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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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6 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?

“Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face.”

—C.G. Jung, The Shadow

In the past few years, I’ve noticed something interesting emerging in conversations with colleagues and in the sharing circles of workshops.

We’ll start to quote someone, or mention a body of work we love, and then we hesitate. I don’t know that much about him,we hedge. I mean, I haven’t vetted EVERYTHING she’s done.

Where it once felt easy to cite a writer or discuss their ideas, we now pause mid-sentence. Did I hear there was abuse in his community? Are these theories based on solid science? Has this been debunked? Was he in the Epstein files? Didn’t she say something antisemitic once?

The rise of “cancel culture,” for better or worse, has made us more attuned than ever to the possibility that our heroes have feet of clay. And the internet is not helping. It’s full of people screaming into the void about how everyone else is wrong — and even my carefully tended Substack feed is ripe with snark and smugness. Writers eager to inform me that polyvagal theory is junk science, IFS is dangerous, Deepak Chopra is a hypocrite, and the body-positive movement is dead.

Each new revelation is another collapse. Another writer, another teacher, another healer — another fall from grace. Something darker, more cynical, starts to creep in. Who can we trust? What is still sacred? Where, exactly, is the good?

That must be one charismatic frog

What is it about certain authority figures that makes us “fall” for them? Why do we get “swept away” by certain individuals, or systems, or beliefs? How do we find ourselves “hooked,” “caught up,” “captured?” Why on earth would we want to kiss this metaphorical frog — and what makes us so certain they’re a prince?

The language we use to describe these experiences is worth pausing on. We fall for someone. We get swept away. We are caught and captured — as though by a current, or a trap, or a spell. Notice what all of these phrases have in common: the self is passive. Something is happening to us. Our volition has quietly left the building.

Throughout my career as a coach, yoga student, teacher, and studio owner, I’ve known a lot of charismatic wellness professionals. Their personality is immediately attractive in some way– they speak the right jargon, they dress the right way, they have very white teeth. In meeting them, you might think, “man, I want some of that.” Some of them have a gift for seeming to see into your soul, or to talk to your innermost desires.

Sometimes, in the yoga world, they call this kind of charisma “shakti,” which is a Sanskrit word that (in one sense, at least) means “power.” It can seem as though we’ve fallen under their spell.

Yoga teachers who carry this kind of power can do more than mesmerize with their presence — they can guide students into poses, experiences, and states of surrender that would be unimaginable otherwise. This is the gift of the mana figure. It is also, as two infamous examples make painfully clear, where things can go very wrong. (Please be aware that the following links contain graphic accounts of sexual assault: Bikram Choudhury and Pattabhi Jois.)

In Jungian psychology, a mana figure is an archetypal image of extraordinary power, wisdom, or authority — the kind of person who seems to carry something beyond the ordinary. The word mana comes from Melanesian and Polynesian cultures, where it refers to a sacred, impersonal force that can inhabit people or objects.

Mana figures appear both in dreams and in waking life — as the wise old man, the great mother, the guru, the healer, the prophet. They are figures onto whom we project our own unlived potential for wisdom, strength, and wholeness. When we encounter someone who carries this quality for us — a teacher, a therapist, a spiritual leader — we are often responding not just to who they actually are, but to what they represent in the deeper layers of the psyche.

The danger Jung identified is what he called mana inflation — the moment when either the person receiving the projection begins to believe they actually are the mana figure, or when the one projecting loses themselves entirely in devotion to it. Both are forms of psychological possession.

We see the world as we are

“Strictly speaking, projection is never made; it happens, it is simply there. In the darkness of anything external to me I find, without recognizing it as such, an interior or psychic life that is my own.”

— C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

Projection isn’t a pathology — it’s a fundamental feature of the psyche, the mechanism by which we develop, relate, and find ourselves in one another. It is how the inner world reaches toward the outer one. We are all doing it, all the time.

In one sense, we never really see each other at all. We are each projecting onto the other our own hopes and fears, our history, our unique constellation of ideas about the world and ourselves. As Anaïs Nin wrote, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

Perhaps you can recall your first encounter with a figure who would turn out to matter. That friend who would prove so challenging. The romantic partner who took a piece of your heart when they left. The actress who always inexplicably mesmerized you. The pet who reminded you of the childhood dog your mother never let you have.

When we feel that magnetic pull — that je ne sais quoi, that ineffable spark, a sense of karma or destiny — we know that something especially powerful is in play. A projection has found its hook.

Our shadow, our “missing piece”

“A projection rises from a neglected but dynamic value within us; usually it is essentially unconscious, but has a certain energy, which, when we have not attended it consciously, escapes repression and enters the world as a hope, a project, an agenda, a fantasy, or a renewal of expectation. No one rises in the morning and says, ‘I will make a projection today,’ but we all do. What is unconscious, charged with meaning, as a certain dynamic autonomy, and is denied inwardly will appear in some guise in our external environment.”

— James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

What we see in the other is a fascinating mystery. We are projecting something we have not yet consciously claimed in ourselves — what Hollis calls “a neglected but dynamic value within us.”

We feel ourselves to be incomplete. Like the protagonist in Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece, we sense that something essential is absent — and we go looking for it in the world.

But what feels missing can never be found externally. It is a part of ourselves that was denied, repressed, or never allowed to be fully claimed — projected outward as “the missing piece” when it was never truly gone. These unintegrated parts live in what Jung called the shadow: the rich, unmapped territory of the unacknowledged self.

We can catch a glimpse of our own shadow more easily than we might think. Ask someone who their favorite public figure is — and their least favorite. Listen to what infuriates them about that neighbor, or what they love most in their closest friend. The qualities we most admire and most despise in others are almost always the ones we have never allowed ourselves to fully own.

To say this plainly:

Our heroes and our villains are reflections of our own unacknowledged qualities.

We kiss the frog because we’ve projected our own lost royalty onto its warts.

We see in others what we have never allowed ourselves to become.

You guys, this prince is just a frog

In 2026, as we find ourselves at a global crisis point, the loss of our luminaries can feel especially painful. The spell is broken, and we find ourselves gazing at yet another frog— but our disillusionment is just projection coming home.

The withdrawal of a projection is a powerful, pivotal moment. All of the psychic energy we’ve invested in the Other rushes back to us — immediate, physical, felt in the body before it’s understood by the mind. It might be the gut-punch of betrayal, a flood of grief, or red-hot burning rage.

“Every failed projection is experienced by the ego as a frustration and a defeat,” Hollis tells us. But then he asks the question that changes everything:

“What are we going to do with that quantum of energy, that agenda of growth or regression?”

In other words — where is our power now? Where in ourselves live the qualities we’d placed in the Other? What did I love or admire about this person, this system, this community? Where have I denied myself these qualities — or been denied them? And where, now, might I begin to cultivate them in myself?

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You’re still a princess- don’t turn yourself into a frog

“Who would not be drawn to a missing part of their psychological life, for that is what a projection carries, and who has not felt the power of this phenomenon? (No wonder the phrase ‘soul mate’ has become such a cliché, for aspects of our soul are involved — but we can mistakenly think we actually see them in the other.)”

— James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

For those of us with trauma histories, the moment a projection crumbles can be especially generative — or especially dangerous. Rather than meeting the situation with curiosity, many of us turn the collapse inward. We blame ourselves for having “fallen” again. We reach for the familiar comfort of shame.

This always happens to me. I’m the common denominator. I should have known better.

No matter what your shame says: it is never wrong to see good in others. It is not naïve to hope that people will behave ethically, or to go looking for good in the world. And if someone took advantage of that projection — if they used your trust against you — that is not a failure of your discernment. It is never your fault that someone else chose to cause harm.

And Jung was clear on this point — projection doesn’t land randomly. It needs a hook. Something real in the other that invites it, that makes the projection feel true. Which means that what you saw in them was not a hallucination. The good you perceived was real. It simply was not the whole story.

Every failed projection is a defeat for the ego — but a necessary one.

As we learn to recognize, reclaim, and integrate what we’ve projected outward, we become more whole. We need to place less of ourselves in others. We begin to see people as they actually are — not as missing pieces of ourselves, not as princes hiding inside frogs, but as the fully complex, contradictory, beautifully limited human beings they have always been. With that energy returned to us, we become less reactive, more grounded — better resourced for the work we are actually here to do.

PS. Reminder that we are three weeks away from the “Better Breathing for Trauma” series that begins April 4. Read more and register here!

Last week I talked about the importance of recognizing our stressors— and how they can affect us— before we simply start throwing “feel-better” techniques at ourselves. Paradoxical though it may seem, simply acknowledging the reality of our situation can have a settling effect on our system.

That doesn’t mean that using breathing techniques can’t be helpful. As I mentioned in last week’s post, breathing is the only function of the autonomic nervous system over which we have conscious control. This makes it a powerful mechanism to dial down an overactive nervous system, or in working with trauma symptoms when they arise.

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The technique that I share in the video below is a good one to use, as my colleague says, “anytime the breath feels out of control.” One of my clients has found it to be a good resource in working with panic attacks as they arise. I learned it myself from Jennifer as part of my own breath retraining process, which helped me to lower my overall experience of anxiety.

As with any technique, remember that if it doesn’t work for you, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you— each of us respond differently to different interventions. Consider it an exploration and see what you find!

Feel free to leave a comment or send me a message with any thoughts or questions.

Both Jennifer and I have found that there are so many ways to work with anxiety, stress, and the body-based effects of trauma without even talking about the sources of that anxiety or stress (although that can be a part of the process, too). If you’re curious to know more, we’ll be sharing more information and practical strategies in next month’s Better Breathing for Trauma series. Whether you’re a human who lives with anxiety, or someone who supports other humans in a therapeutic way, our intention is to help you understand how stress lives in our posture and breathing patterns, and how we can shift our experience from the inside out.

Triumph over nature?

This morning marks the beginning of Daylight Savings Time here in the US. My body is not fooled. It knows what time it feels like. And yet, if I want to participate in society, I must override that instinctual knowing and move forward in my day, minus one hour.

Jung said,

“…(T)riumph over nature is dearly paid for. Nature requires no explanations of principle, but asks only for tolerance and wise measure.” —CG Jung, “The Eros Theory,” CW 7

Nature cannot long be tricked, reasoned with, overridden, or dominated.

But boy, do we love to try. My social media feed is chock-full of suggestions for ways to “optimize” or “hack” our way into better health, from supplements to mindfulness interventions. As I said in the post below, much of this messaging is based in shame and fear, appealing to our deepest desire to be loved and accepted. Sadly, ultimately, most of these approaches are doomed, because they fail to acknowledge what Jung knew: the human body, the human psyche, cannot be dominated, but must be treated with “tolerance and wise measure.” Not as easy to sell.

Everyone wants to be regulated

Nowhere is this rule— that nature cannot long be held back— more true than when we are talking about our survival instincts. Our deepest animal need is to stay alive— a neurobiological drive that is always in play, no matter how “safe” our logical minds may tell us we are.

Our systems never cease scanning for potential threats, and preparing to respond to them. At the first sign of danger, we shift into our sympathetic nervous system. Our adrenal glands release epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol. Our heart rate and blood pressure increase; our pupils dilate to improve vision. Our “non-essential” systems— immune, digestive and reproductive— pause as blood flow is directed to our muscles. At the same time, our breathing becomes faster and more shallow.

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What an incredible life-saving system this is! Yet it has become the bane of our modern existence, largely because for many of us, our sympathetic nervous system is stuck in the “on” position. Not only do we live in a time of unrelenting stress, we each carry a history of past threats that our systems recognize, and respond to. But because we fail to understand— let alone respect— its purpose, we treat it as a nuisance, a flaw. We call it “dysregulation,” and we are so desperate to get ourselves “regulated” again, to “reset the nervous system,” that we will often try anything to make that happen.

Paradoxically, if we could find a way to work with our biology, instead of fighting it, we’d have a better chance of naturally down-shifting back into the parasympathetic nervous system.

Have you tried taking a few deep breaths

Breathing plays a key role in bringing our system back into balance. Because it is the only part of the autonomic nervous system that we can actively control, we often use it as an access point. And that can be quite helpful.

Many of you have probably already learned some basic breathing techniques, from “take a deep breath” to “box breathing” or “lengthen your exhales.” These can be quite helpful, in certain contexts. But for some of us— and in some other contexts— you may have noticed that these techniques don’t always work the way we want them to.

One of the reasons (and I think it’s a big one, actually) is that trying to impose an external breathing pattern on a system that’s already in high alert is a lot like someone telling you to “just calm down” when you’re panicking.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never found that to be helpful.

Your nervous system is smarter than you think

Remember that our breathing— along with our entire nervous system— is designed to respond to perceived external stressors. That’s a feature, not a bug. If your breath doesn’t change in response to a threat, you’ve got much bigger problems. The deeper truth is that sometimes we need to change something else before the breath itself can change.

Creating a greater sense of stability and safety is the simplest thing we can do to help someone else shift their breathing patterns or move out of fight-or-flight, but we often miss this step because we don’t know how to do it.

Here’s the biggest nervous system hack of all: acknowledging that the situation is stressful or feels dangerous can be helpful in settling our system.

If you think back to a time that you were with someone who validated your feelings, or where you felt deeply seen, and understood, you already know this truth. When someone mirrors our inner world, we feel less isolated and fearful. Our system automatically settles and our breath shifts itself.

Many of my clients are individuals who have spent their lives knowing or seeing truths others did not (as in the Cassandra complex— see below). They experienced gaslighting from their family system, or their culture (as many folks in marginalized identities do when the cultural narrative fails to match their lived experience).

Trauma survivors experience this in a profound way, especially when family secrets are involved. Their body knows a truth that others’ do not, yet it is consistently denied by everyone around them. The situation is further complicated when the individual learns to deny their own truth, effectively gaslighting themselves, in an attempt to resolve their existential tension.

“Taking a deep breath” isn’t going to get it, y’all.

For these individuals, simply acknowledging the reality of the situation can have a profound settling effect.

What it means to be seen

By saying to others, or ourselves:

• “I believe you.”

• “It’s not wrong to feel what you feel.”

• “It makes sense that you’re having this experience.”

We take away the extra layer of shame and anxiety that accompanies the threat.

Sometimes, there’s an instant feeling of relief that translates into a more “regulated” system. For others, who’ve never had their needs mirrored, it can take much longer to trust the experience. Over time, this process establishes a sense of self-trust and agency that feels more stable and safe-- even though external circumstances have not changed.

When “hacks” become “accidental gaslighting”

If we are always telling ourselves, or our clients, that they need to change their breath when they appear anxious, we are unconsciously denying their reality. We’re communicating to our system that it will not be supported in the crisis it’s experiencing. No matter how good our intentions are, it can feel like we’re saying, “you’re wrong, you’re wrong” every time anxiety appears.

What about “irrational fears,” you’re wondering? When you— or someone else— “shouldn’t” be afraid? The same rules apply. Each of us has our own triggers and reasons for feeling threatened. Nobody gets anxious “for no reason.”

By acknowledging and listening to the underlying pattern, we provide space for that pattern to shift on its own, rather than trying to force it into compliance before it’s ready.

Breathing techniques can still be useful

That doesn’t mean that there’s not a place for breathing techniques— they’re a critical part of re-establishing a greater felt sense of safety in our bodies, and we’ve got some great things to share with you in next month’s webinar series— but it’s important to know what they can and cannot do.

Breathing techniques:

• Cannot override a deep core belief that something is wrong;

• Will not change the reality of external circumstances, or the inner truths we live with;

• Are not a substitute for a felt sense of safety and stability in our bodies.

Before we attempt to create change in our bodies or souls, we must first acknowledge the reality of the situation as we experience it. Until we do, any new strategy will never stick. We must, as Jung said, give Nature the “tolerance and wise measure” she requires.

“One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites—polar opposites—so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love…. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

—James Baldwin, “Where Do We Go From Here?”1

Sometimes, when I sit down to write this weekly letter, I feel a kind of wild despair. How do I get these thoughts and feelings out of my head and into some kind of organized shape? How can I translate these abstract blobs of experience into a language that expresses something clearly?

As I sat here this morning staring at this screen (and then again, off into space), it occurs to me that my personal struggle mirrors the larger issue humanity is facing: how do we bring our two split halves back together?

I’m not speaking here necessarily of the political Far Left and the Far Right (though we will see that they do line up rather nicely), but of the masculine and the feminine principles that should be balanced in each of us: Eros and Logos.

Eros is less verbal. It relates to the body, love, relatedness, abstraction. It uses our right-hemisphere brain; it values feeling; it sees the big picture. It is potentiality, and the principle of connectedness.

Logos, the masculine principle, has to do with the mind, power, discernment, clarity and directedness. It is left-hemisphere thinking, seeing in details and parts. It is the principle of force.

The act of writing— like any creative act, like conception itself!— requires both principles in equal measure.

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Power out of balance

“Where love reigns, there is no will to power, and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other.”

—CG Jung, CW 7, par. 78, “The Problem of the Attitude-Type”2

We are living in a time where the principle of power is dominant. Where a blatant lie can take precedence over a truth; where the tools of technology are used to alter the reality of our lives. Where wars and divisiveness are the norm, and relationality and compassion are decried. A man held the door for me the other day at a local store. Our eyes met, and I smiled as I thanked him, before glancing down at his shirt. “Wokeness leads to weakness,” it said. Power split from love.

Carol Gilligan (whose groundbreaking work demonstrates how young boys are taught to be “heroic,” detached and unempathetic, while young girls learn to be selfless and nurturing), explains that

“If you want to elevate one group of people over another, you have to undercut our relational capacities as human beings. You have to stop the person at the top from feeling empathy for the people at the bottom.”3

How familiar this feels.

Love and power together

“(C)ultural values do not drop down like manna from heaven, but are created by the hands of individuals. If things go wrong in the world, this is because something is wrong with the individual, because something is wrong with me. Therefore, if I am sensible, I shall put myself right first.”

—CG Jung, CW 10, par. 329, “Civilization in Transition.”4

It’s unusual for me to write so much about Eros— I tend to focus on cultivating power, Logos. This is because for myself— and for many of my clients, and readers— Eros is already predominant. Instead, it is our power that lives in our personal shadow, which needs to be reclaimed so we can become more whole.

This is critical work: as Baldwin says, “love without power is sentimental and anemic.” To simply lament how evil the “other” is without addressing our own imbalance is nothing short of hypocritical.

At the same time, in the larger culture, it is the principle of Logos that has been dominant— and yet, Eros is pushing back in a way that is clearly threatening.

Take, for example, the 2026 US Super Bowl Half Time show— an event so threatening to white patriarchy that an alternative had to be provided. The performance itself was Eros on full display: art, music, multicultural expression, intergenerational connection, and that clear sign, stating simply, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

The statement itself, though, is paradoxical. According to our definition of Eros, love on its own is not power. It is relationship, connection, and creative potential. The Super Bowl Half Time show was such an impactful experience not due to Eros alone, but because it combined the power of Logos— planning, organization, direction, purpose, thinking— with the connecting, feeling relationality of Eros. The same is true of the Minnesota anti-ICE protests. Eros alone cannot effect change. The Beatles said, “All you need is love,” but in truth, we need power combined with our love to generate something new.

I like the way James Hollis suggests we think about this for ourselves:

“(R)egardless of one’s sexual identity, we all have two tasks: nurturance and empowerment, whether you’re female or male. You have to always be asking yourself, what nurtures me? What feeds me and supports my journey and what opposes it? And secondly, what is my empowerment? How do I get permission and the courage to risk taking my life into the world and engaging that risk?”5

Protecting oneself from emotional contagion

In Buddhism, Eros and Logos could be seen as the concepts of “emptiness” and “clarity.” Emptiness refers to the fact that all phenomena are inherently non-existent, pure potential. Clarity means that anything can arise within that potential. Eros and Logos could also be stated as prajna (wisdom, feminine) and upaya (method, masculine). The union of the two is shown as syzygy, yab-yum, two deities in union. Images like this one helped Jung to arrive at his conceptualization of the two principles.

Mingyur Rinpoche, my primary Buddhist teacher, frequently says, “the best protection is no protection needed.” Perhaps he means by this that when we understand that reality is inherently empty, and that anything can arise within it— your most heartfelt wish, or your deepest fears— we no longer need to grasp so tightly to our sense of safety. And when we understand ourselves as dynamic beings, an ever-fluctuating interplay of masculine and feminine, endlessly creating new possibility with one another, we can both take ourselves less seriously, and recognize the potential impact of our actions in an interdependent world.

There is no opportunity to stand apart from the rising tide of danger we are in as a species. We can attempt to avoid the news, or social media, but simply leaving our house or picking up our phone subjects us to the swirl of others’ anxieties and fears. If we are ourselves uncertain, we are more vulnerable to emotional contagion, getting swept up in mass emotions we never intended.

“The best protection" we can find is to cultivate an awareness of ourselves, especially that which lies in our own shadow. By growing familiar with those less comfortable, younger, awkward parts of ourselves, we become more whole. We are less fearful. We are more effective agents for change.

The questions Hollis suggests above are a good starting point:

• What nurtures me? What needs me and supports my journey, and what opposes it?

• What is my empowerment? How do I get permission and the courage to risk taking my life into the world and engaging that risk?

I look forward to hearing where this takes you.

Until next time!

xo,

Laura

The body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche; and the soul is the psychological experience of the body. So it is really one and the same thing.

—CG Jung

On June 27, 2022, I had the following dream:

My teeth are breaking and falling out. At first, I could kind of put them back in, and they would stay in place if I was careful (this has worked in past dreams), but this time they just kept coming apart. I had a handful of broken grey teeth. I showed my brother’s ex gf-- I was a little hysterical. I made an appointment with a dentist to put in false teeth because previous repairs obviously had not worked. The feeling is terror, and also shame.

The day before, I had taken a train to Miami, where I met with a Postural Restoration coach. PRI was a modality I’d been incorporating in my practice for the past 18 months. Its emphasis on rebalancing the human body’s inherent asymmetry had helped several of my clients with all kinds of symptoms, from chronic heartburn to low back pain. But I wasn’t getting the results I was looking for in my own body, so I needed some help.

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The coach I met tested me thoroughly and gave me several exercises to work on until our next session. The most memorable part, though, was when she told me, casually, to “click your back left molars every once in a while” as I was doing an exercise. I was stymied. “What do you mean?” I asked. “You know,” she said. “Have your top left molars touch your bottom left molars. Don’t clench, just make them touch.” She paused, seeing my face. “Oh,” she said. “Can’t you do that?”

Panic washed over me. Those teeth were nowhere near touching each other. I had read about the importance of molar occlusion in the PRI research— something I’d never heard anywhere else— but I’d somehow managed to ignore this glaring issue in my own body. In fact, none of my top teeth touched ANY of my bottom teeth— they never had.

Who cares about molar occlusion anyway

I’d always thought I was fortunate to avoid having braces as an adolescent. I never loved my smile, but it wasn’t something that I obsessed over. My teeth just didn’t feel like a big deal.

What I didn’t know— consciously, anyway— is that having proper “molar occlusion”— the ability to touch your molars to each other— provides the brain with an essential sense of safety and grounding.

If you take a look at my pre-braces teeth, you can see that my teeth were nowhere close to touching:

In my case, this meant that I was consistently clenching my jaw, trying to get some kind of contact, resulting in the deep overbite you see here.

It is not at all common knowledge, even among personal trainers, or physical therapists, but molar occlusion is critical for stability. These teeth play a proprioceptive role— helping our brain and body to understand where they are in space. Failure to achieve that contact means that our muscles will have to work in different, less optimal, patterns to stabilize our bodies.

This is why my chronically stiff neck, pinching hips, and limited range of motion weren’t something that I was able to “fix” on my own, because they stemmed from my brain’s existential need to find stability and safety in the absence of the molar contact it was looking for.

Teeth aren’t the only critical stability point (though they may be the most unexpected one). Feet are also key players. Our brain’s ability to sense heel and big toe contact are another commonly-missed issue, along with rib cage placement— when the rib cage is too far forward, our shoulder blades don’t have a good point of contact to rest on, creating more existential angst for our whole system.

Vision, too, is another huge component that is frequently overlooked. I’ve seen many cases where simply changing footwear, getting a new glasses prescription, or even just chewing gum (getting that molar contact!) took a person’s pain away instantly. All this time the brain was just waiting to get the feedback it needed to feel safe enough.

In my own case, the chronic hip, foot pain, and neck pain that I’d lived with for so long had failed to respond to all of the interventions I’d tried because my brain wasn’t able to sense “ground.” And it wasn’t until I found a physical therapist who was trained in both Postural Restoration and Applied Integration techniques that I was able to begin the three-year process of moving my teeth into the proper position to establish the contact I needed.1

The unbearable lightness of being ungrounded

Western medicine has created an artificial dichotomy between mental and physical health. I feel incredibly fortunate to have entered into the mental health field through the physical work I’ve done; it gives me a tremendous advantage in better understanding how and why people are suffering.

For example, individuals who struggle to know where they are in space— who feel “ungrounded”— are often likely to experience anxiety. In the case of hypermobile persons, we can provide tools and training to help them to experience their bodies differently. These individuals benefit from more feedback in their bodies— Therabands, blocks or balls between the knees, weighted blankets. This frees up bandwidth in their brain so that they can literally breathe more easily, engage more economical muscle patterns, and even enjoy the experience of being alive more.

For an individual who has trouble finding ground through their feet or teeth, like me, wearing shoes with enough of a heel cup or arch support for their brain to sense where their feet are in space can be enough to free up their range of motion. I can tell you that in my own body, although I love the natural feel of barefoot shoes, I cannot turn my neck very far while wearing them, and my calves will be exhausted after a short walk. Ironically, in “barefoot” shoes, my brain can’t sense the ground; my body has to work a lot harder to keep me “safe.”

This experience of being ungrounded in our bodies is a physiological nudge toward dissociation; a “lightness” that may feel pleasant and airy, at times (my physical therapist, Amy, said to me once, “you walk like you’re about to float off the ground!”)— but which is, overall, less present, less reality-based, and perhaps less able to cope with the needs of our time. As we’ve seen above, if we do not feel stable, we cannot effectively use our full range of strength and movement. The best we can do is brace ourselves.

Beyond body & mind: symbol 🦷

The last time I saw my grandmother, a few years before her death, she was chewing a piece of candy when a confused and sad look dropped over her face. She spat a broken tooth into her hand, and held it out to show me. The aching feeling of this sudden, almost terrifying loss— that tooth, once strong, now broken and useless— flooded me, an echo of my own recurring dream of broken teeth.

The Book of Symbols says of teeth,

“Symbolically, teeth represent a kind of individual psychic mill where what’s too rough to take in directly can be ground up by conscious consideration, digested and metabolized. Teeth also evoke other aspects of aggression…. Losing teeth is a common image in dreams, often bringing to awareness conflict around assertively grasping and integrating an aspect of life one needs to claim, or a compromised capacity for aggression in general. Or it may depict a state of anxiety, a fear of of affective disintegration, that one ‘can’t hold it all together.’”2

Whitmont and Perera, in their classic Dreams, A Portal to the Source, suggest that dreams of “(l)osing teeth may refer to the loss of a particular reality adaptation, hopefully to be replaced by new ones or prostheses.”3

What did these ongoing,dread-filled dreams of losing my teeth mean for me? Up until this point, I was not consciously aware that my teeth did not touch in the way they were “meant” to. I couldn’t, then, know that this was contributing to an overall sense of untethered-ness, an accidental, existential anxiety that stiffened my joints and constricted my breath. But my psyche knew. It communicated my distress to me quite clearly.

Dream symbols aren’t always so direct, but this is a reminder that in cases where they point directly to a somatic (body-based) experience, we may want to ask: is there something literal to consider here?

My dream journal tells me that I have not had this recurring dream since 2024, when I regained my molar contact. It wasn’t perfect— and I continued to have chronic neck and foot pain while I wore braces, and then while wearing Invisaligns (which prevent the natural contact the brain craves). But I had enough contact that my body and psyche could start to trust their experience more. I have more range of motion in my neck (even as I write this, I’m marveling at how far I can turn my head from side to side!). I don’t limp when I get out of bed in the morning anymore.

And I no longer dream that my teeth are crumbling in my mouth.

Jung’s “psychoid realm”

“Practical medicine is and has always been an art, and the same is true of practical analysis. True art is creation, and creation is beyond all theories. That is why I say to any beginner: Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul. Not theories but your own creative individuality alone must decide.”

—C.G. Jung, Contributions to Analytical Psychology (1928)

What do we do with this kind of knowledge? How should we understand this case study of my teeth, my dreams, and the anxiety that underlay, or coexisted with, both?

One of the more esoteric parts of Jungian psychology is what he termed the psychoid realm— a level of reality in which mind and matter are not differentiated. This is why, if our system is unbalanced, we may experience symptoms as physiological (foot pain); mental (anxiety); or, on the psychoid level itself, symbolic (the dream).

Conceptualizing our bodies and psyches as a holistic system rather than separate realms of experience, we are better positioned to understand three things:

1. All symptoms can be seen as attempts to restore order to an imbalanced system

2. We may need more than one practitioner— it might take a team— to address the imbalance, but most importantly,

3. The client themselves holds the answers, though they will need support in decoding them.

In this light, there is not one right answer, nor even, necessarily, one right methodology, for each client; the process of seeking the answers may be more curative as the final “answer” itself. Exploring my own “grounding,” metaphorically and literally, has been an archetypal experience; one of the “hero’s journeys” of my lifetime; a sacred rite of passage back to “ground.”

This is, as Jung says, “the miracle of the living soul.” It cannot be reduced to simple theories, but must be lived as “true art,” a “creative, individual” act.

“It is hard for me to follow those who are not experiencing satisfaction in their lives. So much of our ability to be satisfied gets co-opted, manipulated, by other people, by institutions, by systems, that say satisfaction isn’t real, the only thing that matters is survival.”

—Prentis Hemphill, Finding Our Way podcast

Over the past month or so, we’ve been exploring the landscape of the human nervous system. If you want to catch up, you can read about the Window of Capacity here and, for those unicorns who don’t adhere to simple rules, the “Faux Window” of Capacity here.

All of this begs the question— if we ARE stuck in a perpetual state of activation (or, on the flip side, a low-energy state of disconnection)— “What are we supposed to do about it?”

I remember asking a similar question. There was a time, when I was running the yoga studio, that my stress level was so consistently high that my nerves were always jangling. The slightest thing-- a car horn at a traffic light, an unexpected text-- would run through me like a gun shot.

I’d also lost the ability to access any kind of normal range of emotions. At one particular low point, cleaning up after a final evening class, I walked into the front lobby and found an especially disgusting mound of trash spilling out of the bin. Instead of sighing, rolling my eyes, or saying, “oh God, now this,” I found myself reflexively smiling at the trash. Yes, dear reader, you read that right. I actually flashed a fake smile to the trash can because I had trained my system to deal with unpleasant people, tasks, work, with a big old smile to hide my emotional exhaustion. At that moment, standing alone in a yoga studio, smiling at the garbage, I thought, “Holy shit. I have got to change something.”

Homesick for a place we’ve never been

In my Buddhist tradition, we are taught that each of us has an inborn longing to reconnect with our true nature. Like birds know how to return to their nest, the teachings say, we too know how to return to our Buddha nature, our innate knowledge of that place within us where we are fundamentally okay.

NARM speaks in similar language to describe the experience of complex trauma: “It’s like being homesick for a place we’ve never been.” Even though we have lived our entire lives in a state of dysregulation or depression, we still know on some level that there is something else, something better, easier, more satisfying.

Yet if we are stuck in a “Faux Window” of capacity, or just feel like we can’t even imagine what real ease, rest, or satisfaction would feel like, this can be quite tricky— like trying to imagine a color we’ve never seen. We don’t have a map to get there, or a conceptualization to work with.

This can be particularly irritating when we are told that something should be relaxing. Yoga teachers often make the (unintentional) mistake of inadvertently suggesting that students “should” be experiencing something. “This should feel good,” or, even, “Enjoy a few moments in child’s pose.” What happens if it doesn’t feel good, or we can’t enjoy it, or our system just won’t let us relax? I find that students tend to shame themselves, assuming that the problem lies within. Looking around the room during Savasana, if we’re not able to settle our systems, can be an isolating experience. Everyone else can rest, we think. Yoga isn’t for me. Or, worse: I’ll never be able to relax.

I believe that each of us does have a natural “homing” system— this longing to be at home, satisfied, comfortable, at ease with ourselves. While it may be harder for some of us to find our way there, it’s not impossible. And it’s really important that we try.

This is not a luxury. This is our natural state; our birthright. This isn’t something we get to do when we’ve finished our chores, or when we’ve achieved our social justice goals. If we cannot find this kind of satisfaction, in fact, we will never be able to truly help others; we’ll have burnt ourselves out long ago.

A naturally fluctuating system

So— how do we begin to find our way “home?”

Our nervous system responds to stress by providing us with necessary physiological resources (elevated heart rate, stress hormones, etc.) to drive us toward the top or even out of our “window” in order to handle the stressor. After it’s completed, we naturally cycle back downward into our “rest and digest” physiology inside the window.

It’s normal and healthy to be “activated.” A life lived only inside our window of capacity would be incredibly boring, and we would struggle to effect change in ourselves and in our lives. In fact, the ONLY way to increase our window of capacity is to push up against its edges.

You might recall from this post, in fact, that when we’re training the nervous system, we deliberately introduce a stressor and then allow ourselves to recover from it. The natural cycle is expansion and contraction— or, up, and then down— over and over again.

Still with me? Okay, hang on, because I’m about to tie a few things together.

Your complexes and you

If you happen to be someone who is “stuck” in an activated state, or who struggles to ever feel like you can “sit still;” who “doesn’t know how to have fun;” or who desperately wants to feel joy, pleasure, or satisfaction, but just can’t seem to make it happen, this cycle of expansion and contraction is especially relevant.

Our complexes, as Jung noted, are directly tied to our physiological experience. One of the hallmarks of a complex is that it has a specific “feeling tone.” When we’re in the grip of a complex, we may experience some intense physical responses in our bodies. Or, conversely, we may feel completely disconnected from them, because the complex is running the whole system!

Let’s go back to Laura, circa 2014, smiling at the trash in the yoga studio.

One of my most pervasive complexes is what we might call a “perfectionism and productivity” complex. It has always driven me to do more, to do it better, to work harder, to multitask, to only do something if it has a quantifiable benefit or purpose. This complex is also tied in to my sense of personal value— if I’m not being productive, then I am inherently unworthy. I know many of you can relate.

This complex was so successful, in part, because it worked insidiously with my nervous system physiology in a way that I have seen countless times since in myself and my clients.

The general formula is:

POSITIVE STATE MOVES YOU INTO WINDOW OF CAPACITY → NEGATIVE COMPLEX RESPONSE MOVES YOU BACK OUT

Here’s one variation:

• After a long day of work, you sit down to watch a show on Netflix. Your nervous system responds positively. “Ahh!” it says. “Now we’re going to get to relax and really feel good.”

• After a while (sometimes immediately!), the complex reacts: “What are you doing? You’ve got stuff to do! You can’t just sit here!”

In this case, the complex doesn’t let us stay in the restful part of the window of capacity, but drives us back out of it, up-regulating us back into activation.

Another common trick of the complex is the shame down-regulation method:

• You take some time for a “guilty pleasure” (note the language) activity, like playing a video game or reading a mystery novel. Time passes and you’re enjoying yourself so much I don’t notice.

• Finally, the complex breaks through. “LOOK WHAT TIME IT IS. You just wasted an hour on that and you’ve got nothing done. What’s wrong with you? This is why the house is a mess/our life is a wreck/we never meet our goals.”

In this variation, the complex won’t let the individual enjoy the pleasurable part of the window of capacity. It dampens the mood with shame, pushing the individual down into a hypoaroused state of depression.

It’s worth noting that all complexes have a positive and a negative aspect (or “pole,” as we sometimes say). Having a productivity or a perfectionism complex work for us is incredibly beneficial at times.

That’s why our complexes have the potential to bring more balance to our whole system, if we can work skillfully to integrate them. They’re always trying to nudge us one way or another. As we can see here, they actually do that by pushing us into different physiological states— often against our conscious will. But knowing that they can do this is incredibly powerful, as we’ll talk about in the next section.

Microdosing satisfaction

It wasn’t long after Trash-Smile-Gate that I began seeing a somatic psychotherapist. I’d sit on her couch for one hour each week and tell her how stressed I was, how jumpy, how irritable, and that I just couldn’t seem to relax.

It was difficult for me at the time to even settle my system in that very welcoming, safe office. As I got more comfortable, this became a different problem. “I feel good now,” I said to her, tearfully, one day. “But I’m just going to go back out there and get activated all over again!” (Do you recognize the complex, here, saying, “This isn’t working, you’re wasting your time, you shouldn’t even bother”?)

What she said to me then was pivotal:

“It still matters,” she said. “It still counts that you have this hour to feel good, to feel at home in your body.”

I’ve never forgotten this. I came to see that every time I practiced dropping into that sense of ease in my body, I was expanding my capacity to stay there. The more often I came home to myself, the more easily I’d be able to find my way there again. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was creating new neuronal pathways in my brain, learning how to be comfortable, safe-enough, satisfied.

For some of us, finding satisfaction is no problem. But for those of us who struggle with chronic activation (or hypoarousal), or who ping-pong between the two, never landing in that sweet spot in the middle— we can actively practice what I’m calling “microdosing satisfaction.”

In the video below, I’m setting up these dominos just so I can have the pleasure of knocking them down. It’s sped up, but you can see that I fail the first time, but I keep going. When I finally do get that moment of pleasure, I take a moment to feel it in my body.

What’s not pictured (because it’s invisible) is the thought that comes after: “What a waste of time,” or, “I can’t believe how long that took you.”

Remember our formula? For those of us who struggle with satisfaction, with finding our way “home,” we have to remember that:

POSITIVE STATE → NEGATIVE COMPLEX RESPONSE

This can be tricky to see at first because we’re so used to it it’s almost invisible. Once we start seeing this pattern, though, it can be quite comical in its regularity; our old broken record trying to keep us in line. We don’t need to try to stop it, or do anything with it (in fact, the more we try to shut it down, the louder it gets)— just acknowledge it. That’s enough to start to make change on its own.

Choose your own adventure

So what do you actually DO to “microdose satisfaction”? You don’t need to go buy dominos, unless you want to. Remember, we’re not trying to make big, sweeping change— we’re looking for tiny moments that feel good in our body and nervous system, and letting them accumulate over time.This might be a first sip of morning coffee, with an extra pause to notice how much you enjoy it. Or a really funny meme that you text to a friend. Or a moment, petting your cat, feeling its velvet fur under your fingertips.

Activities I’ve done with clients that feel satisfying include:

• Bouncing a ball in perfect rhythm for as long as we can

• Putting a puzzle together, savoring that moment of perfect fit!

• Creating a doodle drawing or coloring a mandala

• Learning a new skill or choreography

• Taking a walk and feeling how our arms swing with the opposite leg

It is not, as they say, rocket science. In fact, it’s so damn simple that the biggest challenge is our complex telling us, “that’s a waste of time.”

Did you notice that voice coming up as you read through the last few sentences? If so, see if you can just notice it, rather than identify automatically with it— and then you can make a choice.

Is it really a waste of time to experience satisfaction in your life? Or is this the way we finally start coming home to the lives we’re meant to live?

“The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious. For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated.”

—C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation1, par 551

I have been feeling nauseous all week.

The release of further inhumane details from the Epstein files—exposing survivors’ names and brutalized experiences to public scrutiny—has underscored the staggering hypocrisy of a system that protects powerful men at the expense of children’s and women’s safety, rights, and dignity.

Add that to the ongoing violence from ICE and the release of the most overtly public racist trope from the White House, and the machinations being put in place to “protect” a “fair” election in November— it is, as they say, “a lot.”

The nausea that so many of us are feeling is a clear symptom: our bodies are under threat. Nausea is a physiological response to fear; it dampens metabolic activity as part of a “freeze” response. And there’s a lot to be afraid of right now. The people in power are dangerous, and our collective refusal to simply comply with their demands is pushing them to greater and more egregious displays of power and violence.

Fear itself is a healthy response to a threatening situation. It’s what we do with that fear that matters.

“The good girl” complex

Among everything else happening this week, I hadn’t paid much attention to the release of the Melania documentary. So when I saw that the brilliant had written a post about it a few days ago, I was intrigued by her title, and had to know more.

Patton’s thoughtful and incisive analysis resonated so much that I think it’s worth sharing a long excerpt:

(These white women) were watching a woman who appears to have learned how to remain materially secure and socially protected while standing next to volatile white male power. They were watching a version of survival that looks controlled instead of chaotic, polished instead of desperate, elevated instead of trapped.

But if you go one layer deeper, they were also watching a woman who seemed to answer questions many of them have been taught not to ask out loud. How do you stay safe next to a man whose anger fills a room? How do you maintain status when the person tied to your stability is also capable of cruelty? How do you keep your life intact when the system that protects you is the same cruel system hurting other people? How do you convince yourself that proximity to power is the same thing as having power?

Because for many white women, the documentary was not just about Melania. It was about witnessing a woman who appears to have mastered the art of emotional containment inside male dominance. It was about watching what it looks like to stand next to a man who is feared, hated, or controversial and still move through the world with protection, wealth, and social insulation intact.

And at a moment in American history where many white women are living alongside white men who are angrier, more radicalized, more openly hostile to demographic change, more resentful of women’s autonomy, more vulnerable to extremist pipelines, and more comfortable expressing racist or misogynistic ideas out loud, that image carries enormous psychological weight. Because it raises a quiet, dangerous question: If this is what white male power looks like now, what does survival next to it require?

I grew up in a small, white, conservative town. I live in a slightly-larger-but-still-small, white, conservative town. I am intimately familiar with these white men2 who are “angrier, more radicalized, more openly hostile,” etc. During a peaceful protest in our town last year, a (conservative) white teenage male punched an elderly (liberal) white woman in the stomach. The white male rage in the air is as palpable as the exhaust fuming from their pickup trucks.

When these men, who are also my neighbors, smile and wave at me on the street, I am aware that as a white woman, I have the privilege of “passing” as one of “them.” Unless I tell them I am bisexual, that we have a trans daughter, that I voted for Kamala, that I do not support ICE, etc., I can be “safe.”

Of course the “good girl” in me very much wants to appease, to be safe, to fly under the radar. Despite being raised in a feminist household, I am a product of patriarchal, white supremacist culture. I can (and do) work every day of my life to address these internalized issues and to reassert my own sense of justice, power, and integrity, but I am no longer debilitated by shame around this complex. The shame itself would keep us locked into the hierarchy— as Patton says, these are “questions many of (us) have been taught not to ask out loud.” Speaking up, no matter how queasy we feel, is how we break the spell.

We also have to remember that in extreme circumstances, the “good girl complex” means literal survival. In violent systems, fawning—appeasing men in power—may be the only strategy that allows survival until escape becomes possible. For individuals who are survivors of sexual violence, or intimate partner violence, or an abusive childhood, this complex is likely to be more and more activated as patriarchal powers escalate: we know what there is to fear.

But there’s a hefty price to be paid in simply, as Patton says, convincing “yourself that proximity to power is the same thing as having power.”

Not even an anti-hero

“[It] is quite frivolous, superficial, and unreasonable of us, as well as psychically unhygienic, to overlook the reaction and standpoint of the unconscious.”

— CG Jung, The Undiscovered Self, para 5613

What is it that each of us is called to do, in the face of oppression and real embodied danger? My understanding is that each of us must consult our own psyche to know what is right for us— and if we fail to face our own fear, as Jung says in the epigraph above, “the meaning of life is somehow violated.”

Here is the dream of a factory owner living under the Nazi regime:

“Goebbels came to my factory. He had all the employees line up in two rows, left and right, and I had to stand between the rows and give a Nazi salute. It took me half an hour to get my arm raised, millimeter by millimeter. Goebbels watched my efforts like a play, without any sign of appreciation or displeasure, but when I finally had my arm up, he spoke five words: “I don’t want your salute.” Then he turned around and walked to the door. So there I was in my own factory, among my own people, pilloried with my arm raised.”

This dream, collected by Charlotte Beradt in her book The Third Reich of Dreams4, was a recurring one for the sixty-year old dreamer. Beradt says of this man,

“(H)e came to an accurate conclusion: that his attempt in front everyone to toe the Nazi line, his public humiliation, ended up being nothing but a rite of passage into a new world of totalitarian power— a political maneuver, a cold and cynical human experiment in applying state power to break the individual’s will. The fact that the factory owner crumbled without resistance, but also without his downfall having any purpose or meaning, makes his dream a perfect parable for the creation of the submissive totalitarian subject.'“

Beradt concludes, “He has not even become unheroic, much less an anti-hero— he has become a non-person.”

What kind of safety has this man bought himself? In denying his own sense of integrity; in aligning himself with the power of the oppressor; the factory owner personifies Jung’s “violation” of life’s meaning. In one variation of the dream, in fact, during the half-hour struggle to raise his arm, his spine actually breaks. Dreams don’t mince words.

In contrast, here is a dream from the US, which came shortly after the 2025 presidential inauguration:

“I am being chased by a group of angry men. I am able to duck into a space and get away from them, and in the dream I imagine that I have my steel mace (the weapon that we use for training). I started going through the exercises with the mace in my dream, and even though I wasn’t even holding the mace in the dream, but only pretending to, I felt stronger and more in control.”

The dreamer recognized that she was able not only to escape the “angry men,” but that she had internal resources to empower her. The dream image of wielding a mace was especially potent for her, as she related it to feeling stronger and more powerful. It let her feel less afraid of the patriarchal power she related to the incoming administration.

When we fail to connect to our own sense of power; when we are passive in the face of oppression; when we ignore our own soul’s urging to do what we know is right, we run the risk of “accidentally” aligning ourselves with evil. Still, at other moments, we may need to strategically align with the oppressor (cloaked in the Trickster archetype) to live to fight another day. I cannot judge anyone else’s actions. I don’t need to— our dreams will know the truth.

I can only listen to my own dreams, and their urgings. They tell me to move through my nausea, to brave my own fear, and to “take the risk,” as Jung says, in sharing my thoughts and feelings with you.