“Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you.”
— Rachel Naomi Remen
Dear Future Human,
Deep down beneath the sedimentary layers of the psyche lies the true self, a vital essence, connected to and informed by nature's greatest wisdom—a unique facet of Nature’s ever-unfolding exploration of itself.
But by the time most of us reach adulthood, this authentic core has been buried under calcified layers of protection—first of numbness, then of defensiveness, and finally of fraudulence—adapted to the context of our early environments. The protections that buffer us from deep pain and terror also become blockades that prevent us from an awareness of what we deeply want, need, and believe.
Jennifer's story is the story of these layers. It is an account of how a brilliant, sensitive, truth-seeking child learned to bury her authentic nature so completely that she forgot it existed. And it is the story of how, through courage, community, and countless small acts of rebellion against her own conditioning, she excavated her way back to herself.
The protections that buffered Jennifer from feeling her pain and terror also estranged her from her core, rendering her incapable of accurately perceiving even things as simple as what she likes or dislikes or what makes her happy or unhappy. By the time I met Jennifer, her perception was so narrow that she could only see and accept what her Fraudulent Self experienced as safe or desirable.
When we began working together, I noticed that Jennifer frequently spent weekends at her family’s farm in upstate New York. Jennifer believed—no, insisted—that this farm was her “happy place,” and that the time with her family was nourishing and restorative. Jennifer experienced these trips as “sanctuaries.”
Curiously, this belief persisted despite the reality that she often returned from her trips reporting a sinking feeling in her stomach, “something was off,” which she quickly dismissed. She wasn’t aware of these feelings when she was with her mother at the farm, but only after she returned home. Over time, she began to share how dismissive and disconnected her mother was with her. She would come to me in tears after calling her mom on the phone, where her mother, too busy to talk, would give her only a couple of minutes of her time. Gradually, she began to recognize that when she came back from these sojourns, she would feel sad, depleted, and hurt. Yet when the next weekend approached, she would pack her bags with the same conviction that the farm was where she belonged.
As we have discussed in my letters on Neuroscience and Perception, Jennifer’s relationship with the farm illustrates what happens when we perceive reality through the adaptive lens of childhood survival. It’s like an alcoholic who reaches for a drink to “unwind,” to numb discomfort, as his life fractures because of his drinking, or a woman who “loves” and “needs” her partner, while she is abused, gaslit, and manipulated by him. Jennifer still perceived her family environment as a safe space, even as her family consistently caused her pain.[1]
Jennifer’s brain developed a kind of perceptual editing. Her natural tendency was to see the world through rose-colored glasses, and her extroverted spirit organized her brain around the story that her family was good, the farm was safe, and her own feelings were irrelevant. These were the stories that had helped her survive as a child. Jennifer, like most of us, was unable to see and feel the places in her life that made her miserable—this kept her feeling small, disconnected, exhausted, and disappointed. Her brain suppressed sensory and emotional data that didn't fit her positive narrative, creating a filtered reality that served her adaptation but cut her off from her authentic experience.[2]
Children, powerless to change their environment, can only accept and adapt to their environment’s unspoken rules and dynamics of their family or social systems.[3]
This is the greatest cost of a life lived fraudulently: the loss of accurate perception. When we cannot trust our own experience, we become strangers to ourselves.
My first intervention with Jennifer was a simple one: temporarily stop going to the farm. She resisted. She hated me. She fought tooth and nail against this challenge, accusing me of trying to strip her of something she loved.
But something inside of her felt the wisdom of this challenge—she finally agreed. Very quickly she experienced profound relief, while at the same time she experienced her family’s pushback in their attempt to bring her back to their comfortable and predictable routine. Constraining her usual performances and emotional landmines, Jennifer's nervous system began to feel a release, a peaceful state in a way it hadn't in years. She could no longer ignore the dissonance between her belief and her body's truth. For the first time, she could feel the difference between what she thought she should want and what her authentic self actually needed. She described the first weekend home this way: “the first weekend that I stayed in my own home instead of going to the farm I actually felt a freedom to listen to my own needs, take a slow weekend to relax, and create experiences for myself that I wouldn’t have been able to have had I gone.”
These are what I think of as windows, little experiential gaps that crack open our tunnel-vision, and begin to reveal new possibilities, new ways of behaving, new ways of interacting. They are very small at first. They may be almost imperceptible, unless you are paying close attention. They are small shafts, barely larger than pinpricks, that begin to penetrate the accumulated layers of numbness and dissociation that disconnect us from our true experience of life, from reality.
But make enough pinpricks, and the light gets brighter and brighter.
Jennifer had taken the first step toward perceptual rewiring.
The work began with environmental interruption. Remember our brains adapt to our environments. Each intervention Jennifer undertook was designed to interrupt the habits—the automatic neural patterns that had governed her life for decades.[4] Jennifer stopped entering the family system that had demanded her fraudulence, and limited phone calls with her mother. She left her “stable boyfriend,” and moved away from her comfortable home, away to a new state. All of these changes—in every aspect of her life—literally rebuilt new pathways in her brain—shifting her feelings about herself, building an image of herself as a rooted agent of her life.
Each boundary felt terrifying, but her nervous system naturally began to regulate itself.
Then came reclaiming her voice. Jennifer began the terrifying work of speaking truth. She surrounded herself with individuals who were learning and practicing radical truth—holding her accountable when she did not speak from an embodied voice. Learning to say NO. Cutting her long blond hair to shift the image of herself. Publicly speaking in front of influential groups. She began taking on leadership roles in various projects and rigorously embarked on a path to discover her many innate gifts.
Jennifer continued deepening her self-awareness. She grounded more in her body through meditation and taking dance classes, and with the support of her community, worked rigorously on speaking her truth. Slowly, she began to connect to an internal space—Witness Space. From this space, she was able to ask herself questions about her feelings, emotions, and impulses. She saw that much of her suffering came from being trapped in what she calls "the prison of my own mind."
What she has discovered, in other words, is the healthy corollary to the Liminal Space: the Witness Space. Unlike the Liminal Space, which emerges as an unconscious trauma response, the Witness Space is deeply attentive, and deeply conscious. It is the opposite of reactive. It holds what’s present without judgement. From there, she could ask: What am I feeling? What’s the story of this feeling? What is actually true? She was able to feel what truly moves her, and what doesn’t. In the Witness Space, her core self has room to stretch and explore in safety.[5]
Jennifer could now bring both her Flailing Child and her Fraudulent Adult into her consciousness. She was able to recognize when her Flailing Child, who felt helpless and overwhelmed, was reacting to situations and people in her life. She could observe her protective mechanisms, and the projections of her irrational thoughts, when, in reality, there was no apparent threat. She learned to intercept her Fraudulent Adult’s bravado reactions, and admit she was feeling insecure or angry, so that she could rewire her emotional responses in the moment. She understood the importance of intercepting her early childhood perceptual neuronal circuitries and imprinting new ones from her adult’s perspective based on having autonomy and agency.[6]
Jennifer had to face a lot of pain. Every change is a small death: that is how the body, which clings so tightly to what it already knows, experiences change.[7] Jennifer’s determination to discover her Authentic Integrated Self allowed her to discover that she can be comfortable being with herself without needing to fill her space with other people. She began to experience her resiliency in the face of challenging situations. Her newfound connection to her body imbued her with a wondrous sense of vitality and a deeper connection to the natural world. She developed curiosity and interest in the world—politically, geographically, economically—reading and engaging in conversations she never did before. She began to see herself as a leader, recognizing the essential skills and talents she possesses, and now wishes to share and contribute.
Most of all, Jennifer’s greatest transformation occurred around her relationship with people in her life—most importantly her mother. Before she could enter into a new relationship with her mother, the old relationship had to die; for a time, Jennifer’s mother mourned and grieved the daughter she thought she knew and railed against Jennifer’s desires to evolve and assert herself. After a while, her mother began to call her, curious and open to participating in Jennifer’s adventurous life.
Pinpricks: first, we commit to changing the environments that once required us to be fraudulent. In doing so, as we step into new dynamics, free from social and familial conditions that shaped our defenses, we slowly discover new freedoms and new internal experiences. The quiet resurrection of our own core self gradually begins to emerge. In other words, we can discover the true self only by reorienting ourselves to our environments, not the other way around. That is how nature works.
What Jennifer has uncovered by now is not simply a renewed and much deeper relationship with her mother, but a renewed and much deepened relationship with herself. She is grounded and confident, full of that exuberant energy and curiosity that kept her constantly on the go as a little girl. But now, she has an adult’s maturity that enables her to stay rooted in the present. Even when she experiences the pull of old patterns of reactivity and defensiveness (her Fraudulent Adult), or the urge to collapse and withdraw in woundedness (her Flailing Child), she can remain centered.
The pain and fear that comes along with this transformation is normal. It occurs in every natural ecosystem, including the family or social ecosystems in which we play a role. Often, we find that when we begin to push back against our environments—to re-order them, in some way—the environments will regenerate and push back against us. Only slowly do our systems come back into harmony, around a new normal where we can be our healthier, fuller selves.
Change, in that sense, requires a great degree of courage and perseverance—and even blind faith.
The challenge, for most people, is that they can’t perceive the cost associated with failing to change. Due to the numbing effect of the Liminal Space, they have no conscious awareness of the Flailing Child locked beneath their layers of defenses—let alone the deeper truth that before the Flailing Child emerged, there was, and still is, some unique, primal life-force, a Signal that guides them toward a more fulfilling existence. Instead, they remain fully psychologically aligned with their Fraudulent Adult, only experiencing the effects of these buried layers when sudden waves of anxiety, depression, or rage overtake them—and never connecting these phenomena to their true cause.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to recognize that there is a part of us that is perpetually in terror—unheard, unloved, helpless, desperate for comfort—until we have already begun the shift into the Witness Space. In other words, it is impossible to recognize that we are Fraudulent until we have already begun to move back toward our authentic and integrated selves. And yet without seeing the cost, without fully experiencing the cost, we have no hope of walking through the pain required to change.
In my next series of letters, I will write about how to perceive the cost, not only with ourselves, but to our key relationships: our friends and family, our jobs, our purpose, and the natural world.
With humility and determination,
Ronit
[1]Hame Park et al., “Confirmation Bias through Selective Readout of Information Encoded in Human Parietal Cortex,” Nature Communications, June 2025.
[2] J. Habicht, A. Bowler, M. Moses-Payne, and T. Hauser, “Children Are Full of Optimism, but Those Rose-Tinted Glasses Are Fading,” Journal of Experimental Psychology, August 2022.
[3]J. Martinez-Escudero, S. Villarejo, O. Garcia, and F. Garcia, “Parental Socialization and Its Impact across the Lifespan,” Behavioral Sciences 10, 2020.
[4] Wyatt, Zoe, “The Neuroscience of Habit Formation,” Neurology and Neuroscience, March 2024.
[5] Gregg Henriques, “What Is the Difference Between the Self and the Witness?,” Psychology Today, August 2023.
[6] Kerry Komine, “Unleashing the Extraordinary Potential of the Brain’s Adaptive Rewiring Mechanisms for Lifelong Development, Cognitive Enhancement, and Personal Transformation: Unlocking the Power of Neuroplasticity,” Neuroscience and Psychiatry, June 2023.
[7] Travers, Mark. “Have You Experienced an Ego Death?” Forbes, April 2024