Seven and a half years of therapy followed. By the end, I had language for everything. I knew who was to blame. I could have given a masterclass on my own trauma.

And I still didn’t know who I was outside of the marks left behind by the people who hurt me. And I still chose a wildly narcissistic partner to marry.

In this episode, I share some very personal stories of the pitfalls I fell into — the ones I want to help you avoid. What actually worked, what didn’t, and why.

My hope is that it saves you the years and the money it took me to find out.

The Belief I Had to Unlearn

I used to believe that insight was the finish line. If I read the book, learned the terms, named the pattern, and understood the wound well enough to explain it to anybody who asked — that would be enough. It’s more possible to do that now than it was back in my day. There’s so much more clinical language available in mainstream culture. But here’s what I notice: I don’t see a lot of truly healed women talking like that.

Attachment style culture and the highly sensitive person frameworks aren’t wrong, exactly. They just don’t treat what’s a trauma response and what’s the superpower you were born with as two different things. And that distinction matters more now than almost anything else in my approach to healing from life-altering relationships with people who have borderline or narcissistic traits.

Somewhere in all my mind-heavy obsession, I believed I would finally be set free — free to have the life and the relationships I longed for.

I used to operate like my mind was going to solve everything.

I didn’t know any better, but I was wrong. And only the kind of wrong you can be when you have no idea there’s another way.

What I came to learn was how heavily conditioned my mind actually was — by the unwell people in my midst and in my family, by the collective and dominant culture, by fashion magazines and pop songs filled with longing for love and codependency, by my borderline mother. Back in the day, going to therapy was what you did when you were up Schitt’s Creek without a paddle. And I was.

I already had an incredibly active mind. It took me years — personal and professional years — to understand why. And that’s the first all-too-common misperception I want to talk about, because I watch almost every woman I work with labor under it too.

What the Old Era Got Wrong

See if you can recognize the old era approach — and honestly, in a lot of ways, it’s still the current approach, and it’s leaving a lot of women hanging and let down. In my humble opinion.

Healing — and I’m using quotation marks — equals mind management. That’s the first one.

The second is sovereignty. I love that word. It’s the perfect word for what happens when you become truly ungaslightable to your core. You are sovereign. But right now in the culture, it’s looking more like “I’m a queen, I’m a goddess” — very self-righteous. Without proper internal processing, those become costumes women wear. They’re wearing them like a posture, without having done the work to change their inner operating system. It becomes more armor.

The third is the concept of safety. Who is safe? Am I safe? Is this a safe space? It really looks more like hypervigilance to red flags and gaslighting. I see a lot of people hooked on fear of the other.

The Familiar Feeling You Almost Don’t Notice Anymore

If you’re listening to this, you could probably give a masterclass on it if someone asked, because you know the terms — trauma bond, gray rock, flying monkeys. You’ve read the books, maybe done decades of therapy and the embodiment retreats, and still your body braces before you even know why. It’s a familiar feeling, and you almost don’t notice it anymore.

You enter rooms feeling hopeful and leave feeling off, like you’ve absorbed someone else’s mood or expectations, and the inner critic makes it mean something about who you are. Or you’re bracing for the next blaming or shaming or shunning, still litigating in your own mind between your reality and their version of reality — your sense of self, which is quite fractured, against their version of who they’re telling you you are.

Maybe you say yes too fast, or over-give, or over-explain to keep the peace, and then your body crashes later when you’re alone, when no one’s watching. You catch yourself editing your own truth in real time — softening it, adding disclaimers — because some part of you still believes that being fully honest will be punished.

If that’s you, if you recognize any of that, I want to tell you: you’re not doing any of this wrong. You were handed a doorway that was never going to lead you all the way out of the labyrinth. Intellectual insight doesn’t free you from inner captivity. You can’t manage your mind with the same mind that created the problem in the first place. The same mind that chose the narcissist, the same mind that was heavily conditioned by the borderline mother — it’s just not going to work.

HEART OF SUN SANCTUARY JOURNAL

Where Women Are Losing Time and Money

I want to describe where women who’ve had these relationships with narcissistic and borderline people are actually losing time and money — two precious resources. I want to get specific, because vague antagonists are easy to nod along to and hard to actually recognize in your own life. Some of this might conflict with your current perception, but I feel very passionate about these examples.

No treatment modality is infallible, and what one person is comfortable doing would be unthinkable for another. I have profound respect for that.

Pitfall One: Feminine Embodiment Work

The first path I want to touch on is feminine embodiment — especially in the format you see a lot these days, workshops and retreats that teach women to accept behavior that was never appropriate, in the hands of a facilitator who has no real knowledge of what this kind of abuse actually does to a woman’s psyche or nervous system, or who’s still in denial about her own abuse.

Before my client’s true boundaries — the kind that speak without words — have been restored, this path can push her further away from her core self, usually without either of you realizing it.

Pitfall Two: Parts Work

The second approach is known as parts work, or Internal Family Systems. It’s come under fire a lot lately, and for good reason. I’m not here to do the whataboutism that usually accompanies these conversations, and this isn’t a turf war. But I want to share what I’ve seen in friends and clients who dove headfirst into IFS.

The construct of IFS is that there’s a Self, capital S, and then there are parts that are not the Self — the angry part, the age-four part, the food-addicted part. There are protectors and exiles. The concept of Self and parts isn’t inherently wrong. But two things happen at once with IFS, and they tend to compound each other.

The first is the technique itself. It’s what’s known as an open-ended technique — it encourages you to go deeper and deeper, and it can go to some strange places, even people identifying with animals. It validates whatever voices or images arise in you, and I believe this is where the danger lives.

Our minds are receivers — very sensitive and very open to whatever environment they’re in. Women with relational trauma are especially prone to wanting to make progress, and they tend to people-please, looking for ways to feel in control of their lives and their challenges. In a room or a dynamic where the goal is to please the group — whether that’s an unspoken agreement in the group or coming from a facilitator who isn’t fully conscious they’re creating this — that pressure can unwittingly shape increasingly dramatic memories into being. Practitioners with subconscious agendas can shape the narrative, imposing their own unprocessed trauma onto their patients, knowingly or not.

The second thing is the practitioner. In the wrong hands — practitioners with little to no boundaries, knowingly or unconsciously coming from egoic power and force — this can do a lot of damage. It can force people’s psyches to go places they’re not ready for. It can try to override the nervous system before it’s ready. I struggle to see how that combination is helpful to women who’ve been sexually, physically, spiritually, and psychologically traumatized or abused.

And here’s the part I really want to land: even when the facilitator is a good one, even when nobody’s imposing anything and nobody’s chasing drama, it’s still the mind conceptually juggling itself.

Talking to a part is still a thought talking to a thought.

It’s not the same as the true capital-S Self actually being experienced and operating in your day-to-day life. I guarantee you she is in there. It’s just not the same as her actually being experienced — and that’s the piece I think gets lost in the framework itself, separate from who’s holding it.

Because in the wrong hands, I’ve seen people get re-traumatized. Hands down. I’ve seen identities fracture. If someone already tends toward dissociation, this made that survival strategy worse in them. And the practice of talking to the parts bled into everyday conversations with friends and family, until it became hard for people not doing IFS to even follow along.

Which brings me to something I keep coming back to: this is more mind-heavy management. It gives an already heavily conditioned and overactive mind even more to manage, even more to do. A mind that’s already overactive doesn’t need a more elaborate internal cast of characters to negotiate with. It needs a way to integrate with the body and rest in the self — not think its way there.

In my practice, I don’t impose anything. I meet my clients where they are on the day. They have their own timing for going deeper into the roots of their challenges, and quite organically, what’s ready to be understood and released announces itself. Nothing has to be forced.

I don’t want to go too far down this particular rabbit hole, but here’s what I’m drawing attention to: a practice can be well-intentioned and still be working at the level of the conditioned mind, when what’s actually needed is to be met somewhere the mind cannot reach on its own. It can also leave someone over-identified with their abuse, and we really don’t want that. I’ll share more about that in an upcoming episode.

Pitfall Three: A Course in Miracles

The next one is A Course in Miracles — a respected practice channeled by Helen Schucman, a formerly atheist clinical and research psychologist who, as a footnote, admitted toward the end of her life that it had ruined her life and that she regretted following it. Worth noting.

The course says we’re either motivated by fear or love. Here’s a simple example you might recognize: when we’re checking our phones every fifteen minutes to see if he texted, and we didn’t hear the ding, and then get mad because it’s been two days without a text, and make it mean he’s a no-good scoundrel — that’s fear. When we can stay with, “I don’t know why I haven’t heard from him, but wherever he is, I wish him peace and good health, and I trust if it’s meant to be, he’ll come back around,” that’s operating in love. The first grips the body and mind in suffering. The second is a state of complete surrendered trust.

All good, in theory. But here’s the crux of it: it wasn’t designed to treat what ails the daughter of a narcissistic parent, or a woman raising kids with a borderline ex while trying to come out of hiding around her talents and finally start the business she’s been sitting on. For a woman whose upper energy centers run porous — soaking up everyone else’s pressure and thoughts and beliefs — or whose physical cells are still stuck in chronic threat detection, a purely mental practice, even a spiritual one, can spin the addictive or overactive mind further instead of settling it.

I have to tell you a funny story. A long time ago, I was dating this guy — my god, he was so cute — and he was a student of A Course in Miracles.

He called me one day to tell me he’d been arrested for driving stoned. His car was zigzagging on the road in the middle of the night, and he got pulled over.

Backstory: he’d given up drinking because his father was a severe alcoholic and he felt he had a problem with alcohol too. But what an addictive personality will often do is put down one addiction and pick up another — in his case, he put down the wet goods and picked up the dry goods. So he’d been arrested, and when the cop pulled him over, it turned out his license had expired too. They had him spend the night in jail.

He told me the story, saying he’d spent the night wondering what message God was giving him. Why did I end up in jail? And he’d realized: the message was….”don’t drive without a license.”

🤪☹️🤪

I was quite taken aback. I didn’t realize he was such a stoner when we started — this was very new information — but that level of entitlement was unacceptable to me. He could have hurt himself. His car was zigzagging and he didn’t even realize it. He could have hit someone else — someone who could have been drunk and driving themselves, and they could have had a collision. His attitude about it made me cold.

Not long after, I let him know I couldn’t see a future for us. He said something like, “I think you’re giving into fear” — a landmark concept in A Course in Miracles, where the opposite of fear is love. It’s sort of a mind-washing modality, where you wash fear out of your mind. I said, “I don’t feel afraid. I feel very clear that I don’t see a future for us.” He asked why. I said, “I’m kind of shocked at the blasé attitude you have about the way you were driving. You have a history of alcoholism, you’re trying to evolve, and you picked up weed — a heavy, heavy habit, which I didn’t realize. I have a history with people who have substance abuse issues, and I know where I am in my journey. This isn’t going to work for me.”

Then he used the course again: “I think you’re choosing fear. Why can’t you just be with someone who smokes a lot of weed, and just keep choosing love instead of fear?” I had to explain that it would only be fear that would keep me thinking I don’t have a choice — because I’m so attracted to you, but you’ve got this monkey on your back. Only fear, and a sense that there’s no one else out there, a state of lack, would cause me to repeat something I know isn’t for me and isn’t going to end well. And to me, that is choosing love. I’m choosing it for myself, because I love myself, and choosing not to repeat the mistakes of the past. And I’m choosing love for you too — because I will make your life a living hell trying to get you sober. And clearly, if you think God’s message to you was “don’t drive without a license,” you’re not ready to get sober.

One more thing worth mentioning: when someone is a heavy substance user, when you’re with them and they’re taking in the substance, they disappear, and you’re left alone in the room having an experience all by yourself. Only fear and a belief in lack would keep me choosing that.

The thing about something like A Course in Miracles is that we can end up chasing the high of the upper energy centers — chasing the light, the transcendence — at the expense of the wounds still living in the lower centers, which go unhealed. That’s exactly what keeps a woman circling the merry-go-round of deeply disappointing relationships one more time, in a sexier outfit or a different pair of pants.

A Course in Miracles is heady stuff, and it has to go through the filter of the personality of the person teaching it.

Having been to several public events with the most famous teacher of the course, and witnessing her berate and shame several attendees in the Q&A for asking particular questions, I was put off. She’s human. But she’s seasoned, she’d been doing these events for decades, and the course hadn’t touched her personality self much.

After a few attempts at sticking with the course myself, I put it down for good — it was overstimulating to my mind, and I really needed to get grounded.

This is very important: what is most simple is the most grounding. Keeping it simple is very grounding.

It’s easy for me to say now, but I’m reporting back from an internal experience. Once I put that kind of thing down and came back to the very simple, foundational things I teach my clients, my insides became much more calm, still, and centered. My specialty is embracing the complexity of my clients’ circumstances and solving them with simplicity.

More Time and Money Wasters

A few more worth mentioning.

A boundaries course that gives you scripts but never touches why your body still won’t let you use them with someone you’re wildly attracted to — or the intense kickback, what I call the boundary sickness, that arises when you do use them. You cannot override your nervous system’s readiness. In my work with clients, yes, you need to practice new things, but there’s no need to force it — not if we’re genuinely working through the subconscious.

A dating or relationship coach who’s never once worked with women who must leave a disordered partner, while telling her that if she can just get rid of her own “toxic anger,” he’ll finally calm down — that he’s mirroring her — meanwhile he’s the one showing every sign of coercive control. I’ve seen this many, many times.

And the ways a woman’s money keeps leaking: caretaking an abusive mother who’s fully able-bodied, paying bills that were never her responsibility, living with a resentment that costs her far more than the money ever did.

None of this is a fluke. They’re all symptoms. The rest of the iceberg is still there, underwater, untouched — because none of these paths were ever built to go deep enough to find it or resolve it.

That’s not to say there aren’t fantastic therapists out there. There really are. But they may or may not have honed their expertise on this specific challenge. And I have to say, there are some very bad therapists out there too. The women who come to me after years of talk therapy have been so underserved, so let down. It breaks my heart. It’s possible they needed that experience to finally find the help they actually need — and by contrast, they’ll know it when they see it. But many have no idea there are other, more liberating paths.

The Perspective Shift

You’re not still affected by what happened to you because you’re not doing enough. You’re still affected because somewhere back in that conditioning — from the mother, the culture, the magazines, the songs — you learned that noticing what was true and saying it out loud wasn’t safe. So you got very good at not noticing. That’s a survival skill you’re still running, on a nervous system that thinks it’s still needed.

You don’t need to decode the narcissist anymore. You need to restore you, and your ability to trust — not just yourself, but what you already know deep down, even when it’s buried. Understanding tells you why you disappeared, but it doesn’t on its own bring you back to your wise, truth-telling body — the one that already knows who’s safe and who isn’t. And it doesn’t bring you home to your soul, the part of you that knows how to guide you toward the life you long for, the one that still feels out of reach.

That’s the whole distinction. Once you see it and experience it, you cannot unsee it.

The Moment It Became Undeniable

I want to share the moment it became undeniable for me. I sat in a therapist’s chair for seven and a half years, once a week, sometimes twice, when things got really intense in my life. She’d written a paper on me for her colleagues, for a journal only therapists read — because in her whole career, she’d never had a patient who’d been through what I had in childhood and not ended up, in her words, “an addicted prostitute on the corner.” She was dumbfounded, she told me, by my innate hopefulness, by my capacity for closeness after everything I’d been through.

I remember one session, tears streaming down my face, telling her how guilty I felt that my marriage hadn’t worked out — that my husband had finally taken a chance on love with me, and it hadn’t been enough. As if all the cards had been in my hand. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I was very naive. He’d been hideously abusive to me, and still I felt bad. She looked at me and said, “You really do take loving people seriously, don’t you?” And I do, still. But not in a dysfunctional way — not when it’s at my expense.

Back then, I had language for everything. Insight for everything. I knew who was to blame. And I still didn’t understand why I was the way I was — why certain things about me had always felt different than my immediate family, why in certain circles I felt too big, or too small, or even invisible.

It wasn’t until years later, when I met my mentor and discovered the alchemical birth chart, that I understood why. They were no longer a mystery. They were written in my chart the whole time — what I came here to overcome, and how to actually do it. A perspective my therapist’s license, her worldview, would never have allowed her to be open to, let alone offer me.

Insight and clinical language had done everything it could do for me. It had a ceiling, and I had reached it. That’s the moment the work I do now was actually born — I didn’t realize it then, of course, but it was defined by hitting the wall myself, in my own body and soul, in that chair.

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Where the Real Work Begins

Today, in my practice, my clients all eventually leave their therapists. Not because I tell them to — early on, they feel it for themselves. They’re being held back, and our work together goes to a depth that dissolves what talk alone could only manage.

My Bio-Celestial Depth Alchemy method doesn’t ask you to keep circling the wound with your mind. It’s a spiral path, not a checklist of who’s to blame — because real healing is rarely linear. And the first movement of that path isn’t more analysis, which, if we’re being honest, really amounts to just more rumination. So the first, foundational part of this path is: forgive yourself for what you had to do to survive. Not analyze it. Forgive it. Let your body, not just your intellect, take that true exhale.

To be clear, true forgiveness can never be forced. You arrive there once your personal boundaries have been restored so completely that they speak without words. It’s a natural consequence of this path. Forgiveness — self-forgiveness — it’s a destination. You’ll reach it naturally once your personal boundaries are restored, and it will feel as natural as breathing when it lands in your body. You won’t carry such a high emotional charge. The mistrust, the hypervigilance for sights, sounds, smells, gaslighting, the sense of abandonment and betrayal — it just won’t be there anymore. This is one hundred percent possible. I am living proof, and so are my clients.

There’s something I see a lot, and it was certainly part of my own path. When we get deeper into things like birth charts that show us constitutionally how we function, who we are, what the synergy is between our physiology and our unique soul — the birth chart reveals quite a lot. One of the things it reveals, and you can see it in the body, is the body type, and which gland in the endocrine system is most dominant. We need to bring the endocrine system into balance so that we’re biochemically balanced — so our relationships become biochemically balanced too. Part of the work I do with my clients is bringing their systems into balance, looking at their unique physiology and what they crave. Usually we crave the foods that over-stimulate our dominant gland, and then the other glands become imbalanced, and we get a whole host of issues.

The crux of what this episode is about: we’re attracted to modalities where we’re already strong, already over-stimulated. They’re very appealing to us, but they’re not addressing the other parts of our being — and for sure, not taking into consideration the unique needs of our constitution and physiology, and what kind of synergy is happening between that and our soul, our environment, and everything else that comes into play.

We’ll get into that in another episode.

If you’re the woman who has done all the things — the therapy, the books, maybe even the retreats — and something in you just still hasn’t landed in radical self-trust, that is not a failure of your effort. It’s a sign you’ve reached the edge of what the mind alone can do. There’s another door, and it doesn’t ask you to understand more with your mind alone. It asks you to come home to your original blueprint — the one you had before you were interfered with. To wash out the narcissistic and borderline influence for good.

Because I’m calling it: the era of the over-therapized and under-healed woman is over.

If this is the first thing of mine you’ve listened to or read, welcome. There are several more misperceptions, and time and money wasters, that might be keeping you stuck, ahead in this series — and each one unlocks a different door. I’ll see you in the next episode.

FEELING THE CALL TO GO DEEPER?

This episode is the answer to that question. Not the one you’ve been given before. The real reason. And what we’re doing about it.

This is for the woman who can’t step away because she’s co-parenting.

This is for the woman who’s decided to go no-contact.

I’ve got you covered.

The Question at 2 A.M.

There’s a thought I want to talk about today. It may or may not be fully formed in your day-to-day awareness yet, but it’s the kind of thought you sort of know is there — the one you’d rather look away from toward your Pinterest boards. Maybe you’ve told your therapist, or your journal, or your best friend. Maybe you’ve said some version of it, or flirted with the edges of it.

It’s the one that survives every book you’ve read, every modality you’ve tried, every genuine insight and hard-won understanding and aha moment. The one that’s still there at 2 a.m. in the morning, after all of that. Persistent and private.

It goes something like this: What if something in me was always going to make real love impossible? What if the life I can feel waiting for me just isn’t available to someone like me?

If that landed somewhere in your body just now — if there was even a flicker of recognition — I want you to stay with me. Because that thought, the one you’ve barely admitted to yourself, let alone said out loud anywhere, is exactly what this episode is about. And I have something important to tell you about it.

Not a Conclusion — An Installation

That thought is not a conclusion you reached. It’s a conclusion that was installed — put there in the deepest layer of conditioning, before you had the language to question it or the context to understand what was being done. It lives below your conscious mind, which is exactly why every conscious effort to dissolve it falls short.

You can understand narcissistic or borderline abuse cycles completely. Name every pattern. Validate every experience you had. Diagram the trauma bond with clinical precision. And this thing just sits there, unchanged — because it was never made of words. It was made of sensation, formed before you were old enough to know that the information you were being given about yourself was wrong. A projection. A not-so-fun house mirror. That’s not your failure.

You don’t have an information problem. You have an identity problem. And no amount of how-to content will solve an identity crisis. That’s really what I’m here to talk about in this episode.

Who I’m Talking to Today

Before we go further, I want you to know who I’m talking to today. Whether you’re co-parenting with someone whose disorder means the war didn’t end when the marriage ended. Whether you’re back in the dating pool and something keeps going sideways in ways you can’t quite explain. Whether you’re in a workplace where the dynamic feels disturbingly familiar. Or whether you’re a woman whose gifts have gone quiet, and you’re just not sure if they’re ever going to come back.

This episode is for all of you. I want to tell you something about the life you’ve been reaching for — to offer you something I wish someone had offered me earlier in my own journey.

Reaching for Proof

When we’ve been told — through words, through actions, through the sustained campaigns of people who needed us small and afraid to speak up — that we are not enough, that we’re too sensitive, that we’re the toxic one, no longer lovable, not worth the full version of life and love and creative freedom — we don’t just stop wanting those things. We start reaching for them to prove that they were wrong about us.

A relationship that finally sticks around. Recognition for our gifts and talents. Visibility that confirms our worth. Success that amounts to evidence. We want the cash and the prizes we believe were owed. We want the life that says to everyone who ever diminished us — and maybe most of all, to ourselves — see, they didn’t break me.

I want to say this with tenderness, because I lived this myself: that reaching for more is earnest, because the longing underneath it is true. Absolutely true. But when the life we’re building is organized around proving something to the wounded part of us, and to the people who hurt us — when our choices are still coming from that deep, pre-verbal place of not enough, rather than from the soul that always knew otherwise — we are still, in the most important sense, living by their abusive and distorted rules. We’re still letting the verdict they handed us be the organizing principle of our existence.

This is not the freedom you so richly deserve.

The urging of your soul path is never far. It’s always been there — that frequency we almost pick up sometimes, the knowing that feels like this is what I’m actually here for. But between us and that path, there’s something covering up the permission slip. It’s a deeply held sensation, often not a fully formed thought or elaborate story, that says: you don’t get to have that. Not you. Not with what you’ve been through.

And no amount of understanding lifts that sensation, because it was never made of understanding.

What Talk Therapy Gave You — and What It Cannot Reach

Here’s what I need to tell you about talk therapy — and I say this with enormous respect for the role it plays, because it has given many of the women I work with something genuinely important. Talk therapy gave you language. It gave you a witness. It helped you name what happened and analyze the pattern. That has real value.

Here’s what it structurally cannot reach: the sensation that formed at age four, or in utero if you have a narcissistic or borderline personality mother. It’s the somatic conclusion your body drew when the environment it was born into told it, through ten thousand small and gigantic moments, that love is conditional and you are constantly on the wrong side of the condition.

That sensation was never made of words. It lives in the body — in the nervous system, in the biochemistry that formed under prolonged stress and confusion, and the particular chaos of loving people who could not love you back, or even take in who you actually are.

You cannot talk your way out of something that was never talked into you.

Fluent in the Wound, Instead of Free From It

Here’s what happens when a woman spends years trying: she becomes fluent in her wound instead of free from it. She can explain her attachment style. She can name her mother’s personality disorder. She can diagram the trauma bond, probably in her sleep. She can sit in a therapist’s office and have an entirely accurate, entirely articulate conversation about every single thing that happened to her — and walk out and still pick the same kind of person to marry or get into business with. Still shrink at the moment of visibility. Still feel, at two in the morning, that unnamed thing that no trauma framework has ever quite touched or resolved.

That is not healing. That is a very articulate prison.

By the way — your captivity is over, if you choose now.

Where the Thought Came From

The reason that private thought or sensation — what if I’m fundamentally unlovable — survives all of it is precisely because the moment she comes close to saying it out loud, her mind does one of two things. It agrees with her. Or it tries to talk her out of it: “Of course I am, I’m the most lovable.” The reassurance shuts the door. It stays unresolved, and she can’t bring it into the light, so it goes back underground and just keeps running.

I’m not going to reassure you right now. I’m going to do something far more useful — I’m going to tell you what it actually is.

That thought, what if I was born fundamentally unlovable, is a survival-based strategy conclusion. It was drawn by a very young, pure-feeling, very open human being who was doing the only thing available to her: making sense of an environment that didn’t make sense. When the love available to you comes with conditions you can’t consistently meet, when you’re told — directly or through the way you were treated — that who you are isn’t quite right, a child’s mind does the most logical thing it can. It decides the problem is internal. Personal. Because if the problem is you, it can theoretically be solved. And if the problem is them — if the people you depend on for survival are simply not capable of loving you safely — that conclusion feels unsurvivable.

So our psyche, in its extraordinary intelligence, drives the wound deeper inside to protect you from overwhelm. And now you’re carrying it as a private verdict, without even knowing it. It was a protective act — the most loyal thing your system could do for you at the time. And now, decades later, it’s running your life from the basement.

It explains why you hide or devalue your gifts and stay hidden — because visibility feels like stepping back into the line of fire, when there’s only shame and the threat of being shunned or made to feel small again. And if you’re finally seen, really seen, and still not fully chosen, still not celebrated, still met with criticism or indifference or cruelty — it confirms the belief. Hiding is the only way to protect yourself against the verdict.

The Experiment You Keep Running

It explains why you might keep finding your way into the same kind of relationships. Underneath your choices, you’re actually running an experiment: can someone like them eventually choose me fully? And if they can — if even they can see my worth — maybe the verdict was wrong.

The experiment keeps failing, so you keep running it, because you don’t yet know that the experiment was never actually going to give you what you’re looking for. The answer to am I worth loving cannot come from someone who is incapable of loving. That’s a hard truth. They are not capable of returning the gift you’re giving them — your care, your empathy, your compassion, your willingness to fix what’s broken.

The Grief Underneath the Grief

And it explains the grief that sits underneath everything else — the one you can barely let yourself feel, let alone fully name. It isn’t really “oh, I’ve just had bad relationships.” It’s: I may have spent the years I was most alive waiting to be confirmed as worth something by people who are never going to be able to do that.

That is the grief underneath the grief. And it deserves to be met — not managed, not reframed, not immediately soothed into something that keeps you on the same not-so-merry-go-round. Met and honored.

Martín Prechtel wrote a very special book about grief called The Smell of Rain on Dust. He describes unprocessed grief as a haunting — it runs our lives until we honor it and allow it to move through us. The secret about grief is that it’s a fundamental aspect of our creative energy. Once it passes, we are ushered out of the past and delivered into the present, where we are free to create the new.

What Actually Moves the Boulder

So what actually moves this boulder out of the way? It is not more analysis. My clients come to me having had enough aha moments that just don’t stick. Understanding — intellectual comprehension — is the floor. It’s not the ceiling. It’s where we begin, but it’s not where we finish.

What moves it, first, is letting her body know she is safe. A woman living under chronic and unrelenting duress — with a disordered parent, a life partner, even a boss — demands that you adapt to survive, and the female brain is especially adept at adapting to survive. But these extra conditions program our cells to register constant threat, and they get stuck in something called chronic threat detection. A long list of ill health follows: PTSD and complex PTSD, tinnitus, weak digestion, insomnia, anxiety, hypervigilance, hypersensitivity to smells and sounds. You get the idea.

Her body is out of its natural rhythm and is begging her to slow down and listen. It’s speaking the only language it knows how to speak to get her attention: symptoms. Learning how to nourish the body according to her own unique physiology can course-correct this. Her feminine animal body is crying out for help, while the culture is telling her to regulate it, underfeed it, superfood it into submission to be healthy. Meanwhile, her conditioned mind has chosen ideas about food that have nothing to do with her own unique physiology. Without learning the potency of nourishing her body the way she truly needs, she relates to her precious body like it’s attacking her, or betraying her. That’s the illusion that must be broken.

Clearing What Isn’t Yours

Next: clearing out what isn’t actually hers. The voices, the verdicts, the somatic conclusions she drew in the only language available to her before she even had words — by reaching them at the level where they actually live, which is her cells, her nervous system, the subconscious architecture that was built around them. This is not a mental process. It’s a depth process, and it requires a container built specifically for that.

And second — this is the piece that begins to dissolve the shame everything else has left behind — forgiving herself for what she did not know. Not for what she did wrong. For what she didn’t know. Because she was doing the most intelligent, most logical, most human thing possible: organizing her life around the information she had. The information was poison — words she heard spoken about her. She didn’t know that yet. She was just a feeling, trusting, wide-open human being in the presence of people who weaponized exactly those qualities. And she did what any of us would do. She tried to make it make sense. She tried to fix it. She tried to prove it wrong, to justify and explain. But in the proving, she was still dancing to their theme song: you are unlovable.

She was doing her best with what she saw and what she heard, not realizing it was distorted. Wrong — that was what was wrong.

What Becomes Possible

And when that finally lands — not as an idea, but as a felt truth in the body — something begins to shift that no amount of talk therapy has ever been able to shift. The voices that aren’t hers start to go quiet. And underneath them, underneath all of it, she finds something she may not have felt clearly in years, or maybe ever: her own frequency, coming from inside her. Clear. Unmistakably hers.

Then her choices, for the first time, are free. Free from the past. Free from calculating the reprisal. Free from bracing for the attack. Free from organizing her life around a verdict that was never true. Free to follow what her soul has been trying to bring her to all along.

That is what becomes possible when the work reaches the depth where the wound actually lives.

The Cost of Another Year

I want to speak now to the cost of another year in this loop.

I see so many women living a life half changed — because of the limits of talk therapy, thinking reiki sessions are going to do it, even serious meditation study with masters. None of that treats being the child of a borderline, or having your reality altered by a narcissist. The consequence of staying where you are isn’t that you stop growing. You’ll continue to gather insights, and you may become remarkably articulate about what happened to you and why. But articulate is not the same as free.

And the compounding cost — the one she won’t let herself calculate, because if she does, the grief of what’s already passed becomes almost unbearable — is time. Specifically, what another three to five years in the same loop, with just better vocabulary, actually takes from her.

Her gifts don’t just stay hidden. Sometimes they atrophy, or get redirected into serving the very people who drain her — into relationships and physical symptoms that seem intractable and all-consuming. The life force that was meant for her work, her life’s work, her joy, her creative fire — she becomes endlessly resourceful, in exactly the wrong direction. That’s not just stagnation. That is active loss of precious time, pleasure, and satisfaction.

In her dating life, if she’s back in it or trying to be, she’s navigating without the one thing that would actually protect her: her truth-telling body. And her truth-telling body just isn’t online yet. So she does what the mind does when it’s trying to compensate — she studies the red-flag, green-flag lists she finds online, the attachment styles, and becomes an expert. Then she meets someone, and six months in, sometimes a year, she realizes: same personality, different face. Even though she was so sure she got it right this time.

Or she swings the other way entirely. The door is shut — all men are like this — which feels like wisdom from the inside but is actually the wound making a policy, protecting her from the very possibility of something not just different, but mutually nourishing and trustworthy of her heart.

Or — and this one is the most heartbreaking — she finds a genuinely good one. Someone safe, someone who actually shows up. And she tanks it. Not consciously, but out of fear so old and so deep she doesn’t even recognize it as fear. She just knows something felt wrong when nothing was wrong, and she couldn’t trust it.

Or she finds a reasonably good one and over-functions in the relationship while he under-functions, and the sensation of I’m unlovable gets reinforced over and over.

All four of these women are running the same experiment, with the body’s discernment still buried under everyone else’s voices and verdicts about her.

In her work life, the pattern reconstructs itself with stunning precision. She finds herself in a job she believes she cannot leave, even though what’s happening there would be immediately recognizable to anyone watching from the outside. The boss who presents as a friend. The blurred boundaries. The unsolicited advice about her personal life, delivered as concern. Then the rage when a reasonable limit is set — everything I’ve done for you, you’re being disloyal, ungrateful, you’re using me. The loyalty scanning. The subtle, sustained sabotage of her upward mobility and earning power.

She didn’t find a difficult boss. Her subconscious found a familiar one, and it reads familiar as safe. So she stays, and her gifts — the ones that should be growing, expanding, earning, being recognized — get slowly consumed by the management of that one relationship. Again, she is endlessly capable, endlessly resourceful, pointed in exactly the wrong direction.

For the Mothers

Now, for the mothers listening — particularly those co-parenting with someone whose personality disorder means the battle isn’t over just because the marriage is.

The cost of another year in that loop is specific, and it is painful. She watches her daughter trying to survive the other household. She knows exactly what’s being said, what’s being done, how reality is being written or rewritten for that child, because she lifted herself out of that same captivity. And she can’t tell her daughter what he really did in the divorce, in his attempt to take her away from her mother — not until her daughter is eighteen. So she carries the knowing, becomes a witness to his patterns, loses too many negotiations about the child’s safety or needs, and carries the silence and the guilt of both.

But here’s what I’ve seen in the mothers who do this deeper work, and I want you to hear this clearly: if you’re one of them, your healing is not separate from your child’s protection. It is the most direct form of it available to you right now.

When you do this deeper work, you learn the potency of your own self-care — not as indulgence, but as strategy. You become a truly reparative parent. You become the safe harbor she can swim back to. You find your backbone — the quiet, unshakable kind that cannot be manipulated or even provoked. And you become wise in how to negotiate her safety without escalating the war.

You cannot yet hand her the map out of their grasp. But you can become someone who has already found the way through, and be a living example that breaks the patterns her own grandmother didn’t dare to break. That is not nothing. That is everything.

Casey

The life she was designed for — the one her soul has been trying to signal toward all along — keeps waiting. Not because she isn’t absolutely worthy of it. She just doesn’t see or value what’s brilliant about her, because she hasn’t yet had the container that can reach the depth where the real block, or the real brilliance, lives.

I’m going to tell you about one of my clients. Her name is Casey. She’s a professional artist — she taught it, she made it, it was the most essential expression of who she was. Then she became a mother, and that added a complete dimension to her whole identity. Then she went through years of court battles with a co-parent whose borderline personality made it his sustained mission to denigrate her as a mother, as a woman, as a human being. His voice moved into her mind the way an unwanted occupant moves into a house. She just couldn’t clear him out.

Eventually she stopped making her art. It happened the way a signal goes quiet when there’s too much interference — gradually, and then completely. The creative fire that had always been her clearest proof that she was still herself, still in there, just went flat. She began to think it was never going to come back.

When Casey came to me, she’d done twenty years of twelve-step work in a recovery program and twenty years of talk therapy. She was not a woman who hadn’t tried. She was a woman who had tried everything available to her, and still felt the flatness. Even after the divorce was done, she still felt the absence of her own signal from inside her. She still felt him in the rooms where she used to feel only herself.

She came to me carrying both of the questions we talked about at the beginning of this episode: What if I’m too damaged? Is this all there is for me? And underneath both of them, though she hadn’t quite found the words for it yet, that deeper, more private question — the one about whether the problem was something she was born with, something that couldn’t be fixed.

What shifted for Casey wasn’t just a more honest understanding of what he’d done to her. It was the clearing of what his presence had covered over — the voices that weren’t hers, the verdicts she’d absorbed as though they were her ultimate truth, the permission slip that had been buried under years of his campaign against her sense of self as a woman and a mother. When that cleared, her own signal came back. And with it, her creative inspiration returned — the desire to make things, the fire she thought had gone out for good.

Casey wrote the most beautiful testimonial. I’ll share just the first part of it:

“Working with Hayley has done more for me than what twenty years have done with my therapist and in twelve-step recovery rooms. To have my inspiration back, to make art again — is a miracle.”

That word, miracle — I think she used it because that’s what it felt like from the inside. To have her own signal back. To be able to hear herself again. To sit down in her studio and feel, for the first time in years, that she was the one in the room. Not him. Her.

The Container

The Heart of Sun Sanctuary immersion is that container. Not another deep dive into understanding the people who hurt you. Not another modality that won’t touch the places that need to be cared for and set free. And definitely not another round of just talking about it.

It’s a spacious, pressure-free immersion designed to move at the pace your nervous system and your life can actually hold — one that works at the depth where the pattern actually lives: in your body, in your subconscious, in the conclusions that were drawn before you had words, in the layer below where any talking has yet reached. And most importantly, in the blueprint of your unique design.

The work we do together is about clearing what isn’t yours. Forgiving yourself for what you didn’t know. And returning you, gradually and gently, without force, to your own frequency — the one that’s been there all along, the one that knows what you’re here for, the one you will recognize immediately when the voices that aren’t yours finally go quiet.

Here’s what that life begins to feel like: an exhale. A slowing down. Then permission — maybe for the first time in years — to actually attend to the unmet needs of your body. The urgency that has been running underneath everything begins quietly to dissipate. You find you have more patience for the process, for your own divine timing, and for your child in the moments when you’re together. You stop performing a healing and begin to actually rest inside being healed.

You become un-gaslightable.

Not because you’ve memorized their moves and their tactics, but because you finally know yourself well enough that someone else’s distorted version of you has nowhere to land inside you. There’s no room. And slowly, in the way that real things grow, you begin to feel safe and free to live your true gifts.

That is what coming home to yourself feels like.

One Question to Sit With

Before I wrap up, I have one question to sit with.

If you saw someone you love — your child, your closest friend — struggling to believe in herself, struggling under a thought that was planted in her, not born in her, what would you say? What would you want her to know about herself that she can’t see right now, but you can?

Just imagine what that is for a moment. Now — can you say that to yourself?

And here’s the deeper question: it’s not just whether you can say it, but whether your choices reflect it. Whether the relationships closest to you mirror it back to you. Because the words are a beginning. But a life organized around that truth — choices made from it, people who confirm it just by how they treat you — that’s the finish line. That’s what we’re building toward.

And you don’t have to find your way there alone. If you’re ready to stop circling and finally land.

READY TO BE UNITED WITH YOUR TRUEST SELF?

If you’ve ever worked hard at your healing in the aftermath of identity altering relationships— therapy, books, courses, meditation, yoga, the whole circuit — and still felt a ceiling you couldn’t break through, this episode is for you. If you have ever loved someone and lost yourself in the loving, this is for you. If something in you knows there is a freer, truer version of yourself waiting and you just can’t find the door — you are exactly who I made this for.

This is my epic but hope filled journey outta hell. What it felt like to be split from my Self for so long. What it took to go find her. And what I discovered on the other side that I could not have known any other way.

HEART OF SUN SANCTUARY IMMERSION

That moment happened to me in a therapist's office. What she said next is where this episode begins — and it's the most honest State of the Union on women's healing I know how to give.

So many spiritually sensitive women have done all the right things.

Therapy. Books. YouTube videos about the Narc. Clinical trauma language oozing from every pore. Coaching that has no clue about fully recovering from the f**kery of relationships with NPD or BPD people. Insight and A-Ha’s that just don’t stick. Hoping the Course In Miracles or Reiki sessions are gonna fix their relationship picker…

Their bodies don’t feel free and never let them forget “danger” is around every corner.

They’re out of the relationship, but they’re not fully back in themselves.

Or they’re co-parenting and it’s a nightmare…

You’re not a beginner. You can name the patterns - yours and theirs.

You can explain what happened. But your deeper need isn’t being met.

Traditional talk therapy can help you have language to tell the story about what the hell happened.

But, it’s a thirst trap of sorts…by using a mind-only modality that isn’t designed to repair any kind of biological rupture still operating in your cells, leaving your body stuck in chronic threat detection.

And then there’s the other trap that looks like healing but isn’t: consuming content to figure out or outsmart the narc or the borderline.

This keeps you biochemically bonded to the people who hurt you. Despite your best intentions.

You listen. You learn. You nod along. You feel that brief rush of “yes, that’s it.”

And then… you’re left hanging.

Because content can’t hold you until self-forgiveness lands, when the devastation kicks in.

It can’t attune you to your natural pace for healing. It keeps you going back to it to chase the high of recognition. It does very little to change your nervous system’s capacity to let you live without the fear of this happening again. Or to let you share your gifts with the world.

It will never offer the kind of personalized, guided, gentle and contained experience your body and soul are actually asking for.

That’s why I created Heart of Sun Sanctuary Immersion.

It’s for the woman who’s Soul is whispering, you don’t need more information about them. It’s time to tend to you.

The Sanctuary is a space where you’re not performing your healing to be a part of the group. A space that doesn’t demand you share more than you want to share. A space where you can go deep without feeling too exposed.

There are no hard deadlines for completion. But there’s plenty of structure and guidance from me, to make sure and steady progress, at your own pace.

No “push through it” energy. No “tell your story again.” No “do these ten steps and you’ll be fine.”

It’s me walking with you closely, in a way that honors your nervous system, your timing, and your privacy. A true sanctuary, not another container that leaves you doing the hardest parts alone or tries to rush you through content and leaves you unsupported in your darkest hour.

This for you if, you want to become un-galightable to your core, be powerful in your own skin and grow into the woman you’re designed to be…

The podcast will always be here for you anytime you need it. And if you feel the call to go deeper with me in a private, guided, held experience, Heart of Sun Sanctuary Immersion is where we do that.

I’m curious-what’s the place you keep getting “left hanging” in your healing? What do you feel like you still need that you haven’t been given yet? Your Soul knows…ask her!