Letter 28: You Are Not Alone - Healing in the Garden of Relationships
“A person is a person through other persons.”
— Ubuntu proverb
Dear Future Human,
Beneath many of our deepest stories lies the same fear: I am alone. It may show up as “I am unlovable,” “I don’t exist,” ”I am not worthy,” and countless other versions. This fear has become common with the emergence of the modern world, where people have become more disconnected from one another and from the rhythms of the natural world.
This fear is widely shared. You’re not alone! Everyone carries some variation of this fear, only dressed in different histories, families, cultures, and roles.
We are part of an ecosystem, much like plants in a garden—we are shaped by everything around us. A rosebush does not decide its shape in isolation; it grows according to the soil, the sun, the weather, the neighboring plants, and the gardener’s care or neglect. This is how you developed too, through constant interactions with everything around you. We are an ecosystem within an ecosystem.1
From the moment you were born, you have been shaped in the context of relationships. Your nervous system learned how to be safe through your interactions with parents, siblings, peers, and teachers. Your defenses, your automatic reactions, your sense of self—all were wired through experience with other people. Your adaptation took different roles—sometimes by pleasing, sometimes by striving and sometimes by protecting yourself. Your Fraudulent Self was created by adapting to the social environments that rejected your Authentic Self.
And because these patterns were developed in the context of relationships, they can only be changed in relationships.2
Over years, I began to see that if I wanted to intervene fundamentally in a person’s negative loops and self-sabotaging habits, I couldn’t just work with the person’s psyche. I needed to address their environment, the relational field in which their nervous system developed.
I began to realize that if our defensive behaviors developed in the context of “I am all alone,” then healing would require a different experience: a living “garden” of human beings. A container of support, mutual accountability, and loving presence—that would continually remind each person: You are not alone. You matter. You belong. Your authentic self is enough and wanted.
Transformation requires a new environment.
Consider the butterfly. Inside the chrysalis, the caterpillar doesn’t gradually improve—it liquefies. Its entire body dissolves into what scientists call “imaginal soup.” There is no caterpillar anymore, no form, just potential. There is total dissolution.3
The chrysalis is what makes this possible. Without that container, the liquefied essence would simply spill out and die. The caterpillar cannot become a butterfly in the open air. It needs constraint to transform.
You are no different. Your Fraudulent Self was built in relationship—through years of adapting to how others responded to you. It cannot be dismantled through isolated insight or willpower alone. It must feel safe and dissolve in relationship, where it will be held within a container strong enough to catch you when what you believe is your identity begins to disintegrate.4
That realization led me to create a community committed to supporting and helping each other feel safe enough to grow past our fears—let go of our fraudulent self and connect with our unique Signal that points us home. I called it Leap Forward.
It is an environment where vulnerability is met with acceptance rather than weakness. Where not knowing is not something to be ashamed of or hide but embraced. Where your authentic self is valued simply because it exists.
Mistakes are not treated as failures but as part of how learning actually occurs. Needs matter and asking for help is invited. Patterns are interrupted with care. Truth-telling and transparency are essential ingredients for building trust and cohesion. Interdependence is not something we just talk about, it is practiced and felt.
In this container, patterns are revealed in real time, in the context of real relationships—where they were first developed, and where they are now can be consciously experienced. As each member shares with transparency and vulnerability, everyone can begin to see the automatic loops that control their thinking, feeling, and reacting, making visible the universality of our conditioning.
The practice is often challenging as resistance emerges, both from the ego and from the natural defensiveness of the nervous system. It is easier to see these patterns in others than in ourselves. Seeing them together, we become more receptive.
With ongoing exposure and practice, we create new experiences: of safety, of being received, of being challenged with care, and of belonging without performing.
We create a space where we heal with and through each other, in an ecosystem that supports our birthright of belonging and connection.
To heal, you will need to create a similar environment for yourself—you cannot do this deep work alone. Isolation is what created the wound in the first place.
In the letters ahead, you are going to learn specific practices: how to pause mid-pattern, how to witness your reactions, how to feel what you have been avoiding, how to map your defenses. These practices are essential building blocks for real and lasting change.
Later, after you have learned the practices and tried applying them, I’ll show you exactly what community looks like in practice—the specific structures and methods that make transformation sustainable. But first, you need to understand what you’re becoming, why change is so hard, and what the actual practices are.
This work requires courage and fortitude, you were never meant to walk it alone.
With you,
Ronit
P.S. As you read this letter, you may feel frustrated, thinking, “I don’t have a community like this.” Most people don’t. We’ll address that directly in a future letter. For now, simply recognize that healing was never meant to be solitary.
Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc, “Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory,” Simply Psychology, May 6, 2025.
H. Hwang and D.Han, “The Brain and Relationships Dance Together to Sculpt Who We Are,” Journal of the Korean Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, September 30, 2025.
Ferris Jabr, “How Does a Caterpillar Turn into a Butterfly?,” Scientific American, August 10, 2012.
Saul McLeod, PhD, “Vygotsky’s Theory of Cognitive Development,” Simply Psychology, October 16, 2025.