easy being green. I have lost friends who cannot understand why I can’t spend as much time together as they needed (because I need so very, very much time alone). I have to guard myself against overstimulation, or I get physically ill. I suck at small talk. And after a day of working with groups at work, I will toss and turn all night as my system attempts to process all of the social/emotional information that it wasn’t able to digest. But this “too sensitive,” “gentle” system, is a miraculous instrument. It helps me tune in to others in a way that I am so grateful for. It allows me to have numinous, sensory experiences of joy and love. It let me sit down and write this piece in one sitting, because when I am passionate and focused, I cannot be stopped.

In planning this piece, I shared some of my childhood memories with my partner. “All I ever wanted to do was be home with my dog,” I said, wistfully. He laughed. “So, not much has changed.”

This, actually, is the essence of individuation. We were never lost. We were just waiting to come home."

There are many ways to conceptualize exactly why so many of us are feeling exhausted, burnt-out, depressed, and anxious, in this particular cultural moment that we’re facing.

One way to understand it is that we find ourselves caught up in what is called a “double bind;” a particular kind of psychological dilemma that takes a tremendous toll on our nervous systems.

A “double bind” refers to a situation in which:

• You face two conflicting demands,

• You cannot satisfy both,

• You cannot leave the situation; and

• You cannot even name the bind without making it worse.

A classic example of the double bind is a gay adolescent living in a fundamentalist household. Their need for parental love and acceptance is in direct conflict with their need to live authentically (two conflicting demands, neither of which can be satisfied). They are dependent on their family for support (they cannot leave the situation). To name the bind (coming out) is unthinkable (it would only make the bind worse).

In the language of complex trauma, this particular kind of double bind is called "the core dilemma.” It’s the deepest kind of existential crisis: the impossible choice between authenticity and belonging. We cannot be our truest selves without risking the love and connection we need. To adopt an acceptable persona means that we receive love for being someone we are not. It’s a heartbreaking situation: we long for something that feels perpetually out of reach.

As a result of this dilemma, our very needs become threatening. If needing things leads to pain, rejection, or abandonment, we must shut down the needs themselves. We cut ourselves off, developing strategies to numb, disconnect, or disappear from a reality that has become too painful to inhabit.

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The physiological cost of the double bind

The lived experience of the double bind has a distinct effect on our bodies. Trying to meet two competing demands is like having one foot on the brake, and one foot on the gas. An endlessly revving engine, our nervous system flooded with stress hormones, we can feel like we’re in fight, flight, and freeze all at the same time.

Some individuals experience this as a literal split in the body: one half moving forward, the other backward; a complex twist of bones, muscles, and fascia that has us reaching out for support at the same time we retreat from the threat of that connection. Others experience this as body twitches, nausea, or total systemic shutdown.

To live out the core dilemma costs a tremendous amount of psychic AND physiological energy: it drains our life force, leaving us exhausted and second-guessing ourselves: I just can’t get it right.

Patriarchy and the double bind

My personal anthem for the double bind is Lola Young’s 2025 hit “Messy”:

“‘Cause I’m too messy, and then I’m too f*cking clean
You told me, “Get a job,” then you ask where the hell I’ve been
And I’m too perfect ‘til I open my big mouth
I want to be me, is that not allowed?
And I’m too clever, and then I’m too f*cking dumb
You hate it when I cry, unless it’s that time of the month
And I’m too perfect ‘til I show you that I’m not
A thousand people I could be for you, and you hate the f*cking lot.”

—Lola Young, “Messy”

If you’ve never heard it, I really recommend a listen— it’s incredibly catchy, and her plaintive growl gives it a resonance words alone can’t capture. Most importantly, her lyrics point to something that I believe all marginalized identities can relate to: under patriarchy, there is no acceptable way to be yourself. Beauty standards are literally impossible; if we somehow manage to come close to achieving them, we are “trying too hard,” we’ve “had too much work done,” or we’re now “dangerously thin.”

Because this hierarchy of worth is based on a system that prioritizes white male bodies, all other bodies are inherently problematic.There is no way to be authentic and to be valued. As the saying goes, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of patriarchy: the double bind is baked in.

The cultural “core dilemma”

On the collective level, the double bind is so much a part of our daily lives, it’s rendered almost invisible. Worse, like a child caught in the core dilemma, we’ve started to accept that our basic needs will not be met:

• Trust: We want to trust, but trust has been weaponized (et tu, Cesar Chavez?)

• Connection: I need community but community feels dangerous.

• Safety: I need to feel safe but safety feels naive.

• Expression: I want to be seen, but being seen feels increasingly risky.

• Agency: I need to feel like I matter, but the system is so big— how can I make a difference?

This double bind underlies our collective exhaustion. We’re living under the impossible weight of a situation in which every move costs something, and no move feels like enough.

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Loosening the bind

This cultural double bind is so immensely powerful because it hijacks a neuropsychological system that is common to all mammals— our attachment system. We have a basic need for love and belonging that is wired into us for survival; we carry this with us from infancy into our adulthood.

Yet individuals who have lived with complex trauma— which include those who have learned to live with marginalized identities in a patriarchal system— already know the secret to escaping the double bind: it must be named. By definition, talking about the double bind feels dangerous. That discomfort is part of what keeps us tied in its knots.

The image of the 8 of Swords from the Smith-Rider-Waite Tarot deck provides a compelling visual for the secret to escaping the double bind. These bonds are looser than they appear; freedom is more accessible than we’ve allowed ourselves to believe. The means to our escape are close at hand.

Naming the bind, as Young does in the song quoted above (“I’m too messy, and then I’m too f*cking clean”), highlights its sheer absurdity. The game is rigged. We don’t have to play this game at all; we can find another way.

But in order to see this— like the image in the card above— we must remove our own blindfold and reclaim our own power.

Jung’s individuation process

Addressing the double bind in which we find ourselves, collectively, is an unprecedented opportunity for both individual and collective change. The hypocrisy of our institutions is being unveiled publicly; our heroes are falling from their pedestals. As one of my clients recently observed: “If people can’t see the truth now, it’s because they really, really don’t want to.”

The question is — what do we do with this knowledge? Do we put the blindfold back on and stay tied in our comfortable knots? Or do we begin to work with this tension in a way that generates something genuinely new — for ourselves, and for our culture?

Jung called this the process of individuation: the lifelong, often uncomfortable work of becoming who we actually are, rather than who we were told to be.

“It is really the individual’s task to differentiate himself from all others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities, such as membership in organizations, support of ‘isms,’ and so on, interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible.”

— C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

For some of us — particularly those who have never been well served by the dominant culture’s collective identities — this recognition may come more easily. When the system was never designed for you, you learn earlier that its promises are hollow. And yet even then, abandoning our old ways of operating can be surprisingly difficult. Familiar binds have a comfort to them, however painful.

This is part of what makes this particular moment so disorienting. The blindfold is being torn off. We are being asked to recognize this double bind before we would have chosen to on our own. For many of us, this revelation is truly destabilizing. Yet it is also, in Jung’s framework, exactly the kind of disruption that makes real growth possible. We finally get “to be me,” with all the authenticity and responsibility that that entails.

Questions for personal contemplation

If you’d like a prompt to work with this, my invitation to you is to ask yourself the following:

• Is the double bind familiar from my own childhood, or history?

• Where do I feel that double bind now (review the list above- trust, connection, safety, expression, agency)?

• What feels “impossible?”

• Is it possible that there is another way for me?

• Notice what your experience is as you work with these. Do you feel tired? Defeated? Excited? Anxious? How might that response be reinforcing the bind itself?

• Think of a mentor or figure who was able to overcome a double bind— James Baldwin, Frida Kahlo, Viktor Frankl— what inspires you about them? How can you relate their work to your own life?