In somatic and psychodynamic frameworks, we understand that affect does not simply disappear when it is suppressed. Energy, including emotional energy, requires movement. It requires discharge, processing, integration. When a person habitually blocks this movement in themselves, that charge does not evaporate. It projects outward. It organises the relational environment around it in predictable, though invisible, ways.

The mechanics

The person at the centre of a drama field is not necessarily volatile or even obviously difficult. In fact, many are calm — sometimes even eerily so. They are the ones who pride themselves on “not doing drama.” You may have seen them on dating apps. Or in the spiritual community. They may be high-functioning, rational, successful. The suppression has become so complete, so neurologically efficient, that they genuinely do not experience access to certain emotional states.

But the body (and the field) keeps the account. The unprocessed material — grief, rage, longing, shame, fear — does not get locked up in some storage container. It leaks into the intersubjective space. It communicates through micro-expressions, tonal dysregulation, relational distance, and unconscious behavioural invitations that essentially ask: will you feel this for me?

"They do not do the feeling. Instead, they curate the conditions in which others cannot help but do it for them."

Partners, friends, and family members in proximity to such a person begin to notice something strange: they are the ones crying. They are the ones escalating. They are the ones who end up holding the anxiety, the sadness, the anger — and feeling vaguely crazy for how much they are feeling when the other person seems so composed.

This is something called projective identification.

What projective identification actually means

The concept, introduced by Melanie Klein and expanded considerably by Wilfred Bion, describes a process by which a person unconsciously disowns an aspect of their inner experience and deposits it into another. The recipient of this projection then begins to feel — and sometimes act out — the very emotional content the first person could not tolerate in themselves.

And usually it is the sensitive ones and the deep feelers, like myself, that bear the load of projective identification.

In the context of a long-term relationship with someone who habitually closes off their feeling life, this dynamic can become structurally inbuilt into the relationship. The emotionally available partner slowly accumulates what the other cannot hold. They become the designated feeler. The one who "overreacts." The one the family identifies as the emotional problem — while the suppressor maintains their false coherence.

And nervous system science supports what clinicians have observed for decades. The autonomic nervous system is inherently relational; it co-regulates in the presence of others. When one nervous system is chronically dysregulated but defended against awareness of that dysregulation, it still signals distress through the body. The attuned partner’s nervous system receives those signals — and responds to them. They are not merely imagining the undercurrent. They are accurately perceiving something that is being denied.

Why people in these relationships doubt themselves

The particularly destabilising feature of this dynamic is the gaslighting quality it takes on — usually without conscious intent. When the emotionally avoidant person maintains that everything is fine, that there is no tension, that the other person is “too sensitive,” they are telling their own version of a truth: from behind the wall of suppression, they genuinely cannot access what they are holding. The denial is sincere. And sincere denial is far more destabilising than an obvious lie.

The person absorbing the projected field begins to question their own perception. They feel the charge. They feel the undercurrent. But the person generating it looks calm, sounds reasonable, and may even be widely regarded as stable and grounded. Over time, many will conclude that the problem is them.

It is not them.

What is actually needed

Proximity to an unconscious drama field is not a reason to leave a relationship — necessarily — but it is a reason to understand what is happening clearly, so that the costs can be assessed honestly.

The person generating the field is often not doing so maliciously. They are enacting a very old survival strategy.

***Please note I have said often in bold & italic, because some people do have conscious intent and I do not want to undermine this very reality.

Emotional closure is almost always a learned response to an environment in which feeling was dangerous, shaming, or unsafe. The suppression worked once. It protected them. The tragedy is that it has become something that they now impose more routinely — unconsciously — on everyone around them.

Healing this requires more than the emotionally available partner becoming aware of the dynamic, though awareness is a crucial first step. It requires the suppressed person to develop a genuine relationship with their own inner and somatic world — often with professional support, often slowly, often with significant resistance. The somatic body holds the memory of why feeling became unsafe. That memory must be approached with care.

Until that work begins, the drama field persists. And the people who love them will continue to feel things that were never entirely their own — carrying, often without knowing it, the emotional weight of someone who has not yet learned they can afford to feel.

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Successful by every measure the culture offers. The kind of man who had built success— a company, a reputation, a life that from the outside appeared to lack nothing. He spoke carefully, in the register of men accustomed to being listened to. He had done his research before coming. He knew what to expect, or thought he did.

Within thirty minutes he was crying on my therapy table.

Men entered my spaces and unravelled in ways that they don’t normally — even in the safety of their own homes. They cried because they were moved — something deep inside of them was touched by a type of grace they had not experienced before.

From the unfamiliar and slightly terrifying experience of being in a room where his performance was neither required nor rewarded — where his carefully curated sense of self and identity had no function — something more honest moved in through the gap.

I witnessed this pattern so many times over six years of working as a Tantric Dakini that I stopped being surprised by it. What surprised me instead was the consistency of what lay underneath — not darkness, not perversion, not the hidden pathology the culture assumes must be present in men who seek this kind of work. What lay underneath, in almost every case, was a boy who had learned very early that power meant control, that safety meant performance, and that desire — real desire, the kind that makes you vulnerable, the kind that connects you to something larger than yourself — was a liability to be managed rather than an intelligence to be followed.

These men had not failed. In fact, they had succeeded— but only at the project the empire asked of them. And the project, I came to understand, was killing them.

The Symptom We Keep Misreading

The Manosphere — that loose, fractious, algorithmically accelerated ecosystem of red pill philosophy, incel forums, Andrew Tate disciples, and men going their own way — is one of the most discussed and least understood cultural phenomena of our time.

The mainstream response to it follows a predictable arc: alarm, condemnation, the careful extraction of its most egregious statements for public display, followed by bewilderment that so many men — young men especially — find it compelling. The conclusion most commentators reach is that these men are broken, radicalised, or simply misogynistic. The solution, implicitly or explicitly offered, is better education, better therapy, better feminist consciousness.

I want to suggest something different, entirely.

And don’t get me wrong, I am not saying I agree with the behaviour of the men being showcased in the Manosphere… I just… understand them.

The hunger that drives men into these spaces is real. And it is a hunger that no one — not the Manosphere, not mainstream feminism, not the therapy industry, not the church — is currently feeding.

That hunger is the hunger for initiation.

What Initiation Actually Is

Every traditional culture in human history has understood something that modernity has almost entirely forgotten: boys do not become men automatically. The transition requires a deliberate rupture — a passage through something difficult, disorienting, and transformative, held by elders who have made the crossing themselves and can guide others through it.

Initiation, in it’s truest form, is not hazing. It is not dominance training. It is not the suppression of emotion in the service of toughness. It is something far more demanding and far more tender than any of those things: it is the deliberate dismantling of the boy’s identity, followed by the careful reconstruction of something larger, more grounded, and more genuinely powerful in its place.

In initiation, a boy learns what his body is for beyond performance. He learns that strength is not the absence of vulnerability but its mastery. He learns, often for the first time, that he is not alone — that the men who came before him struggled with the same fears, the same hungers, the same terror of inadequacy — and survived them, and became something worth becoming.

The West dismantled its initiatory structures centuries ago. What replaced them — school, sport, the military, corporate hierarchy — are not initiations. They are performance training. They teach boys how to compete, how to produce, how to suppress what is inconvenient. They do not teach boys how to feel. They do not teach them what desire is for. They do not introduce them to the interior life that every human being carries and that, in the absence of guidance, either atrophies or explodes.

The men who arrive in the Manosphere are men carrying the full weight of an uninitiated masculine energy — the hunger, the aggression, the desperate need for meaning and belonging and genuine power — with no container, no elder, no tradition that knows what to do with it.

Andrew Tate did not create this hunger. He found it and he monetised the wound.

What Feminism Got Wrong — And Right

I want to be careful here, because this is the part of the conversation that most quickly collapses into bad faith.

Feminism is not the cause of the crisis in masculinity. The cause of the crisis in masculinity is the same force that is the cause of the crisis in femininity: a civilisation that organised itself around the suppression of genuine feeling, the performance of prescribed roles, and the extraction of human beings as instruments of production and power. Men and women have been equally deformed by this structural reality within society — differently, but equally.

And yet.

Feminism, in its most visible cultural forms, has not always known how to speak to men’s pain without making it a threat. The legitimate and necessary project of naming male violence and male entitlement has sometimes produced a cultural atmosphere in which male vulnerability is treated with suspicion — in which a man who admits to longing, confusion, or genuine suffering is assumed to be performing victimhood as a power move.

I have seen it time and time again— men come in and express that there is no safe place for the oceans of feelings they have. Not even in their marriage. Actually, often especially not in their marriages. This is where I see this pattern play out the most, with mens emotional bodies being subjugated by women who do not know how to go beyond the cultural conditioning of “men don’t cry”. Yes, that conditioning runs in both men and women, and that is why we are here.

The men I worked with — the men in those rooms, crying without knowing why — were not the enemy of women. They were the product of the same system that oppressed women: a system that required men to partition themselves from their own feeling in order to function as instruments of power. The same force that exiled the feminine exiled the interior life of men. The wound is shared. The liberation, if it comes, will be shared too.

The Manosphere has located a real pain and misidentified its source. The pain is real: the loneliness, the purposelessness, the sense of being disposable, the absence of genuine belonging, the hunger for something that means something. These are not fabrications. I have sat with them, in body, in breath, in the specific weight of a man who has never been given permission to be anything other than useful.

The misidentification is the claim that women — feminism, modernity, the erosion of traditional gender roles — are responsible for this pain. They are not. The pain precedes all of that. It is older than the culture wars. It is the pain of a civilisation that has not known how to initiate its men for centuries.

What These Men Are Actually Hungry For

In six years of working as a Dakini, I met countless men who performed dominance because it was the only language they had been given for the thing they actually wanted — which was, almost without exception, some version of the same thing: to be seen. To be met. To exist in the presence of something that did not require their performance and did not flinch from their reality. To feel, even briefly, that they were more than what they produced.

The red pill promises men power. What men actually want is presence — their own presence, returned to them from wherever it went when they were taught to lock it away.

The red pill promises men that the problem is women’s liberation. What men are actually experiencing is their own captivity — inside roles, inside performances, inside a model of masculinity that has no room for the interior life that every human being carries and that does not stop existing simply because it has been denied.

The red pill promises men a return to hierarchy as the solution to their confusion. What men are actually longing for is initiation — the experience of being taken seriously enough to be challenged, of being held by something larger than themselves, of being brought through a passage that leaves them more themselves on the other side.

None of this is available in the Manosphere. What is available in the Manosphere is the performance of these things — a simulation of initiation without any of its actual costs or transformations, a community built around shared resentment rather than shared growth, a model of power that is recognisable precisely because it is the same model that produced the wound in the first place.

The men in these spaces are not looking for Andrew Tate. They are looking for an elder. And they are going to Tate because no elder has shown up.

The Elder Who Has Not Arrived

This is the absence at the centre of the crisis.

Every genuine initiatory tradition was held by elders — men and women who had made the crossing themselves, who carried the scars of it, who knew from the inside what the passage required and what it made possible. The elder’s authority was not the authority of dominance or performance. It was the authority of having been through the fire and come back changed, and of being willing to go back into it with the next generation.

The West does not have these elders. Not in sufficient numbers, not in positions of cultural visibility, not in forms that young men can find and trust. What it has instead are celebrities, influencers, and algorithms that have learned to serve men the most inflammatory version of what their pain is already telling them.

Jordan Peterson is the closest thing the mainstream has produced to a masculine elder in recent years — and his partial success, the genuine hunger he has met in millions of young men, is itself evidence of how starved the culture is. But Peterson is a psychologist and a moralist, not an initiator. He can tell men what to do. He cannot take them through the fire.

What genuine initiation requires is not instruction, but embodied experience through first hand encounter. It is the experience of being met by something larger than the self — a tradition, a practice, a presence, a force — that does not flatter the ego but dismantles it, carefully and without cruelty, in service of something more real.

I know what this looks like. I have held it. Not as a teacher standing above, but as a presence moving alongside — as a Dakini whose function is not to tell a man who he should be but to reflect back, with precision and without flinching, who he actually is beneath everything he has performed.

The men who came to me did not leave with a doctrine. They left with themselves — or the beginning of themselves, which is all any genuine initiation can offer.

But I am also not a man — and men being initiated by the feminine is a whole different form of initiation. Men also need male only spaces to journey pl

What the Manosphere Cannot Give and What Might

The Manosphere will not solve the crisis it is profiting from. It cannot, because it is built on the same architecture that created the wound: the architecture of dominance, performance, and the suppression of genuine feeling in the service of power.

What might actually help is harder to name and harder to find — because it has been deliberately dismantled, and its reconstruction is slow, unglamorous, and cannot be monetised at scale.

It looks like men sitting with other men in spaces that are not organised around competition or productivity. It looks like somatic practice — the slow, painstaking work of returning to a body that has been used as an instrument for decades. It looks like genuine encounter with the feminine — not the performance of it, not the commodity version of it, but the actual, destabilising, initiatory feminine that does not flatter and does not flinch. It looks like art, and grief, and the willingness to admit, in the presence of witnesses, that something has been lost and that the loss has a cost.

It looks, in other words, like everything the Manosphere explicitly rejects.

And yet the hunger it is failing to feed is real. The loneliness is real. The purposelessness is real. The desperate need for something that means something — for belonging, for genuine power, for a life that is more than the accumulation of dominance and the performance of not needing anything — is real.

These men deserve better than what they are being offered.

Not because they are victims. But because the uninitiated masculine is one of the most dangerous forces on earth — and the world cannot afford to keep producing it.

I am personally a part of many circles and communities that offer real initiation in this way — and I have been priviliged to be witness to a culture where it still remains.

This is what the Manosphere is looking for. It will not find it there.

But it exists. It has always existed. And the men who are ready for it — who are tired enough of the performance, hungry enough for something real, brave enough to walk into a room and let the architecture of their selfhood come undone — will find their way to it.

Sigourney Belle is the author of When Eros Overthrows an Empire*, the first book in* The Body Gospels — a four-book autotheory series tracing the suppression and return of Eros through civilisation, love, the body, and the shadow. She worked for six years as a Tantric Dakini in Melbourne, and has spent two decades at the intersection of medicine, mysticism, and cultural transformation.

The caduceus. Two serpents coiled around a central staff. Wings at the crown.

You’ve seen it on ambulances, hospital signage, the logos of pharmaceutical companies. We’ve inherited it as a symbol of medicine, of healing, of health. But the caduceus was originally the staff of Hermes — the god not of medicine, but of commerce. Of trade routes, merchants, thieves, and the movement of wealth between worlds.

Which raises a question worth sitting with: why is the symbol of money and the symbol of medicine the same symbol?

Because somewhere, in the deep grammar of symbol, health and wealth were never separate things.

The spine as the original ledger

The central staff of the caduceus is the spine. And in every esoteric and somatic tradition worth its salt, the spine is not merely structural — it is the axis along which life force moves. Kundalini rising. Sushumna nadi. The central channel. The antennae through which the nervous system receives, integrates, and distributes information to every organ, every cell, every system in the body.

The two serpents are the dual currents — ida and pingala in yogic anatomy, the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches in clinical neuroscience. They spiral. They balance. They regulate the entire neuroendocrine system — and electromagnetic field.

A spine in coherence is a body in flow. And a body in flow is one that can generate, receive, and circulate — not just life force, but capacity. Energy. Resources.

So when people receive a session with me or train with me, in my modality, Spinal Attunement, what they start to notice is two fold — not just improvements in their health, but also within their creative capacity and ability to generate wealth.

Pssst… I offer these sessions online twice a month in a group setting via the Soma Mystica® Monthly Membership Portal, Portal to Self

I also have one live practitioner training coming up this year in June in Schoorl, The Netherlands at Avalon Retreat Centre and we are currently taking applications here

I also have a monthly membership space for women wanting to bridge this Health x Wealth Axis. It is called Elysium. In that space I work with the energetic field, giving attunements and intuitive health advice through energetic body scans. The women in the space have been giving incredible feedback lately about how pinpoint precise the attunements and advice is, and how they walk out feeling incredible soft and in-body.

This is what I do in my Body Oracle sessions also — however, its an afforable way to receive ongoingly with me.

All my offerings are located here

What blocks wealth blocks health. And vice versa.

Modern neuroscience is beginning to confirm what indigenous and esoteric traditions encoded symbolically for millennia: a dysregulated nervous system is not just a health problem. It is a capacity problem.

Chronic sympathetic activation — the body locked in low-grade threat — doesn’t only suppress immune function, digestion, and cellular repair. It narrows perception. It contracts the window through which opportunity can be seen, received, and acted upon. The body in survival cannot dream, cannot build, cannot sustain abundance of any kind.

The Parasympathetic Nervous System & Specifically The Vagus Nerve (The Vagus Nerve is responsible for 80% of the Parasympathetic NS function, which is why there is a big focus in the Trauma Industry on PolyVagal Theory) — that great wandering nerve that governs social connection, gut intelligence, and the felt sense of safety — is also the nerve that governs the capacity to rest into receiving. To tolerate success. To hold more without bracing against it.

You cannot out-strategy a dysregulated nervous system. You cannot manifest your way around a spine that is braced for impact.

The body is not a vehicle for your ambitions. It is the medium through which all of your ambitions either flow — or don’t.

Two words for the same underlying reality: the free movement of vital force through a living system.

At the crown of the caduceus: wings. The symbol of Hermes in flight, yes — but also the image of what becomes possible when the two currents are integrated and the central channel is clear.

In the body: a coherent, mobile, responsive spine connected to a regulated nervous system, capable of full breath, full presence, full range.

In life: the felt experience of being unobstructed. Not without challenge — but resourced enough to meet it. Not without grief or complexity — but with the interior spaciousness to hold it without collapse.

This is what the ancients were pointing to. Not a transaction between health and wealth, but an identity between them. Two words for the same underlying reality: the free movement of vital force through a living system.

So what does this mean practically?

It means that tending to the body is not a luxury you earn after you’ve built the life. It is the precondition for building it.

It means that the spine — your spine — is not merely a structure to be adjusted or managed. It is the axis of your becoming. The channel through which your capacity to generate, to receive, to sustain, actually moves.

It means that the caduceus was never a hospital logo. It was your map to both Health & Wealth.

Experience my work: Join me in Elysium or Portal to Self

Train with me in Spinal Attunement

Or book a private 1:1 session here

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A friend — someone I trusted, someone I’d let into my creative world — who had developed a habit of leaving critical commentary under my posts. A pointed observation here. A “well, actually” there. Always carrying a faint sting underneath.

I can’t recall a single comment of support on my content, in the 8 years of friendship with her.

For a long time, I told myself I was being sensitive. That receiving critique is part of putting your work into the world. That a true friend can disagree with you. And this can be true, however, when something is showing up time and time again, and it is not balanced with love and support… well, we this is not just critique. It was something more persistent, more patterned — a subtle but consistent need to find the problem in whatever I created.

When I finally named it and set a boundary, the defensiveness that came back told me everything I needed to know. Because real support doesn't bristle when it's gently questioned.

More on the pattern that I am naming

What I was bumping up against has a name. In psychology, oppositional defiance is typically used to describe a pattern in children — a persistent tendency to resist, argue, or defy authority figures. But its shadow shows up in adult relationships too, especially in digital spaces where we're all performing, publishing, and making ourselves visible in ways previous generations never had to navigate.

In this context, oppositional defiance looks less like a tantrum and more like a quiet, chronic refusal to let something simply exist. It’s the compulsion to meet someone else’s joy, confidence, or creative output with resistance — resistance as a default setting.

Online, you’ll recognise it in specific patterns:

• The person who appears under every post but never with warmth — always with an edge, a correction, a counter

• The “I’m just being honest” that lands harder than honesty ever needs to

• The comment that technically says nothing wrong but leaves you feeling subtly smaller

• The consistent inability to let your work — your celebration, your win, your idea — simply be received

• The person who never shares, never celebrates, never amplifies, but always critiques

And when you feel contracted by this, it is because it is not simply just the discomfort of receiving feedback from someone invested in your growth. This is something more reflexive — a kind of psychological immune response triggered by your visibility itself.

The Wound Underneath

Here is what I’ve come to believe, both from my own experience and from watching this dynamic play out in creative communities: oppositional defiance, at its root, is almost always a story about the person expressing it — not the person receiving it.

When someone hasn’t made peace with their own creative voice, their own ambition, or their own right to take up space, your confidence becomes a kind of provocation. It is usually not because you did anything wrong. But because your willingness to be seen — to post, to create, to put your name on something and share it — holds up a mirror they aren’t ready to look into.

The psychological term for this is projection: when we unconsciously take an internal feeling we can’t hold — inadequacy, fear, unresolved longing — and redirect it outward onto someone else. The criticism isn’t really about your work. It’s about the feeling your work stirs up in them.

There’s a second mechanism at play too: what psychologists call reaction formation. This is when an uncomfortable feeling — say, genuine admiration or desire for what someone else has — becomes so intolerable that the psyche converts it into its opposite. Admiration flips into dismissal. Longing becomes critique. The person who most wants what you have is sometimes the most vocal about why it isn’t actually that good.

This is a defence mechanism, usually carved out from childhood. The psyche is trying to protect itself from pain it doesn’t know how to metabolise. But the cost of that protection is paid by the people on the receiving end of it — and it’s a tax you didn’t agree to.

The mechanism behind this behaviour usually lies in the nervous system. When we’ve been chronically criticised — by a parent, a school system, a past relationship — our nervous system learns to anticipate threat. We become, over time, wired to spot danger before it arrives. In some people, that hypervigilance turns outward: they critique others reflexively, as a way of pre-empting the criticism they fear is coming for them. Attack before you can be attacked. Find the flaw before someone finds yours.

When you understand this, the sharp comment under your post starts to look less like a verdict and more like a person in a state of low-grade fear — projecting outward because they haven’t yet learned to sit with what’s moving through them inward.

That doesn’t mean you have to hold it for them. But it does mean you can stop personalising it.

And beneath all of this, especially between women, often lives something I think of as the feminine competition wound.

The Feminine Competition Wound

Women have been socialised — for generations, across cultures — to believe that success, visibility, and creative recognition exist in a fixed and limited supply. That there isn’t enough room for all of us. That another woman’s rise is somehow a subtraction from our own potential.

Historically, when there was only ever one seat at the table for a woman — one female executive, one woman on the panel, one token voice — competition between women wasn’t irrational. It was a survival mechanism and the scarcity was real. The tragedy is that the scarcity has shifted in many spaces, but the nervous system hasn’t caught up. We are still, in many ways, running on an old operating system — one that tells us another woman’s visibility is a direct threat to our own.

This conditioning runs deep and it tends to operate beneath our conscious awareness. It often doesn’t show up as overt jealousy and most people carrying this wound would never identify it as that. Instead, it reveals itself as a chronic low-level need to find the flaw. To qualify the praise. To be the one who points out what everyone else missed. To stay above someone else’s work by refusing to be moved by it.

It also shows up as the need to establish expertise at someone else’s expense. The comment that corrects you in public. The observation that positions the commenter as more nuanced, more informed, more discerning than you. The implied message: I know better. Which is another way of saying: I need to be above you to feel safe.

This is how it showed up for me, in the dynamic I was experiencing last year.

It is an open wound in the psyche of many women; and it is the result of systems that taught women to compete for scraps rather than to build tables.

AND understanding where it comes from doesn’t mean that you have to absorb its impact.

In my friendship, I could eventually see it clearly: she was navigating her own unresolved feelings about creative ambition — her own creative voice she hadn’t yet given herself permission to use. My visibility was activating something in her she didn’t know how to hold. So it came out sideways, through me, as critique.

She wasn’t evaluating my work. She was negotiating her own worth.

A Note on What You Can Actually Do With This

Understanding the psychology is one thing. Knowing what to do on a Tuesday afternoon when the comment lands and your stomach drops— well, that’s another. Here’s what has actually helped me.

Practical ground

Name the pattern, not just the incident. One critical comment is feedback. A persistent pattern of opposition is a dynamic — and dynamics require a different response than individual moments do. Before you react, zoom out. Is this a one-off, or has this happened before? The pattern is the data point, not any single comment.

Feel the sting — then locate where it lands. When a comment has that particular quality of sting, pause before you respond or ruminate. Get curious: where in your body do you feel it? What story immediately arose? Often the comments that hurt most are the ones that have found an existing doubt. That’s useful information because it shows you where your own inner critic is waiting to be activated… and it is worth working with this. I have numerous processes that I work with, to support me to work with my own shadows, somatically. From process orientated work, to somatic experiencing, depth psychology processes and more. There are so many ways to work with the shadow. The important part, is that you are doing it, somatically.

Join me for Somatic Shadow Work

Get curious about what their response reveals. Ask: what might this be about for them? This isn’t about excusing the behaviour, it’s about detaching your self-worth from their reaction. Their discomfort with your visibility is information about them, not a verdict on you. Someone at peace with their own creative life does not need to persistently diminish yours.

Set the boundary without drama. The conversation I had with my friend wasn’t a confrontation. It was: this pattern doesn’t work for me anymore, and I need it to change. You don’t have to over-explain. You don’t have to convince. A boundary is a statement, not a negotiation. The response to your boundary will tell you everything you need to know about the relationship.

Audit who has access. Not everyone deserves a front-row seat to your creative process. You are allowed to restrict, mute, remove, or distance — on social media, in friendships, in any relationship — without owing an explanation. Protecting your creative energy is not paranoia. It is maintenance. It is professional hygiene.

Resist the urge to shrink. The most natural and insidious response to chronic low-grade criticism is to start pre-editing yourself. Posting less. Hedging more. Showing up smaller. Notice if you’re doing this — and name it for what it is: someone else’s wound successfully colonising your creative space.

Find your witnesses. Equally important to removing the people who diminish you is actively investing in the people who don’t. We need witnesses to our work — people who receive it warmly, who celebrate without qualifying, who make us feel like there is room for us. Seek those people out deliberately. They exist. They are often quieter than the critics, but they are there. Celebrate them / their work in return.

Beyond Your Comments Section

We are living through an extraordinary moment for women in creative spaces. More of us are building platforms, publishing work, charging what we’re worth, and refusing to wait for permission. That is genuinely new. Women in Australia only gained the right to work in the federal public service after marriage in 1966 — meaning many of our mothers and grandmothers were legally barred from having a career the moment they married. The structures have shifted faster than the psychology. And with anything genuinely new, there will be friction.

Some of that friction will come from the expected places — from systems and structures that weren’t designed with us in mind. But some of it — and this is the part that’s harder to talk about — it will come from each other. From women who haven’t yet healed the part of them that was taught there isn’t enough. From communities where support is conditional and subtle ranking is the undercurrent. From the reflexive need to establish hierarchy even in spaces that were supposed to be different.

Social media has amplified this in a specific way. The architecture of these platforms — the likes, the follower counts, the algorithmic reward for engagement over connection — has created a new arena for comparison and competition that previous generations of women simply didn’t have to navigate. We are all, to varying degrees, performing our lives and our work in public. And performance, by its nature, invites evaluation.

But there is a difference between evaluation and opposition. Between honest critique offered in good faith and the chronic low-grade need to be the one who finds the flaw. Between caring about quality and needing to be above someone else’s work in order to feel okay about your own.

The comments section has become, for many women, a place where unprocessed wounds go to be expressed sideways. Where the feelings that can’t be admitted — I want what she has. I’m scared I’m not enough. I don’t know if I’m allowed to take up this much space — get converted into commentary about someone else’s work.

We deserve better than that. From each other, and from ourselves.

And I felt to name this pattern, today, because naming something actually has a very specific impact — one that sais to the pattern “I see you” — and this diminishes its power over you.

The feminine competition wound only loses its power when we stop pretending it isn’t there — when we’re willing to look at the parts of ourselves that were shaped by scarcity and ask: is this still true? Or is this an old story I’m still living inside?

The most radical thing we can do for each other — and for ourselves — is to heal our relationship with our own enoughness. To root so deeply in our own creative identity that another woman’s visibility stops feeling threatening and starts feeling like proof of what’s possible. To move from competition to contribution. From scarcity to surplus.

That’s the work. And it begins with us — not with the comments section.

Build anyway.

Post anyway.

Create anyway.

And protect your energy like the most creative resource you have.

Because it is.

— Sigourney Belle

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I had a little giggle to myself, imagining this person living inside of the comforts of their own home, feeding themselves from the groceries they bought from the supermarket and annoucing to the world that they were not going to take part in the “agenda”.

It is so interesting to me, when people say with great conviction, that they're not participating in the “government's agenda” — usually right before driving home on a publicly maintained highway, paying for their groceries with federally insured currency, and posting that declaration to a platform built on infrastructure funded, in part, by DARPA research from the 1960s.

I am not writing this to attack people who think this way, but to ask for a little more honesty and deeper self reflection. Because the gap between what people perform and what they actually live has become one of the stranger features of modern life.

The System You’re Standing In

Let’s be precise about what “the system” actually provides (ps. I am not cheerleading the system — and am fundamentally against a lot of it’s infrastructure, but it IS important to discuss in relation to what I am sharing, here).

The water comes out of the tap because of municipal engineering. The food at the grocery store arrived on roads that didn’t build themselves, inspected by agencies you didn’t fund privately. The hospital you’d go to in an emergency is licensed and regulated. The money in your account has value because a government says it does and backs that claim with force.

You may disagree with all of this. You may think it should be privatized, abolished, restructured from the ground up. That’s a legitimate philosophical position. But holding that position while using all of it daily and claiming non-participation is simply not coherent.

“Opting out” while remaining enmeshed in the economy, the grid, the currency, the roads, and the legal system is not a political stance. It’s a costume.”

The Seduction of Symbolic Resistance

Symbolic resistance is appealing because it gives you the identity of a dissident without the cost. And there is a real cost to actual dissent — the people who have genuinely stepped outside dominant systems have done so at enormous personal sacrifice. The Amish, certain monastic communities, serious off-grid homesteaders: they’ve chosen a harder, more constrained life to live by their values. That deserves respect, even if you don’t share their worldview.

But the person angrily posting from their iPhone about the evils of corporate tech while refusing to grow their own food, generate their own power, or maintain their own security? They’re not outside anything. They’re a customer of the empire who’s annoyed about the service.

This is the thing that often goes unsaid: systems are remarkably indifferent to your opinions of them. The grid doesn’t flicker when you declare independence from it. The economy doesn’t hiccup when you say you’ve opted out. You can despise every institution you rely on and still rely on them completely, and they’ll take your money and your compliance either way.

What Enmeshment Actually Looks Like

Enmeshment with the system, does not mean that you are failing morally. We are all, to some degree, enmeshed with the system in some way… I mean, we were born into it.

It’s just the accurate description of a condition. Most of us are deeply enmeshed with systems we didn’t choose, couldn’t easily escape, and have complicated feelings about. And it is okay. That’s just the byproduct of being alive in a modern society.

The problem isn’t the enmeshment. The problem is the denial of it — because denial forecloses the more interesting conversations. If you acknowledge you’re inside the system, you can start asking how you want to be inside it. What you’ll push back on. What you’ll try to change. Where you’ll draw your personal lines. Those are hard, genuinely interesting questions.

“I’m not participating” ends the conversation before it starts. It’s a way of feeling virtuous without doing anything. It’s the political equivalent of saying you don’t watch TV while spending four hours a day on your phone.

Adopting a More Honest Position

The question I want to pose here, is this: “What would it look like to hold political or philosophical dissent with more honesty?”

Something like: “I benefit from this system, I have real problems with parts of it, and I’m trying to figure out where my responsibility lies.”

This is a little more uncomfortable for many and it doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker or make you feel like a hero.

But it’s actually true. And truth, even inconvenient truth, is a better foundation for action than performance.

You can pay your taxes and oppose what they fund. You can use the roads and advocate for different infrastructure. You can participate in the economy and try to reshape it. These aren’t contradictions — they’re just the real texture of living inside a complex society while caring about what it does.

The people who have genuinely changed systems from within understood this. They didn’t pretend they were outside. They knew exactly where they stood — and they pushed from that place, with clear eyes, not with the comfortable illusion of clean hands.

The empire doesn’t need your approval. But it doesn’t need your pretend-rejection either. What it might actually fear — if such things can fear — is the person who looks at it clearly, admits their place in it, and decides to act anyway.

That’s a different kind of power. Less photogenic, maybe. But real.

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I guess, it is just a mirror for the culture on these platforms: scroll mindlessly…. and somtimes, share, mindlessly…

When something online light something up within me — a post, an article, a perspective that I find genuinely interesting — I often share it. Sometimes I agree with it…Sometimes I don’t… but I share it because think I feel it is something worth engaging with.

And here is the thing: in my head, when I hit share on a post, there’s a whole conversation already happening. I’m weighing the argument. I am reading the energy behind the argument. I am tracking that person’s history.

I am also thinking about who pushes back on the post, and why. I’m holding the nuances, the caveats, the parts I’d word differently.

Basically, my relationship to what I share is usually complicated. It is never really just a “like” and “share”.

But nobody sees that. They just see that I shared it.

And only recently, with geopolitical events heating up and the polarity atmosphere being rife, particularly on social media, I've been sitting with something that seems obvious in retrospect: the people reading my posts don't think the way I do.

My internal dialogue is unique. It is my own. And that is wonderful. But I have to not forget that my thoughts do not just magically transfer onto others, because I am merely thinking about them.

My audience does not have access to my internal monologue. They can't see the debate I was running in my head before I clicked share. They receive the signal without the context that made the signal make sense.

The gap between thinking and posting

Most of us carry around positions that are layered. There’s what we think, and then there’s what we think about what we think. There are the arguments we’ve already imagined someone making against us, and the parts we’d concede, and the parts we’d hold firm on.

But a share button compresses all of that into a single gesture. And on heated topics especially, that gesture gets read in the most charged way possible by the people most primed to read it that way.

A clean take is easy to react to. A layered one asks more of your reader.

But I’ve realised that asking more of my readers is the whole point. If I wanted simple signals, I wouldn’t be writing. The people who read carefully — the ones I actually want to be in conversation with — they can hold complexity. I just have to offer it to them, if I want it in return.

A post I recently shared, and what happened

I shared Lissa Rankin’s account of what happened in a Zoom call with Gabor Maté (you can read it, here) — the one where she attempted to name misogyny and patriarchy in a conversation explicitly arranged to discuss Deepak Chopra’s connection to Epstein, and where Maté shut it down and redirected. The piece she wrote is loaded Lissa is a charged messenger, coming in with her own victimisation programs — which I knew, when I shared it.

What I didn’t fully account for was how many different conversations would ignite in the comments at once — and how little of my actual thinking would be visible to the people having them.

From the comments — a snapshot

T

“The author comes off to me as an insufferable fragile toxic woke bigot misandrist feminist victim bully... Gabor Maté is one of the kindest most soft-spoken compassionate empathetic male thought leaders, so even if he did brush her off and invalidate her agenda the reframing of that as her being a bullied victim of patriarchy and white male power is absolutely gross.”

D

“It’s exhausting isn’t it — trying to tease apart the projections from the necessary critiques. Is it easy to believe someone like Gabor could have massive blind spots and be dismissive? Yes. But this woman seems like she’s bringing valuable critique while also leaning towards the “professional victim turned rescuer” archetype. Gee, there’s a pattern isn’t there, when ALL of these spiritual leaders have bullied or “gaslighted” her.”

S

“She created the event and invited a very specific accountability conversation and he didn’t want to have that and redirected it to something else. That’s pretty shitty. Do you not look around at US politics and see the constant manipulation tactics the patriarchy is revealing right now? This is a time of reckoning.”

C

“My body is responding really strong to this. Not in like a “triggered” way, but like a “yellow flag” feels present here.”

Me, in the thread

“I don’t think Gabor Maté is an abuser. At all. He’s just been silent in the face of abuse. But I do think awareness should be raised over the fact that he’s been silent on this matter — and refused to speak about it on the podcast that was arranged to speak about this very matter. That is an orange flag to me.”

Reading back through that thread, I can see what happened. People received the share and filled in my position themselves — based on their own relationship to Lissa, to Gabor, to the broader gender and power dynamics in wellness culture. Some read me as fully endorsing her account. Some read me as uncritically amplifying a “toxic” voice.

None of them were wrong about what they felt. But several of them were responding to a version of me that wasn’t quite real.

What I was actually thinking

When I read Lissa’s piece, I could feel the places where she wasn’t fully owning her part in the culture she’s critiquing. The years of proximity to the very teachers she’s now calling out. The way her own positioning is quietly being rebuilt in the act of taking them down. Dane’s observation — that there’s a pattern worth examining when every powerful figure in your world has “bullied or gaslit” you — landed for me. That’s not a reason to dismiss the critique - but it is another layer worth sharing.

And I shared it anyway.

Because naming what happens behind closed doors in the spiritual industry matters more right now than waiting for a perfectly clean critique. Because Maté’s silence on a podcast arranged specifically to discuss it is, to me, an orange flag — not proof of abuse, but not nothing either. Because the message can be necessary and messy. The messenger can be brave and still tangled in the very thing they’re calling out.

Both things can be true at once. That was my position. But nobody could see it, because I hadn’t written it down before I hit share.

The Mess Can Be The Point

It would be easy to write this piece as pure observation — as a meditation on discourse and complexity and the problem with social media. But that’s not the whole truth.

The other side of this is harder to own: I’ve also stayed quiet when I should have spoken. Many times. Because speaking felt too costly, too messy, too likely to implicate me in the same issues as the thing I wanted to name.

Lissa’s way of going public, going hard, naming names before she’s fully metabolised her own part — that’s not my way. My instinct is to do the inner work first. To sit with something until I feel more neutral. To find the thread of my own accountability before I pull anyone else’s. To make sure I’m not reacting.

That, to me, is maturity. BUT I can acknowledge where my way also has a shadow and I’m only recently starting to see this clearly.

Where I learned it

I grew up having to internalise a lot before I could speak. In my family, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time could start a fire, and so I learned to rationalise quietly, to wait until I was sure before I opened my mouth. I became very good at finding my “part” in things. At not being reactive. At being measured.

What I didn’t see for a long time is that this was also a survival strategy. And survival strategies, even useful ones, have a cost. Mine was that I’d sometimes process myself out of speaking at all. I’d find so much nuance, so much of my own complexity in a situation, that by the time I was “ready,” the moment had passed — or I’d quietly talked myself into believing it wasn’t my place.

So, by me sharing Lissa’s response, it was me saying “this point of view matters”, even if it is messy, even if she has not fully owned her part… she has something important to contribute and listen to.

The mess isn’t a reason to stay quiet — it’s often a sign that something real is happening. That the stakes are high enough to make things complicated. That people are still mid-process because what they’re naming is ongoing.

Why I will only be posting polarising content with sufficient breakdowns, in the future

I don’t think this is just about optics — about managing how I’m perceived. It’s about honesty. If I share something without context, I’m letting a version of me exist online that isn’t quite true. A flatter, more “certain” version that doesn’t account for the beauty, complexity and colours of my inner world and how I really see reality. If I am simply on-sharing other’s perspectives without sharing what is really happening inside of me, then I cannot turn around and be surprised when people make assumptions of my version of reality.

Showing your work isn’t a performance of humility. It’s just accuracy. It’s saying: this is actually how I think, not just what I landed on.

So I am committed to practising something different; to writing the breakdown before I share the post or the article. Showing the debate that’s already happening in my head — because if my position is genuinely complex, then the complex version is the honest one that I should be sharing.

My perspective has never been simple, but out of the convenience of a simple click of the “share” button, I have often left it out or forgotten to say it out loud.

If this resonated, I'd love to hear how you navigate sharing things you don't fully agree with — or whether you've found ways to write through complexity in public. Reply or leave a note.

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The thing I am talking about is:

Ghosting.

“Ghosting is the act of ending a relationship (romantic, platonic, or professional) by cutting off all communication without warning or explanation, leaving the other person with no closure and no understanding of what happened.”

It started for me in December of 2024 when I opened a new connection with a man. I had JUST started entering the dating pool again and decided to put my brave girl hat on and enter into the mainstream dating world, by signing up for Hinge.

At first, it was just a lot of unmating to begin with. I know what I want in a man and have particularly high standards when it comes to designing out a suitable partner — I need to feel met intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, as well as feel a physical attraction to someone in order to feel a yes to exploring intimacy. I am not someone that can go off attraction alone. My heart only opens when all of these faculties feel met.

So when I matched with Jack, who satiated all of these desires, I felt genuinely excited. He was an intellect — A University lecturer and Filmmaker / Writer — but also, down to Earth, having grown up in regional Victoria on a farm. He was sweet, attractive, and the magnetism and pull between us was like nothing I have felt before (and I had WORKED explicitly in the space of Sacred Sexuality with men, for close to 6 years, and had never felt what I felt in the space between us before).

The attraction was mutual, and heartfelt, not just desire based.

And yet, when it came down to attempting to form consistency of physical connection in our lives, he struggled. He hid under the guise of “busy-ness” (which he was, but that was the front he used for something far deeper) and struggled to follow through with plans, regularly. Sometimes he would even disappear for weeks on end.

The connection continued for a whole year, and I found myself withstanding behaviours that I would never normally tolerate.

I can be great with boundaries; when someone displays red flags in a relationship, I am usually not one to attempt to make it work. And yet, in this particular connection, I kept finding myself bowing back down at the altar, with consistent attempts to keep making it work, even though it was creating so much volatility in my life.

The result of the connection, in the end, was not a relationship, it was a book.

The Shape Love Refuses to Take is my upcoming title that will be released this year, which was catalysed and written through my journey of heartbreak and love, all entangled into one.

This article does not implicilty relate to that book, but it is a deconstruction of this pattern— a pattern that I have slowly been analysing under the microscope over the past year.

Given my experience in the field of Neuroscience and in the field of Somatic Trauma Therapy, I am almost always analysing patterns under this lense, and so I will speak to what I have discovered about Ghosting, from this standpoint.

A Epidemic Hidden in Plain Sight

Finding out the statistics of just how common Ghosting is, really struck something inside of me.

Research consistently finds that between 65% and 74% of people who use dating apps have been ghosted. Broader studies of adults in relationships place the figure at somewhere between 20% and 40%, though some research puts it as high as 72% of people reporting they’ve been on the receiving end at least once. Among adults aged 18 to 35, 65% admit to having ghosted a romantic partner themselves, while 72% have been ghosted.

What makes these numbers more than just statistics is what lies beneath them. In a 2023 survey of over 1,000 Millennials and Gen Z adults, nearly 1 in 3 people said they ghost because they are struggling with their mental health. The most common reason given was conflict avoidance — a dread of the difficult conversation so consuming that disappearing feels like the only option.

And here is the detail that stopped me: 86% of ghosters reported feeling relief after going silent. Not guilt or regret…relief. The body, it seems, was making a decision the mind could not.

“86% of ghosters report feeling relief after disappearing — not guilt, not regret. The body was making a decision the mind could not.”

The ghosting epidemic is not, at its core, a story about rudeness or the dehumanising effects of dating apps (well, mostly not, although I am sure this comes into the equation at times). It is a story about nervous systems that have never learned to stay with discomfort. About men, in particular, who were shaped by their earliest experience of love into people for whom intimacy and danger became indistinguishable.

To understand why someone disappears, we have to go back much further than the last message you sent.

The Neuroscience of Emotional Shutdown

To understand why a man who seemed genuinely present can simply cease to exist in your life, we need to understand what happens inside the male nervous system when emotional intimacy intensifies. Research in affective neuroscience has consistently shown that men, on average, experience greater physiological arousal in response to interpersonal conflict and emotional confrontation than women do — and they also usually take longer to return to baseline.

A landmark series of studies by Dr. John Gottman found that men’s heart rates escalate more rapidly and remain elevated longer during emotionally charged relational exchanges. This state, called diffuse physiological arousal (DPA), impairs the prefrontal cortex’s ability to regulate emotion, access empathy, and engage in nuanced communication. In plain terms: when a man is flooded, his brain’s capacity for connection goes offline.

Ghosting, viewed through this lens, is not always a calculated cruelty. For many men, it is an unconscious act of physiological self-protection: a flight response triggered by a nervous system that has been overwhelmed and has no learned tools to stay present in the discomfort.

“Ghosting is not always a calculated cruelty. For many men, it is an unconscious flight response — a nervous system overwhelmed with no learned tools to stay present.”

The freeze-or-flee response originates in the brainstem and limbic system, which are some of the most ancient and automatic parts of the brain. When the amygdala perceives threat, it overrides the cortex. And crucially, for men who grew up in emotionally unsafe environments, the perception of threat can be triggered not by danger in the conventional sense, but by intimacy itself.

Attachment Theory and the Fear of the Feminine

Developmental psychologist John Bowlby proposed that our earliest caregiving relationships create internal working models, ie. neural templates, for how we expect all subsequent intimate relationships to unfold. When a child’s primary attachment figure is consistently attuned and responsive, the child develops what researchers call a secure attachment style. When the caregiver is unpredictable, emotionally volatile, or overwhelming, the child adapts by developing strategies to regulate the distress this creates.

For boys raised by emotionally unstable, enmeshed, or overbearing mothers, one such strategy is emotional avoidance. The child learns, often before the age of five, that emotional closeness with a woman is fundamentally unsafe — that it carries the risk of being consumed, destabilised, or controlled. This is not something that is conscious — it is somatic, written into the body and the nervous system long before language has words for it.

The Mother Wound in Men

While the term ‘mother wound’ is most commonly applied to women navigating the complex legacy of their relationship with their mothers, men carry their own version of it, and it manifests very differently.

In men, the mother wound often surfaces as an unconscious conflation of intimacy and engulfment. The feminine, represented first by the mother and later by romantic partners, becomes associated with threat rather than safety. A woman’s emotional needs, her desire for closeness or accountability, can unconsciously activate the same nervous system response the boy once felt when his mother was unpredictable or overwhelming.

This dynamic can be entirely invisible to the man himself. He may genuinely like the woman. He may feel drawn to her, even excited by the early stages of connection. But as the relationship deepens and real emotional exposure becomes necessary, something in his system sounds an alarm. The conscious mind may not register it as fear. It may register as boredom, or a vague sense that something is ‘off,’ or a sudden and inexplicable withdrawal of interest.

He doesn’t ghost because he doesn’t care. He ghosts because, somewhere beneath his awareness, caring feels catastrophic.

The Role of Shame and the Collapse of Communication

Underpinning much of this is shame — perhaps the most under-discussed variable in the psychology of male relational behavior. Brené Brown’s research on shame has demonstrated that men are particularly vulnerable to shame around emotional inadequacy: the fear of being seen as too needy, too weak, or incapable of meeting a partner’s emotional needs.

When a man senses that a relationship is approaching the edge of his emotional capacity, he may experience a shame spiral that makes direct communication feel impossible. To say ‘I’m overwhelmed and I don’t know how to be in this relationship’ would require a level of emotional vulnerability that his nervous system has flagged as dangerous. So instead, the body makes the decision that the mind cannot: it disappears.

This is not an excuse. But it is an explanation and am understanding the mechanism that is taking place — and that is often, unconscious.

What Healing Looks Like

The good news is that the neural pathways laid down in early childhood are not fixed. Neuroplasticity — the brain’s capacity to reorganise itself — means that men who carry insecure attachment patterns can, with the right support, develop new relational capacities.

For Men

The first step is awareness. Men who recognise themselves in these patterns are encouraged to explore their attachment history — ideally with a therapist trained in relational or somatic modalities. Approaches such as Internal Family Systems (IFS), EMDR, or Somatic Experiencing are particularly effective at reaching the pre-verbal, body-based roots of avoidant behavior.

Learning to tolerate the discomfort of emotional exposure, rather than flee from it, is not an overnight process. But it begins with a simple, radical act: noticing the urge to disappear and choosing, even once, to stay.

In the instance of my connection with Jack, he was not interested in therapy, as he felt like he was being pathologised, which was the very pattern that was instilled from him from a young age that he was avoiding. When the external world tells you (sometimes explicitly, sometimes not) that there is something “wrong” with you — which is something very familiar to the black sheep of the family — then feeling like people are rejecting us or wronging us for our behaviours, becomes something we rebel against. In this instance, that was the role he played, and so he learned to become defensive against critique. And whilst I never wronged him, and always broached the issue with so much caution and care, there was no room for introspection on his side, and so ultimately, the connection could not work.

For Those Who Have Been Ghosted

Being ghosted can be incredibly challenging to our self work, as the silence is not neutral — it activates the attachment system and can leave people caught in a loop of self-questioning and self doubt. Understanding that ghosting is overwhelmingly a reflection of the other person’s unresolved internal landscape — and not a verdict on your worth — is not just a consoling thought, it is a neurological reality.

Your value was never up for assessment. What you encountered was someone whose nervous system had not yet learned to stay.

“The nervous system that learned to disappear can also learn to stay — but only when it finally feels safe enough to try.”

A Final Word

The ghosting epidemic is, at its core, an intimacy-issue epidemic.

Whilst I have written this article about men, it is not a pattern that is isolated to men. I have just written about it from my perspective, from a heterosexual female perspective, and so I cannot comment on what it is like to be on the other side of the fence.

I also decided to write the article about men in particular, because it ties into a recent article I wrote, called “We’ve Been Reading Men’s Emotions Wrong” — I have linked the article below.

The article debunks the myth that women are more emotional than men. Instead, the research points to the fact that men are actually more naturally emotional — they just do not have the ability to language and express what they are feeling.

I also wanted to specifically touch on the Mother Wound within men, as it is something I have encountered repeatedly in relationship.

A generation of men navigating the wreckage of dysregulated early attachment, with insufficient cultural permission to name what they feel or seek help for what they carry.

Changing this requires more than dating etiquette. It requires us — as a culture — to take seriously the emotional development of boys, the long reach of childhood wounds, and the neurobiological reality that connection, for those who never knew safe love, can feel indistinguishable from danger.

The nervous system that learned to disappear can also learn to stay. But only when it finally feels safe enough to try.

This is the foundation of what I speak about in my latest book release The Motherculture Revolution, which you can purchase here.

References available on request. This article is intended for general educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice.

Except — for most people who end up there — it was never really a choice at all.

The ones who become entrepreneurs don’t usually arrive there through careful deliberation, weighing pros and cons on a spreadsheet, deciding that a life of uncertainty and chaos sounds appealing. They arrive there because the alternative — squeezing themselves into some conventional shape, fitting neatly into someone else’s structure — simply doesn’t work. Not won’t work. Doesn’t work. The way a square peg doesn’t fit a round hole.

At heart, entrepreneurs are artists.

Not in the romanticised, beret-wearing sense. But in the truest sense: we are people who are compelled to carve something new out of nothing. To look at empty space and see form is waiting to emerge. The canvas just happens to be a company, a product, a market, a team. The materials are uncertainty, capital, timing, and relentless human energy.

And like all artists, they can’t really explain why they do it. Only that they must.

This morning I was sitting with the weight of what I am carrying, choosing this journey for myself.

The constant slipstream of creation and death — eros and thanatos — the thrill of building something and the ever-present threat of watching it collapse. These forces don’t take weekends off. They don’t respect your nervous system or your sleep or the birthday dinners you keep half-attending while your mind is somewhere else entirely.

It’s stressful in a way that’s hard to articulate to people who haven’t lived inside it. Not the stress of a hard job. The stress of being the weather system itself — responsible not just for showing up, but for generating the conditions that allow everything else to exist.

And I asked myself, honestly, this morning: could I do anything else?

The answer was no.

Because this particular madness is mine. Stepping away from it wouldn’t feel like relief. It would feel like amputation.

If you’re reading this and you recognise yourself in it — the restlessness, the compulsion, the strange grief of a quiet week — then you already know what I mean.

You’re not broken. You’re not incapable of stability.

You’re just one of the ones who can’t not build.

And somehow, despite everything, that’s enough to keep going.

What keeps you in the arena? I’d love to hear it in the comments.

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Not in the abstract, dystopian way people talk about robots taking over. It was more close to home than that. I watched AI help people who had never considered themselves writers suddenly produce fluent, readable prose — and I felt a sinking feeling in my belly. I had spent years developing my craft. My livelihood depended on it. And here was a tool that could seemingly replicate it overnight.

So yes, I was threatened.

But something shifted in me over time, and I want to share what I found on the other side of that fear — because I think a lot of writers are still standing where I once stood, gripping their identity a little tighter than usual, wondering if the thing they built their life around is quietly being dismantled.

It isn’t. But to understand why, we have to get honest about what writing actually is.

The writing is not the writer.

Here is the distinction that changed everything for me: there is a difference between the writing and the impulse behind it.

The writing — the sentences, the paragraphs, the structure — is the output. It is the visible surface of something much deeper. Beneath it lives the original thought. The particular way a mind has been shaped by a specific life. The questions that won’t leave you alone at 2am. The losses that quietly reorganised your entire understanding of the world. The things you noticed that no one else seemed to notice, and the years you spent wondering why.

That is what a writer actually is. Not the sentences. The source of them.

And this is where AI, for all its remarkable capability, simply cannot go. It can study every sentence ever written. It can learn patterns, rhythms, structures, voices. It can produce prose that is technically accomplished, even occasionally moving. But it cannot experience what it was to live your life. It does not have the capacity to feel. It cannot be shaped by your specific grief, your specific wonder, your specific obsessions. It has no history that aches. It has no wound that slowly, over years, became a worldview.

That is yours. Entirely, irreducibly, unthreatenably yours.

What readers are actually looking for.

When someone falls in love with a writer — really falls in love, the kind where they buy every book and read every essay and feel inexplicably seen — what are they responding to?

Not the grammar. Not even the style, exactly. Something harder to name. A presence. The sense that a real human mind, with a real and particular history, is on the other side of the page reaching toward them. They are not just consuming information or even beautiful language. They are making contact with another consciousness. They are briefly less alone.

That is what writing, at its deepest, has always been. A transmission from one specific human interior to another.

AI cannot fake that. Not to a reader who is paying attention. Because what they are paying attention to — however unconsciously — is the quality of the original impulse. The realness of the source. And that source is either a lived human life, or it isn’t.

Your lens is not a technique.

This is worth sitting with, especially for writers who are newer to their craft and may feel most vulnerable to comparison.

Your unique view on reality is not something you learned. It is not a skill that can be prompted into existence. It is the sum of everything that has ever happened to you, filtered through the particular consciousness you happen to be. The specific way your childhood arranged your nervous system. The relationships that broke you open. The places you have stood, literally and metaphorically, that gave you a view no one else has stood in.

Style can be imitated. Voice can be approximated. But the lens — the original angle at which your life has positioned you to see the world — that is singular. It cannot be stolen because it cannot even be fully seen from the outside. It lives inside the writing like a fingerprint in clay.

The more clearly you understand this, the more it changes how you write. You stop trying to write like anyone else. You stop performing writerliness. You start asking, instead: what do I actually think about this? What do I actually notice? What is the thing only I can say, because only I have stood exactly here?

Those questions will take you somewhere AI never can.

A practical thought for writers sitting with this fear.

If you are still in the anxious place I used to occupy, here is what I would offer: use this moment as a clarifying pressure.

AI is very good at the generic. It is competent at the average. It can produce writing that is perfectly serviceable, perfectly readable, and perfectly forgettable. What it cannot do is be specific in the way that only a life makes possible.

So go further into your specificity. The weird detail. The uncomfortable honesty. The observation that feels almost too particular to share. The thought you haven’t seen anyone else think. That is not where AI competes with you. That is where you become irreplaceable.

The writers who will feel most threatened by AI are the ones writing toward the middle — toward what is expected, acceptable, familiar. The writers who lean hard into their own strange, specific, particular truth will find that AI has not made their work less valuable. It has made it more so.

One last thought.

There is also a kinder way to look at what AI is doing in the world of writing. If it helps someone who has an original impulse — a story that needs telling, a perspective that deserves an audience — but who has always struggled with the mechanics of craft, finally get their voice out into the world… is that really a loss?

More voices. More perspectives. More of the strange, specific, irreplaceable human experience making it onto the page.

That doesn’t sound like a threat to me anymore. It sounds like exactly what writing is for. The more of us telling the truth of what we see — whatever tools we use to do it — the better.

Your lens on reality is yours. Go use it.

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We are in the midst of an extraordinary shift.

Astrologers, mystics, developmental psychologists, and systems theorists are converging from wildly different angles on something that feels unmistakably true: humanity is being initiated into a new tier of consciousness. And the people who feel most out of place in the current world may, in fact, be its leading edge.

The Age of Aquarius: The Water Bearer baptises humanity

Every 2,150 years or so, Earth’s axial wobble causes a shift in which constellation rises behind the Sun at the spring equinox. We are now moving from the Age of Pisces, characterised by hierarchy, top-down authority, sacrifice, and devotion to an external god, into the Age of Aquarius: the water bearer, the networker, the systems-thinker, the democratic visionary.

Where Pisces gave us cathedrals, empires, and saviour myths, Aquarius gives us the internet, distributed networks, and the slow, painful dismantling of every institution that was built on unquestioned power. The chaos we are living through, politically, socially, spiritually, is not the opposite of this awakening. It is the initiation. The old structures must crack before the new frequency can take root.

"The transition from one astrological era to another takes approximately 500 years. We are in the contested, disruptive heart of it now — and the years between 2025 and 2030 are considered by many teachers to be its most critical threshold."

Aquarius is ruled by Uranus, which is the planet of sudden revelation, of technology, of the brilliant outsider who sees what the room cannot. In 2024, Pluto entered Aquarius, where it will remain for the next 15+ years. This is not astrological decoration. Pluto rules transformation through destruction and rebirth. Its transit through Aquarius will reshape power, networks, and collective identity at the root level.

And it is already happening. The question is not whether the shift is occurring. The question is: where do you sit within it?

The spiral of human values

To understand what is being asked of us at this moment, we need a map of human consciousness that is both rigorous and honest about where most people actually are. Spiral Dynamics, developed by Don Beck and Chris Cowan from Clare Graves’ decades of psychological research, offers exactly this.

The model describes eight stages of a spiral of consciousness and value systems that individuals and whole societies organise their lives around. They are not a hierarchy of worth. They are a sequence of responses to increasingly complex life conditions. Each stage includes and transcends the one before it. Here is where humanity currently stands:

Notice the gap. Blue and Orange together account for roughly 65–70% of the global population and the vast majority of institutional power. They built the world we live in: its governments, religions, corporations, and schools. These systems are evolutionary responses to the life conditions of previous centuriesl and they are increasingly mismatched to the complexity of the world we now face.

The Aquarian Age is not asking everyone to immediately leap to Turquoise. It is applying pressure: through ecological crisis, through the failure of top-down institutions, through AI and radical transparency that is forcing the entire spiral upward. It is, in developmental terms, a collective initiation.

My Hypothesis: That the Aquarian Age is pulling us towards Teal based consciousness

Green is still first-tier consciousness. It sees clearly the damage of Orange’s hypercompetitive individualism, and it responds with fierce egalitarianism, community care, and sensitivity to all voices. This is beautiful. Green built the environmental movement, human rights frameworks, and trauma-informed care. But Green also has a shadow: it can become relativistic to the point of paralysis, intolerant of hierarchy even when hierarchy serves a function, and prone to weaponising inclusion as a new form of conformity. This is what we are currently being initiated into as a collective - moving away from a Hierarchical leadership and towards Network Leadership. In the Age of Aquarius, humans are re-organizing in three-dimensional matrices: networks made up of countless nodes. Each one of us is a node in this model. We express our uniqueness as we share our commonness.

Yellow/Teal is the first to look back down the spiral without judgment: to see why Blue needs order, why Orange needs achievement, why Red needs to feel power. It stops fighting the earlier stages and starts metabolising them. This is the "momentous leap" Clare Graves called a chasm of unbelievable depth. The Aquarian frequency: networked, non-hierarchical, systems-aware, simultaneously individual and collective, is precisely the frequency of second-tier thinking.

The Aquarian Age is not a Green utopia of endless consensus circles. It is the emergence of a new cognitive and spiritual capacity: the ability to hold the entire spiral in awareness, to work fluidly across value systems, to be sovereign without being separate. That is Teal. That is what is being called forth.

Some of us arrived early

If you are reading this, there is a reasonable chance you sit somewhere in the Green-to-Teal range, or you are in the process of crossing that threshold. And if so, you will likely know, with your whole body, what it is to be profoundly isolated and alone in your way of thinking and being in the world.

Not lonely in the ordinary sense. Lonely in the sense that the people around you are operating from a genuinely different map of reality; from a different position on the spiral.

"You didn't enter the world with casual curiosity. You entered it with insatiable curiosity, intensity, sincerity, and a deep hunger for meaning. You meant what you said. You expected others to mean what they said, too. And you were devastated when they didn't meet you there."

Research on gifted and neurodivergent adults consistently confirms what those of us in this community know intuitively: loneliness is not incidental to this way of being. It is structural. The neurodivergent brain, whether ADHD, autistic, twice-exceptional, or otherwise wired for depth and pattern recognition, processes reality at a granularity that makes casual connection genuinely difficult. It is not that connection is unwanted, but it is that the particular form of intimacy required: intellectual, spiritual, energetic, is rare.

There is also an asynchronous development at play. Many gifted and neurodivergent people are operating at Yellow/Teal cognitive complexity while simultaneously navigating the emotional wounds of a childhood in Blue or Orange environments that didn’t know what to do with them. The vertigo of that gap: extraordinary pattern-recognition on one hand, deep attachment wounds on the other, is one of the defining experiences of this particular kind of soul.

Kazimierz Dąbrowski, the Polish psychologist whose work is experiencing a quiet renaissance in these communities, called this “positive disintegration.” He proposed that what looks like psychological suffering in gifted individuals is often the sign of a consciousness attempting to reorganise itself at a higher level of functioning.

You are not too much. You are too early.

The Aquarian Age needs you. Not in a saccharine, spiritual-bypassy kind of way. Not in a way that erases the real cost of living ahead of the cultural curve. But in the most literal developmental sense: the spiral only moves forward because some people are already inhabiting the next level, holding it open, demonstrating by their existence that it is possible.

If you are someone who has always seen the systems behind the systems, who has felt the grief of collective disconnection as a personal wound, who oscillates between visionary clarity and complete overwhelm, well I am here to tell you that you are not broken. You are a second-tier consciousness trying to function in a primarily first-tier world. And that is not a small thing to be carrying.

The Aquarian frequency, with its emphasis on networks over hierarchies and collective intelligence over individual heroism, is specifically designed to make your way of being viable. Not easy. But viable in a way it has not been before. The infrastructure for your kind of consciousness: decentralised communities, peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, the slow erosion of gatekeepers, is being built around you, even as the old world continues its loud and painful resistance.

A closing thought

The water bearer of Aquarius does not drink the water they carry. They pour it out, for the collective. This is the archetypal task of second-tier consciousness: not to transcend the world, but to serve its becoming. Not to be understood by everyone, but to translate between levels with grace.

You are living at the hinge of a 2,150-year age. The chaos you feel is real. The loneliness is real. And so is the extraordinary nature of what is unfolding. The spiral is moving. The age is turning. And the ones who feel most out of place in the old world are often precisely the ones the new world is being built to receive.

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It does not schedule a session to work through its shutdown response. It does not journal about its functional freeze. It does not set an alarm to force itself back into productivity before the thaw. It simply goes still, goes deep, and trusts that something in its blood knows what the season requires.

We used to know this too.

What if some of what we've named as disorder is actually the body doing precisely what it was designed to do — and we've simply forgotten how to read the instructions?

I am not trying to dismiss therapy, or diagnosis, or the real and serious suffering that people carry (and the very real changes that people experience in therapy). I love therapy and it is emotional self care, for me.

This is a question that sits alongside it, one that is with me when I notice the language we’ve built around inner experience — the clinical scaffolding we place around states that every other living thing moves through wordlessly.

Consider grief. When a tree loses its leaves, we don’t call it depressed. We call it Autumn. The shedding is not a malfunction, it is the tree redirecting its energy inward, releasing what it can no longer sustain, preparing for what’s coming next. Biologists call this abscission. It is orderly, necessary, beautiful in its own austere way.

Human grief does something structurally similar a tree shedding it’s leaves in Autumn. It empties us, it strips away. It forces a kind of inward withdrawal that the world around us often reads as dysfunction. We have built entire frameworks around moving through it faster, resolving it, returning the person to prior capacity. But prior capacity was built for a life that no longer exists. The grief is not the problem. The grief is the process by which a self remakes itself around a new reality. The tree in winter is not a broken tree. It is a tree in winter.

Consider anxiety. A meerkat stands at the edge of the burrow and scans the horizon. Its whole nervous system is lit up, alert, broadcasting a silent alarm to every nearby creature: something might be coming. We do not diagnose the meerkat with generalised anxiety disorder. We recognise it as a sentinel doing its job — a creature evolved over millions of years to notice threat before threat notices it.

The human nervous system running on high alert is, often, doing the same thing. It learned its vigilance for a reason. The problem is not the alarm system. The problem is that the threat it was calibrated for may no longer be present — and no one has told the body that the war is over. What we call anxiety is, in another light, a loyalty to survival. An ancient intelligence that loved us too much to stop watching.

Consider burnout. In traditional agriculture, a field left fallow was not a failed field. It was a field being trusted. Farmers understood that soil which gives without receiving will eventually give nothing. Rest was not idleness. The fallow period was when the invisible work happened: the microbes, the minerals, the slow restoration of what had been taken. You could not rush it without destroying the very capacity you were trying to restore.

We speak of burnout as collapse. But perhaps it is closer to fallow. The body refusing to continue depleting what has already been spent. Not a breakdown, but a boundary. Not failure, but a refusal to continue to engage in something that will not nourish us. The organism doing what organisms do when they have given beyond their replenishment.

The living world does not pathologise its seasons. It does not call winter a disorder, or drought a personal failing, or dormancy a deficiency of character.

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I had the honour of witnessing and observing this phenomena, growing up on a small island, where time stood still and I spent most of my days, immersed in nature: the generator power went off during the day, we didn’t have technology and our circadian rhythms were synchronised to nature. This is why this topic is so close to home, for me.

And none of this means the suffering isn't real. It is. The freeze is real. The grief is real. The exhaustion is real. But there is a difference between suffering and brokenness. And somewhere along the way — in our very reasonable attempt to name pain in order to treat it — we may have started to collapse those two things together.

When we give something a clinical name, we do two things at once. We honour it — we say: this is real, you are not imagining it, it deserves attention. And we also, sometimes, locate it as an aberration. A deviation from some baseline of correct functioning that the rest of the world is busy inhabiting while you remain stuck outside it.

But what if the baseline is wrong?

What if the correct functioning we’re being returned to is itself the problem; a pace, a relentlessness, a metric of output that no animal alive would recognise as sustainable?

The salmon does not seek help for its compulsive return. The wolf howling at the edge of its territory is not in crisis. These are creatures living fully inside their nature, doing exactly what their nature asks of them.

And you, lying still in a darkness you don’t fully understand, unable to move, unable to explain what is happening to you — you might be doing the same.

Not broken. Not failing. Not in need of fixing.

Wintering.

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I also posted it, because in the light of everything that has been exposed lately, with the corruption in the US government, I feel that it is important to stay on this pulse: to keep tracking it and naming it. Particularly, as someone who lives in the West and is continually exposed to this covert gaslighting.

What came back in the comments section was something I’ve come to recognise with a kind of weary dread. People insisting it was the Iranian regime. Doubling down. Demanding sources. Performing scepticism with the confidence of people who had already decided on the outcome.

And then, when it was proven, when the evidence was undeniable — crickets. No corrections. No apologies. Just a quiet shuffling away, as if the argument had never happened. As if those 181 people had never happened.

Silence after being proven wrong is not neutrality. It’s a choice. It tells us exactly where the investment was.

And then came a different kind of comment. Someone pivoting: “but what about the time the Iranian regime shot down 200 of their own people?”

And I felt something I can only describe as a deep, slow exhaustion.

Here is what I want to say clearly: two events can both be atrocities. The Iranian regime has done terrible things. The US military has done terrible things. These facts do not cancel each other out. They are not in competition. They do not require us to choose a side before we’re permitted to grieve.

But that’s not what the “but what about” move is actually doing. It is not expanding the conversation. It is not saying, “let’s hold multiple powers accountable at once.” It is a deflection. A trapdoor. A way of escaping the discomfort of sitting with one specific, documented, undeniable thing.

The “what about” commentary is not moral complexity. Moral complexity would look like: “Yes, and here’s another example of the same pattern of impunity.” Whataboutism looks like: “But look over there” — spoken at the exact moment accountability comes near.

There is something particularly painful about watching it happen in real time. You share a story about real people, about real children who were killed and within moments, the thread has become an argument about which government is worse, which death toll is more legitimate, which grief is permitted to take up space.

The children are gone from the conversation. That is the point. That is always the point.

I am asking for something that sounds simple but apparently isn’t: can we just sit with one thing? Can we let one event be real, be wrong, be worth naming and without immediately reaching for the escape hatch of “but they did this too”?

Accountability is not a zero-sum resource. Holding the US responsible for 181 deaths does not mean declaring Iran beyond criticism. It does not mean you have chosen a team. It means you looked at something that happened, and you refused to look away.

That’s all. That’s the whole ask here.

Grief is not a debate. Accountability is not a contest. And 181 people deserve more than being used as a deflection device in someone else’s culture war.

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These two events — whatever comparison anyone wants to draw — are not mutually exclusive. One does not erase the other. One does not make the other acceptable, or smaller, or less worthy of our attention.

Learn to hold more than one truth. Learn to stay in the room when it’s uncomfortable. Learn to say, “yes, that happened, and it was wrong” — without the escape clause, without the redirect, without the need to immediately balance the moral ledger in a way that lets you off the hook.

Just sit with it. That’s where accountability actually begins.

If this resonated with you, please on share it. Please like it. Please re-stack it so others can read.

This morning I was filtering through the layers of this pattern, dissecting it thoroughly on my daily walk by the ocean. Walking, is what helps me to digest information and make sense of it.

I have been unravelling what feels like lifetimes of fawn, in these past few weeks. At the centre of this pattern, I found, yet another one… this one, more sneaky and covert; and it is at the core of why I often feel challenged setting boundaries with members of my family.

Here is what I found:

The pattern

It usually doesn’t look like manipulation from the outside, and often it isn’t— well, not in the conscious, calculated sense.

And that is because the warmth being offered is real. The care is real. And that’s what makes this pattern so hard to see clearly.

When someone leads with empathy, attunement, and emotional generosity as their primary mode of being in the world, those same qualities end up functioning as a kind of buffer against accountability. And it is not because they intend it that way (well, usually not). Most often, it is because the system around them — the relationships, the family, the friendships — learns to absorb the good and quietly set aside the harm.

I am calling it the empathy shield. The person who wields it isn’t cold or cruel; in fact, they’re often the most emotionally intelligent person in the room. They notice things. They remember details. They say the right thing when you’re struggling. And when they do something harmful, ie. when they lie, or manipulate, or withdraw cruelly, or fail to show up in ways that matter, then the ledger of their warmth is already so full that it softens the blow before you’ve even registered the impact.

Why it’s so disorienting

When someone is consistently loving and consistently harmful, your nervous system holds two contradictory truths at once and can’t resolve them. You can’t fully trust your positive experiences of the person — is this real, or am I being managed? — and you can’t fully trust your negative ones either, because they keep being interrupted by genuine moments of connection.

The result is a kind of internal static. You can’t hold a clean position. Every time you get close to seeing the harm clearly, something warm moves in to blur it.

And crucially: the burden of that confusion lands on you. When you try to raise the difficult thing — the behaviour, the pattern, the impact — you’re suddenly the one who seems unable to appreciate what they give. The conversation becomes about your capacity for gratitude rather than their capacity for accountability. The empathic person, responding from their most natural register, meets your grievance with empathy. They understand how you feel. They’re so sorry you feel that way. And the behaviour itself remains untouched.

Why this shows up so often in women

I want to be careful here, because this isn’t an indictment. But it is an observation —and one I have been tracking for some time now, particularly in female friendships.

Women are socialised, in ways both obvious and subtle, to be emotionally available. To attune to others. To smooth things over, to hold the emotional temperature of a room, to lead with care. These are not bad qualities to have. In fact, they’re often genuinely endeering qualities for someone to have. But they are also qualities that, when learned early as a form of protection or belonging, can become deeply automatic. Warmth as a survival strategy. Empathy as a way to stay safe.

In many families and social systems, emotionally intelligent women learn that being warm and perceptive earns them latitude. Their attunement protects them from scrutiny. It makes them hard to confront, hard to criticise, hard to hold a firm line with — not because they’re doing something calculating, but because the system rewards the warmth and absorbs the harm.

But what I want to name here is this:

This doesn’t make it less harmful. And it doesn’t make it less of a pattern worth naming.

The confusion is the mechanism

Here is the thing I keep coming back to: the ambiguity isn’t a side effect. It is, in fact, how this works.

And if you cannot hold a clean, clear position — as long as the warm moments keep interrupting the difficult ones — accountability stays just out of reach. The person doesn’t have to actively resist being held accountable.

And that is because, the confusion does it for them.

I feel like naming this pattern is important, because it is so common, and so quiet and sneaky.

I don’t want to pathologise warmth, or make people suspicious of care (because in this day and age I feel it is truly revolutionary in many ways); but I do feel we need to learn to better develop the capacity to hold two things at once without one erasing the other. She is loving. And this behaviour caused harm. Both true. Neither cancels the other.

The ability to do that; to stay in contact with the difficulty even when someone is being generous with you, is genuinely hard. It runs counter to a lot of social conditioning around gratitude and loyalty. But it is the only way to actually address what’s happening rather than repeatedly absorbing it.

What seeing it clearly looks like

Clarity here doesn’t require coldness. It doesn’t mean discounting the love or deciding the relationship is worthless. It means refusing to let warmth function as a substitute for accountability.

In practice, it might look like: staying with what happened after the warm moment has passed. Noticing when empathy is being offered in the place of an actual reckoning. Being willing to be the person who seems “unable to let it go” — because sometimes not letting it go is the most honest thing available.

It also means being willing to look at yourself. Because most of us do some version of this (I am currently scrutinising my own behaviour in relation to this pattern).

Most of us have learned to soften the edges of our worst behaviour with our best qualities. The point isn’t to become suspicious of empathy as a category. It’s to notice when it’s doing double duty — when it’s being asked to cover ground it shouldn’t have to cover.

The wider implication

When empathy becomes currency in a relationship or a community, it quietly distorts the accountability system of that whole environment. The most emotionally generous people accrue the most social capital. They also often spend it, knowingly or not, on not being challenged. The people around them learn to prioritise the relationship over the reckoning. Everyone stays comfortable. Nothing changes.

But the questions I am sitting with, is this:

What would it look like if warmth and honesty weren’t in opposition?

If someone could be deeply loving and also willing to be clearly seen, clearly named, clearly held?

That combination is rare. But it’s what actual trust is built on: not the soft, static trust of a relationship that never risks discomfort, but something sturdier. Something that can hold both people at once.

That’s what I’m looking for when I track this pattern. Not to expose anyone. Not to stop caring about the people involved. But to stop letting the love be the reason nothing changes.

Not in the abstract, philosophical sense, but in the daily, embodied, what am I actually doing here sense.

It’s a question that feels newly urgent. Because something is cracking open in the culture right now, and I think a lot of us can feel it even if we haven’t found the words for it yet.

The glamour is coming down.

I mean that almost literally: glamour in its older sense, as a kind of enchantment. A spell that makes something appear more beautiful, more luminous, more worthy of reverence than it actually is. For decades, we’ve been living inside a particular glamour: the idea that certain people, by virtue of their platform, their followers, their spiritual vocabulary, their TED talks and book deals and retreat packages, had accessed something the rest of us were still reaching for. They were further along. More enlightened. Living proof that the path worked.

And one by one, the spell is breaking.

Deepak Chopra, for years one of the most recognisable faces of Western spirituality; he has become, for many people, a symbol of something hollow at the centre of the wellness industrial complex. The language of consciousness and quantum healing, deployed in service of brand-building and cultural gatekeeping. Steven Lin, a spiritual influencer I was watching unfold on television just last night, is the latest in a long line of figures whose curated exterior has given way to something far uglier underneath.

I don’t take pleasure in naming them. But I think the naming matters. Because the disillusionment we feel when these figures fall isn’t just about them. It’s a signal and a kind of somatic alarm, telling us that we’ve been measuring ourselves against the wrong things.

Here’s what I mean.

When we look up at someone and when we orient our sense of worth around how close we are to an external ideal, then we are, by definition, locating the measure of ourselves somewhere outside ourselves. In the follower count. The retreat invitation. The endorsement from someone with a blue tick and a podcast. We become, in a sense, spectators of our own lives, always watching to see how we’re doing relative to the scoreboard.

And the scoreboard, it turns out, was rigged. Or at least, it was measuring the wrong game.

This morning I was reflecting on this very topic myself, and my final response was":

My daughter is my best reflection of the good I am doing in the world.

Not my output. Not my reach. Not whether people in certain rooms know my name.

My daughter.

The way she moves through the world. The way she treats people. The things she notices. The questions she asks. The courage she shows, or doesn’t yet show but is growing toward. All of it is a living record of what has actually been transmitted; not what I’ve performed, not what I’ve posted, but what I’ve actually been in the presence of another person who couldn’t be fooled.

Children are ruthlessly honest mirrors. They don’t care about your personal brand. They reflect back what they’ve actually received. And that is, I think, one of the most confronting and clarifying metrics available to any of us.

But I want to be careful here, because this isn’t only about parenthood. Not everyone has children, and the measure of a life cannot be that narrow.

What I’m pointing at is something broader: the shift from external markers of worth to interior ones. From the question how do I appear? to the question who am I when no one is watching? From what have I built that others can see? to what have I actually given, in the small and unremarkable moments that left no trace except in someone else’s nervous system?

This is the reorientation I see happening collectively right now. It is not comfortable. Collective disillusionment rarely is.

But I think it is necessary, and I think it is good.

We are being asked, by the falling of these facades, by the exposure of these hollow centres, to stop outsourcing our compass.

To ask: if I remove every external signal of whether I’m doing well, what’s left? What do I actually know about myself? What do the people closest to me: who cannot be dazzled by my presentation, and who can reflect back to me about who I really am?

Those are the harder questions. They don’t fit on a retreat flyer. They won’t get you verified. But they are, I think, the only questions worth sitting with right now.

Because the glamour is coming down. And what’s underneath it, in ourselves, in each other, is where the real work has always been.

What are the interior markers you’re learning to trust? I’d love to hear in the comments.

And instead of feeling relieved, you feel worried. Because if you’re not fawning, not over-functioning, not scanning the room for what everyone else needs — then who are you? And why does healing feel so much like... not caring?

I am writing about this, because after 18 months of dating avoidant’s and having to constantly turn up the volume on my senses to track the unconscious patterns in the relationships I have been in, I am now on the other side.

Single, exhausted, apathetic and in collapse.

And I welcome it all.

Here’s what I want you to know: the apathy is not a relapse. It’s not depression (though it can look like it). It’s not you giving up. In many cases, it’s the first honest thing your nervous system has done in years.

First, a quick word on fawn

The fawn response, a term coined by therapist Pete Walker, is what happens

when fight and flight aren’t safe options. When you’re young and the people you

depend on are also the people you’re afraid of, the most adaptive thing you can do

is become indispensable. Stay agreeable. Read the room. Make yourself useful,

loveable, unthreatening. Disappear the parts of yourself that might cause conflict.

It’s a survival strategy. A brilliant one, even.

The problem is that it doesn’t switch off when the danger passes. It becomes a personality. A way of moving through the world. And it is exhausting — even when you don’t know you’re doing it.

Fawning looks like: saying yes when you mean no. Feeling responsible for other

people’s moods. Apologising constantly. Shrinking your needs so they take upless space. Being praised as “so easy to be around” while quietly losing track of what you actually want.

Then comes the collapse

At some point in healing, often after you’ve done enough work to recognise the pattern and start to disentangle from it — the system that kept you constantly “on”starts to power down. The perpetual state of readiness that fawn requires simply cannot be sustained once you begin to understand that the threat it was protecting you from is no longer (or was never quite) real.

And when it powers down, it does not always do so gracefully. Sometimes it crashes.

You stop returning messages as quickly. You feel less pulled toward other people’s problems. Things that used to feel urgent, like making sure everyone is okay, being liked, managing impressions, just... don’t land the same way. You might sit with a low-grade blankness that’s hard to name. Not sadness exactly. Not numbness exactly. More like a stillness you haven’t earned yet and don’t quite trust.

This is apathy is a physiological event. Your nervous system is coming out of a prolonged state of hyperarousal. It is resting. It does not yet know how to just be — so for a while, it settles for nothing.

Why this stage is necessary, not a problem to fix

Think of it this way. If you have been over-extending, over-giving, and over- attending to others for years — possibly decades — your sense of what you genuinely want or feel has been buried under layers of what you believed was required of you. You do not emerge from that knowing yourself. You emerge from it not knowing anything.

The apathy is not absence. It’s clearing. It’s the silence after a long, loud noise — the disorientation before your hearing adjusts.

For the first time, perhaps, you are not performing care. Not performing interest. Not performing ease. And because you’ve been performing for so long, the absence of performance can feel like the absence of feeling itself. It isn’t. It’s just what you look like without the costume on.

There is also something important happening underneath the flatness: the old reward system is recalibrating. Fawning kept you regulated through external approval — a smile from someone you’d helped, the relief of conflict avoided, the hit of being needed.

When you stop fawning, those hits dry up. Your nervous system, for a while, has nothing to reach for. That lack of pull is real. It’s also temporary. Desire and preference and genuine care all return — but they return on your terms, not as fear in disguise.

A note on what it’s not

I want to be careful here, because healing-apathy and clinical depression can look similar from the outside — and sometimes from the inside too. If your flatness is accompanied by hopelessness, consistent inability to experience pleasure in things that usually bring you joy, changes in sleep or appetite, or thoughts of self-harm, please bring this to your therapist. Those are signs that something else may need attention.

What I’m describing is something subtler: a low-motivation, low-urgency phase that tends to sit alongside continued functioning. You can still laugh. Things canstill catch your interest. You’re just not driving yourself with the old fuel anymore — and the new fuel hasn’t arrived yet.

Permission to stop over-functioning

One of the hardest things about leaving fawn behind is the guilt. The creeping sense that you are being selfish, cold, or difficult. That people are noticing. That you used to be better, warmer, more available — and something has gone wrong.

What’s actually happened is that you have stopped subsidising your relationships with your own wellbeing. You have stopped doing emotional labour that was never yours to do in the first place. And yes, some people will notice. Some will even be upset. That information is useful. It tells you about the shape of the dynamic, not about your worth as a person.

You are allowed to not know what you want right now. You are allowed to be unavailable. You are allowed to feel nothing particularly compelling about other people’s crises while you get reacquainted with your own inner life. This is not cruelty. It’s convalescence.

You spent a long time being everything to everyone. The least radical thing you can do right now is spend a season being nothing in particular, and seeing what grows.

It’s a passage, not a destination

Apathy, in this context, is a phase of integration. The self that you suppressed in service of keeping others comfortable is slowly, cautiously checking whether it’s safe to come back. That takes time. It takes quiet. It takes you not rushing it with a new project or relationship or performance.

On the other side of this — and there is an other side — is something that fawn never gave you: genuine engagement. Connection that doesn’t cost you yourself.

Care that comes from wanting to, rather than needing to. Opinions. Preferences.

The ability to disappoint someone and survive it.

If you’re in the grey right now, I see you. Me too.

It doesn’t mean you’re broken or selfish or doing it wrong. It means you stopped running on a fuel source that was burning you down — and your body is figuring out what comes next.

Rest in it. Something real is coming.

I was the one at school sitting in the corner writing and illustrating books, instead of listening to the teacher. The one who, despite every report saying “she distracted everyone in the class,” got top grades.

At university, I managed to pass with all high distinctions by opening my textbooks, looking at the images and words, and screenshotting them in my memory. When it came to sitting exams, I would close my eyes, recall them in my vision and then receive my answers.

Some call this having a photographic memory.

It also has another name.

Fantasia

φαντασία

Fantasia comes from the Greek phantasia (φαντασία), meaning: “a making visible”, from phantazein, to make visible, to display.

At its core, it means the power of the mind to make things appear: to conjure images from nothing. The root connects to:

phos / light — that which is revealed, shown, made luminous

phantasm — a vision, apparition, or image formed in the mind

This is not a malfunction. It is not a compensation for some other deficit. It is an ancient faculty and a capacity for inner vision so vivid it becomes its own reality. Artists have always known it. Mystics have described it for millennia. Now neuroscience is beginning to map it, and what it is finding is this: the brains that generate the richest inner worlds are also the brains that have historically driven the outer world forward.

I call this having a brain wired for magic.

Magic is not the violation of natural law. It is the perception of natural law that others cannot yet see.

The Great Awakening

There is an epidemic in our society at the moment…or rather, a comeback.

A rising tide of people are waking up to the realisation that their psychology simply does not fit the structures that mainstream society has curated for them. The 9-to-5 job. Traditional schooling. The relentless expectation that a good mind is a mind that sits still, processes one thing at a time, follows the schedule, and produces output in the form the system recognises.

Diagnoses of ADHD, autism, sensory processing differences, and related conditions are rising sharply across every age group. Some interpret this as crisis and as evidence that something in our environment is breaking us. But there is another reading entirely: that these individuals were always here, in every generation, in every culture and that they are finally being seen.

Not broken. Not new. Just, newly visible.

What has changed now is the world’s narrowing tolerance for minds that don’t compress neatly into the industrial template of productivity. The template that says: sit still, be quiet, follow instructions, produce measurable output between the hours of nine and five.

That template was never designed for the full range of human cognition. It was designed for a very specific kind of task, in a very specific historical moment and that moment is ending.

The minds that could never fit the container are the minds that will build the next one.

What the World Calls a Disorder

There is something that has been called a problem for a very long time. It has been labeled, medicated, accommodated, and apologised for. It has been described in clinical language as a deficit; as a lack of attention, a failure of focus, a glitch in the architecture of the mind.

But what if we have been reading the map upside down?

What if the brains we have been calling disordered are not broken versions of ordinary minds, but something else entirely? Not failed attempts at linearity, but successful expressions of something far older, far stranger, and far more powerful?

What if neurodivergent brains are wired not for the clockwork world we built in the last few centuries, but for the deeper, wilder fabric of reality itself?

You were never bad at living in the world. You were built for a different kind of world entirely.

The Tyranny of Linear Time

The modern world runs on a single, shared agreement: that time moves in one direction, that cause precedes effect, that a good mind is one that can sit still and process inputs in the order they arrive. School taught us this. Work demands it. The calendar enforces it.

But the human brain did not evolve for spreadsheets. It evolved for the forest, the dream, the sudden recognition of pattern across vast distances of experience. For most of human history, the ability to hold multiple streams of information simultaneously; to notice the snake and the berries and the weather and the story from three summers ago, was not a disorder. It was survival. It was wisdom.

Linear time is a useful fiction. A very useful one. But it is a fiction nonetheless. Physicists will tell you: time is far stranger than our calendars suggest. It bends. It dilates. At its deepest level it is less like a river and more like an ocean.

Some brains never entirely bought the fiction. They kept one foot in the ocean.

ADHD: The Gift of Simultaneous Worlds

To have ADHD is to be told, from a young age, that your mind is broken. That it won’t do what minds are supposed to do. That you cannot pay attention.

But that is not true.

The ADHD mind does not fail to pay attention. It pays attention to everything, simultaneously, passionately, without the filter that tells most people what is and isn’t worth noticing. It is a mind that can be pulled by beauty, danger, curiosity, and connection all at once. A mind that makes unexpected leaps between ideas that seem unrelated, and finds the hidden thread.

Think of the child in the corner illustrating books while the lesson continues around her. She is not absent. She is present to something else: something interior, generative, alive. She is building worlds. The fact that those worlds don’t appear on the test does not mean they are less real, or less valuable. It means the test was measuring the wrong thing.

That hyperfocus state: that tunnel of light where hours vanish and the work pours through you like you’re not even the one doing it, is not a malfunction. It is what it looks like when a consciousness aligns with what it was made for. Athletes call it flow. Mystics call it presence. The ADHD brain reaches it, not rarely, but often, whenever it finds the thing it was built to find.

It is not a mind that fails to track time. It is a mind that sometimes slips outside of it.

In emergency situations, when linear thinkers are still processing the first variable, the ADHD mind has already intuited the whole landscape. The ADHD brain was built for the hunt, the crisis, the all-night creative fire. It was not built for the 9-to-5. But let’s be honest: neither was the human soul.

Hyperfocus is not a glitch. It is a portal.

Autism: The Gift of Unfiltered Reality

The neurotypical brain is, at its core, a prediction machine. It constantly filters raw sensory input through layers of expectation, convention, and social script, telling you what you’re probably seeing, what this person probably means, what this situation probably requires. It is efficient. It is adaptive. And it smooths over an enormous amount of raw truth.

The autistic brain often does not do this smoothing. It receives the world as it is: at full volume, full color, full complexity. Every texture, every tone, every micro-expression, every flicker of light. The world arrives whole, unmediated, without the social filter deciding what’s worth registering.

This is genuinely painful in a world designed for filtered experience. The cost of existing in spaces built for a different kind of nervous system is real, and it must not be romanticised. But the capacity itself, to see the world without the agreed-upon simplifications, is not a deficit. It is precision. It is truth-seeking at a level most minds cannot sustain.

The autistic capacity for deep pattern recognition, for noticing what everyone else has agreed to overlook, for the relentless and passionate pursuit of a single domain of truth; well, these are the gifts of a mind that refused to accept the simplified version of reality that the rest of us settled for.

To see the world without the filter is to see it more truly. That is not a disability. That is a superpower with a high operating cost; and the cost is largely paid to a world that wasn’t designed for you.

Perhaps, in a different world, or at a different moment in history, the unfiltered mind is not the one that struggles. It is the one that leads.

Synesthesia: The Gift of Crossed Worlds

For those who experience synesthesia, numbers have colors. Music has texture. Words taste like something. Tuesday is, unmistakably, teal.

To the linear mind, this sounds like confusion: wires crossed, signals mixed. But consider what is actually happening: the hard separations that most brains enforce between sensory domains simply do not exist for these minds. They experience reality as more interconnected, more interwoven, more unified than the categorised version the rest of us inhabit.

What we call synesthesia, other traditions have called something closer to mystical perception. The Sufi poets, the Romantic visionaries, the shamanic traditions across cultures all describe a world in which everything is in relationship with everything else: where sound and color and meaning and spirit are not separate domains but different faces of a single reality.

The synesthetic brain is not confused about reality. It may be perceiving a layer of reality that the normalized brain has learned to ignore.

Synesthesia appears at elevated rates among artists, musicians, poets, and writers. Nabokov had it. Tesla had it. Pharrell Williams has it. Wassily Kandinsky painted what he heard. This is not coincidence. When your brain maps the world in multiple simultaneous registers, you see connections others miss, and you make art that carries multiple frequencies at once. You are, in some sense, living in a higher-dimensional version of the shared world.

To experience one thing as also being another thing: that is not confusion. That is poetry. That is physics. That is how reality actually works at its deepest level; and your brain knew it before the equations did.

The synesthetic brain doesn’t misread reality. It reads more of it.

The Deeper Pattern

Across ADHD, autism, synesthesia, dyslexia, and the full spectrum of neurodivergent experience, a pattern emerges: these are not brains that fail at ordinary perception. They are brains that exceed ordinary perception in specific, often overwhelming ways and struggle to compress that excess into the narrow channel that conventional society has decided is the right size for a mind.

They are brains that leak. That overflow. That refuse to stay inside the lines.

The line, of course, was always arbitrary.

There is a reason that neurodivergent individuals appear at extraordinary rates among visionaries, inventors, artists, mystics, and revolutionaries. Not because suffering breeds creativity… that is a tired and damaging myth. But because the mind that cannot fit the given world is often the one most compelled to imagine, and build, a better one.

The world we have now was not built by people who were perfectly adapted to it. It was built by people who saw it wrong; or rather, who saw through it, to something it could become.

We are at a hinge moment in human history. The problems that face us now: ecological, social, technological, spiritual, are not going to be solved by incremental, linear thinking. They require the pattern-seers. The multi-threaded minds. The ones who refused, at some deep level, to accept the simplified version of reality.

They require the brains that are wired for magic.

A Letter to the Magic-Wired Mind

If you have spent your life being told your brain is a problem to be managed, then this is for you.

The world was not designed for you. That is true. The school calendar, the open-plan office, the 45-minute attention span, the social script, the linear narrative: none of it was built with your mind in mind. You have spent enormous energy translating yourself into a language that was never yours.

But here is what is also true:

You have always seen things others didn’t see. You have made connections that seemed obvious to you and baffling to everyone else. You have felt the room before you entered it. You have disappeared for hours into a problem and emerged with something that didn’t exist before. You have loved things with an intensity that other people find hard to understand. You have suffered more sharply, and also been moved more deeply. You have been, your whole life, slightly too much for a world calibrated for a particular, narrow definition of ordinary.

You are not too much. The container was too small.

The comeback that is happening right now: the rising tide of people recognising themselves in these words….this is not a crisis. It is a correction. It is the moment when enough people have gathered to say: the map we were given was wrong, and we have been carrying a better one all along.

You were never broken.

You were always wired for something larger.

And the world is finally catching up.

✦

You were never broken. You were always wired for something larger.

This is a long read and intentionally so. The first half traces the history of income tax from its quiet 1913 origins in America through its global spread, and makes the case that the chronic financial stress most of us carry is not a personal failing but a structural one, embedded in the design of the modern economy.

The second half gets personal: as an Australian entrepreneur and founder of five companies, I share what eight years of serious study into this space has taught me — including the legal structures I use, how I redirect money away from the ATO and toward causes I actually believe in, and the resources and mindset shifts that made the biggest difference. If you’ve ever felt like the system was working against you, this article is for you.

Stress is everywhere. Nearly 77% of Americans regularly experience physical symptoms caused by stress, and financial pressure consistently ranks as the number one cause. In Australia, the picture is almost identical, with surveys consistently show money as the leading source of anxiety for Australian households, cutting across income levels and demographics.

We treat this as a modern condition, a byproduct of busy lives and too many screens. But what if it runs deeper than that? What if the very structure of our economies, built piece by piece over the past century, was quietly engineered in a way that made chronic financial anxiety almost inevitable?

To understand where we are, we need to go back to where it started: to 1913, the year America fundamentally changed its relationship with money and government, and set in motion a model that would eventually circle the globe.

Before the Tax Man: Life in a Free Economy

For most of American history, there was no federal income tax. A worker in 1900 kept every dollar they earned. The federal government funded itself almost entirely through tariffs on imported goods and excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco. Federal spending was tiny: roughly $500 million per year, compared to over $6 trillion today.

Because taces came from imported goods, which funded everything, this meant that imported products were exepnsive and this heavily protected American manufacturers, a very different economic philosophy from today.

But this wasn’t a perfect world. The Gilded Age was marked by brutal inequality, dangerous working conditions, and virtually no safety net. If you got sick, lost your job, or grew old without savings, you were largely on your own.

But there was something in that era that we’ve quietly lost: a direct and unmediated relationship between effort and reward. You worked, you earned, you decided what to do with what you made. The government was largely absent from that transaction. For better and worse, your economic life was your own.

1913: The Year Everything Changed

On February 3, 1913, the 16th Amendment was ratified, giving Congress the power to levy a federal income tax. The Revenue Act that followed set the initial rate at just 1%, with a top surtax of 6% for the very wealthy. Only about 3% of the population even earned enough to owe anything. It seemed modest, almost inconsequential.

It wasn’t. What was really being ratified wasn’t just a tax rate, it was a principle: that the government had a legitimate, permanent claim on a portion of your income, at whatever rate it deemed necessary. The 1% was a foot in the door.

By 1918, with World War I raging, the top rate had exploded to 77%. It fell briefly in the prosperous 1920s, then surged again during the Great Depression and World War II, hitting an almost incomprehensible 94% at the top bracket in 1944. The idea that income taxation would remain modest had evaporated within a single generation.

The Blueprint Then Went Global

What happened in America did not stay in America. The income tax model spread rapidly across the developed world through the 20th century, accelerated by two World Wars that left governments everywhere desperately in need of revenue and with freshly proven mechanisms to collect it.

Britain had actually introduced a modern income tax earlier, temporarily during the Napoleonic Wars and then permanently from 1842, making it one of the earliest adopters. Canada introduced federal income tax in 1917, again justified as a temporary wartime measure. New Zealand followed a similar trajectory. Germany, France, Japan and one by one, the world’s major economies adopted the same fundamental model: the state as a silent, permanent partner in every citizen’s earnings.

What made this spread so consequential was not just the taxation itself, but the accompanying infrastructure. Withholding systems. Filing requirements. Tax agencies with investigative powers. Penalties for non-compliance. Each country built its own version of the apparatus, but the core architecture was the same, and so were the psychological consequences for ordinary citizens living inside it.

By the second half of the 20th century, the income tax was no longer an American innovation or a wartime emergency measure. It had become the default assumption of modern governance worldwide. To question it was to question something that felt as natural as gravity.

Australia’s Own Story

Australia’s relationship with income tax has its own distinct and revealing history. The Commonwealth introduced a federal income tax in 1915, two years into World War I, following the same wartime logic that drove adoption elsewhere. Like its counterparts, it was initially modest and targeted at higher earners. But like America, it did not stay that way.

What makes Australia’s story particularly interesting is what came before. The colonies and early Commonwealth relied heavily on land taxes, customs duties, and tariffs. There was a genuine philosophical tradition, especially among liberals and agrarian reformers, that land and resource wealth, rather than labour income, should bear the primary tax burden. Henry George’s ideas about land value taxation had real currency in Australian political thought in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

That tradition was progressively eclipsed. By the 1940s, the Curtin Labor government centralised income tax collection at the federal level, which was a wartime consolidation of power that was never reversed. States, which had previously levied their own income taxes, were effectively bought out and left dependent on Commonwealth grants. The federal government became the dominant taxing authority, and income tax its primary instrument.

Today, Australia runs one of the more heavily managed tax systems in the developed world. The top marginal income tax rate sits at 47% (including the Medicare levy). The GST adds 10% to most purchases. There are capital gains taxes, stamp duties, council rates, payroll taxes paid by employers, and superannuation, a compulsory savings system that, while genuinely beneficial for retirement, represents yet another mandatory allocation of income that workers never directly control.

The ATO (Australian Taxation Office) administers one of the most comprehensive tax collection systems on earth. Australians are required to lodge annual tax returns, and the penalties for errors, even unintentional ones, can be significant. For small business owners and the self-employed, the compliance burden is especially heavy: time, fees for accountants, and the persistent low-grade anxiety of navigating a system that most people don’t fully understand.

The Managed Economy and the Managed Mind

Whether you live in Atlanta or Adelaide, the experience of modern financial life has a common texture: complexity, obligation, and a pervasive sense that you are never quite in control of your own earnings.

This is not accidental. The infrastructure of the managed economy- income taxes, payroll taxes, consumption taxes, compliance requirements, creates a permanent cognitive load. You are always calculating. Always aware that a portion of everything you earn, spend, save, and invest is subject to rules you didn’t write and may not fully understand.

The US tax code runs to over 70,000 pages. Australia’s tax legislation, while shorter, is among the longest and most complex in the world relative to population. The average Australian spends significant time and money each year on tax compliance, and that’s before accounting for the mental overhead that runs year-round.

Psychologists call this kind of persistent, low-level uncertainty a chronic stressor. Unlike acute stress, which spikes and resolves, chronic stress grinds. It elevates cortisol, disrupts sleep, suppresses the immune system, raises blood pressure, and over time contributes to serious health outcomes including cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, and depression.

What Financial Stress Actually Does to the Body

The medical research on financial stress is stark. Chronically elevated cortisol, the body’s primary stress hormone, is associated with a long list of serious health outcomes. Heart disease. Type 2 diabetes. Obesity. Anxiety disorders. Autoimmune conditions. These are not edge cases. These are the leading causes of death and disability in both Australia and the United States.

The APA has documented for years that money is the leading source of stress for Americans across income levels. The Australian Psychological Society’s annual Stress and Wellbeing surveys have shown remarkably similar patterns on the other side of the Pacific. The specifics differ— Australians worry about housing costs and cost of living particularly acutely — but the underlying structure of financial anxiety is near-identical.

What makes this especially significant is that the stress is not proportional to income in the way we might expect. Middle-class and upper-middle-class households, people who are, by any historical standard, materially comfortable, report persistent financial anxiety. The culprit isn’t poverty. It’s complexity, obligation, and the feeling of never being fully free of the system’s demands.

The Slow Boil

No single moment caused this. That’s what makes it so hard to see. The shift from a free economy to a managed one happened gradually, incrementally, often with genuinely good intentions behind each individual step. Each new program, each new tax, each new regulation made a kind of sense in isolation. Together, they created something no one quite chose: a system that consumes an extraordinary share of individual economic life and imposes a permanent psychological cost.

In Australia, the average worker today pays income tax, Medicare levy, and has 11.5% of their wage directed into superannuation before they make a single personal financial decision. Then GST on most purchases, stamp duty on property, and various state-level levies. The total tax burden as a share of GDP in Australia sits around 29-30%, lower than some European nations but substantially higher than the 20th century average, and far higher than anything the founders of the Commonwealth would have recognised.

We have become so accustomed to this reality that we rarely question it. Financial stress feels personal, and we often feel a sense of failure of budgeting, discipline, or earning enough. But when stress is this widespread and this consistent across income levels and two very different countries, it stops being a personal failing and starts looking like a structural feature.

This Isn’t About Left or Right

It’s worth being clear about what this argument is and isn’t. This is not a case for eliminating government or dismantling the social safety net. Roads, schools, healthcare access, Medicare, the NDIS, these have genuine value. Societies with no public investment do not automatically produce happy, healthy citizens. Scandinavia, with some of the world’s highest tax rates, also produces some of the world’s highest wellbeing scores.

But Scandinavia is instructive precisely because it shows that it’s not just the level of taxation that matters and where my critique comes from, it’s the simplicity, transparency, and perceived fairness of the system. Danish citizens, for example, pay high taxes but experience relatively low tax-related stress because the system is simple, trusted, and seen as delivering visible value. The complexity, opacity, and adversarial character of the Anglo-American tax model is a design choice, not an inevitability.

What this is a case for is honest reckoning. The growth of the managed economy was not free. It had cost: not just financial costs, but psychological and physiological ones that almost never appear on the ledger. We measure the benefits of government programs carefully. We almost never measure the cumulative stress burden of the system that funds them.

The Questions Worth Asking

A century after the income tax was born as a modest 1% levy in America, it has circled the globe and embedded itself in the fabric of daily life from Sydney to San Francisco. Whatever its merits, it has also produced populations that are, by many measures, chronically financially stressed and physiologically worse off for it.

What would it feel like to live in an economy where your relationship with money was simple? Where the rules were short enough to understand without a specialist, where planning for the future didn’t require navigating a system designed by thousands of legislators and lobbyists over more than a century?

We can debate tax rates and government spending endlessly. But perhaps the more important conversation is about what we’ve normalised. Stress at this scale and persistent, financial, structural, and global is not an inevitable feature of modern life. It is a consequence of choices made, mostly during wartime emergencies, that were never revisited when the emergencies ended.

The first step is simply noticing that what feels personal almost never is.

What I’m Personally Doing About It

A note from Sigourney Belle — Australian entrepreneur, health and wellness educator, and founder of five companies

I have spent the better part of eight years studying this. When I started building businesses in Australia, I did what most entrepreneurs do: I handed my financials to an accountant, trusted the system, and paid whatever I was told I owed. It took years of accumulated frustration, and a growing sense that something fundamental was wrong, before I started asking harder questions.

What I found changed everything. The tax system, as most people experience it, is not the only tax system available to you. It is simply the default, ie. the path of least resistance for those who never learn there are alternatives. The system is complex by design, and that complexity works in favour of those who understand it and against those who don’t.

I want to be clear: everything I am about to share is legal. This is not about evasion. It is about education: the kind most accountants won’t proactively give you, because most accountants are trained in compliance, not strategy. There is a profound difference between the two, and learning that difference has been one of the most valuable things I have ever done.

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If the United States, or the West more broadly, was genuinely motivated by a commitment to human rights when it targets regimes like Iran, why does that same moral urgency evaporate the moment you point the lens somewhere less convenient?

Let’s be direct about what’s actually happening.

The Humanitarian Justification Has Always Been a Costume

When Western governments build a case for military action, sanctions, or regime destabilisation, the language of human rights is never far behind. Women’s oppression. Brutal crackdowns. Authoritarian control.

Whilst these are real for those living inside of its brutality, it is not why the US and Israel are interested in Iran.

The selective application of outrage reveals that the suffering itself is not the point, it is the justification.

Iran gets the full treatment: sanctions, covert operations, and open calls for regime change, with women’s rights cited prominently in the case.

Saudi Arabia, which forbade women from driving until 2018, still operates a male guardianship system, and executed 196 people in 2022 alone, receives arms deals, diplomatic protection, and state visits.

The difference isn’t the human rights record. The difference is oil, regional alliances, and strategic positioning.

If the moral case were real, it would be consistent. It isn’t. And that inconsistency isn’t a bug in the foreign policy machine, it’s the feature.

The Problem Closer to Home

Here’s where the argument becomes even harder to ignore.

The United States has a well-documented, deeply institutional problem with child exploitation, trafficking, and the protection of powerful abusers. Jeffrey Epstein didn’t operate in a vacuum— he operated within a network of powerful people, many of whom have faced no legal consequence. With the new release of files which include Trump, we can now also assume his involvement, too (although it was screamingly obvious).

Institutional child abuse within the Catholic Church took decades of pressure before any serious reckoning. Trafficking networks operate with relative impunity in cities across America.

If the US was so concerned about abuse of women and the innocent, they would be addressing this issue in their own home territory first.

If the political will existed to confront abuse and exploitation with the same force and funding directed at foreign adversaries, it would look very different.

What This Reveals About Power

This isn’t a simple left vs. right argument. Governments across the political spectrum engage in this behaviour. It is a structural feature of how powerful nations operate:

- Moral language is a tool of legitimacy, not a genuine constraint on action.

- Intervention happens where there is strategic interest, and humanitarianism provides the PR cover.

- Domestic failures are deprioritised when foreign threats offer more political capital.

This doesn’t mean every instance of foreign pressure is cynical, or that no good ever comes from it. It means we should be deeply sceptical any time a government claims it is acting primarily out of moral concern , especially when that concern is applied so unevenly.

The Ask

Stop accepting the humanitarian framing at face value.

Ask who benefits. Ask what’s not being said. Ask why this regime and not that one. Ask why the urgency overseas never seems to generate the same urgency at home.

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Internalised misogyny is the process by which women absorb and reproduce the misogynistic values of the societies that produced them. It is not necessarily an individual character flaw or personality quality, but rather, the predictable output of a system that teaches women, from birth, that their worth is conditional, that male approval is paramount, and that other women are rivals, threats, or objects. When these lessons are absorbed deeply enough, some women do not simply participate in patriarchal structures: they become their enforcers.

This essay examines the psychological architecture of internalised misogyny and traces its consequences through three historical and contemporary case studies: the complicity of women in the Salem witch trials of 1692, the enabling role played by women in Harvey Weinstein’s Hollywood abuse network, and the most forensically documented case of female complicity in modern sexual exploitation: that of Ghislaine Maxwell.

Taken together, these cases illuminate a pattern that is neither aberrant nor inexplicable, but the logical, if devastating, consequence of systems that reward women for policing one another.

I. The Psychology of Internalised Misogyny

The term internalised misogyny was theorised and expanded upon within second-wave

feminist scholarship, drawing on earlier psychoanalytic concepts of identification with

the aggressor.

The mechanism is broadly consistent: when a group is subjected to sustained subordination, members of that group may come to identify with the values and perspectives of those who dominate them. This identification can manifest as contempt for fellow group members, as a disavowal of shared identity, or as active participation in the structures of one’s own oppression.

Sandra Bartky, writing in Femininity and Domination (1990), described this process as a form of psychological colonisation- that the internalisation not merely of behaviours but of the evaluative gaze itself.

The woman who has internalised misogyny does not simply experience sexism from outside; she replicates it from within, measuring herself and other women against the standards of a patriarchal world and finding them, finding herself, perpetually wanting.

The clinical literature on trauma bonding and coercive control adds a further dimension. Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery (1992) demonstrated that prolonged exposure to coercive systems — whether domestic, institutional, or systemic—can produce profound alterations in identity, loyalty, and moral perception.

Survivors of such systems may identify with their abusers, enforce the rules of abusive environments upon others, and experience genuine cognitive dissonance when confronted with evidence of that environment’s harm.

This is a sophisticated adaptation of a mind under sustained duress.

Crucially, these dynamics are amplified by the material conditions of patriarchy.

Women who are economically dependent, socially isolated, or whose status derives entirely from proximity to powerful men have concrete incentives, beyond psychological compulsion, to protect those men and the systems they operate within.

Complicity, in this light, is rarely simple: it is frequently rational self- preservation within a system designed to make female independence costly.

II. Salem, 1692: Women Accusing Women

The Salem witch trials are typically narrated as a story about mass hysteria, Puritan theology, or the persecution of women by men. What this framing obscures is that women were among the most active accusers. Of the approximately 185 individuals accused of witchcraft in the Salem episode, a significant proportion were accused by other women- most notably by the group of young women whose testimony initiated the crisis.

The social structure of Puritan New England was one of the most rigidly patriarchal in the colonial world. Women had no formal legal personhood, no right to own property independently of their husbands, and no access to civic or religious authority. Their social capital was almost entirely relational, contingent on their reputations for piety, submission, and domestic virtue.

In this environment, accusation functioned as one of the few instruments of social power available to women.

Carol Karlsen’s foundational study The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (1987) demonstrated that the women most frequently accused of witchcraft in New England were those who disrupted normative patriarchal inheritance patterns — women who had inherited or stood to inherit property in the absence of male heirs, women who were economically independent, women whose behaviour deviated from prescribed female roles.

The accusers, by contrast, tended to be women whose social positions were more precarious and whose conformity to patriarchal norms was, in a sense, being rewarded by the act of accusation itself.

This does not require us to impute cynical motive to every accuser, many of whom were themselves traumatised, young, and operating within a theological framework in which they may have genuinely believed. What it does reveal is a structural logic: patriarchal systems create conditions in which women are incentivised to police one another, to identify threats to the normative order in other women, and to enact punishment upon those who deviate.

The witch trial is, in this reading, not an anomaly but an extreme expression of a dynamic that operates at lower intensities across patriarchal cultures in every era.

The women of Salem did not act in simple solidarity with male authority. Many were driven by genuine fear, by interpersonal grievance, by theological conviction, and by the experience of their own powerlessness. But the form their agency took, ie. accusation of other women as threats to the community, was shaped entirely by the patriarchal framework within which they existed. They weaponised the one instrument available to them, and they directed it, as the system invited them to, against women who had stepped outside its prescribed boundaries.

III. Hollywood and the Weinstein Network: The Female Enabler

When the New York Times and The New Yorker published their investigations into Harvey Weinstein in October 2017, the immediate cultural reckoning focused understandably, on the scale of male abuse of power in the entertainment industry.

Less scrutinised, but no less significant, was the question of the women who had operated as intermediaries, gatekeepers, and facilitators within the system that made that abuse possible.

The accounts that emerged from Weinstein survivors repeatedly described encounters in which women — assistants, executives, and agents — had played active roles in arranging meetings, dismissing complaints, and in some instances accompanying victims to the situations in which they were abused.

These were not women acting in ignorance. Many, according to testimony, were aware of Weinstein’s conduct or had directly witnessed it. Their participation was, in various degrees, knowing.

Understanding this requires grappling with the specific economics of Hollywood as a patriarchal institution. The entertainment industry has historically been an environment in which women’s careers are almost entirely contingent on male approval, in which professional advancement depends on proximity to powerful men, and in which the cost of resistance or disclosure is career termination.

In this environment, female complicity is not simply a psychological phenomenon: it is an occupational strategy, shaped by a system that punishes loyalty to other women and rewards loyalty to powerful men.

Several Weinstein survivors described how female assistants had been deployed as a form of social lubricant, ie. their presence at meetings providing a false sense of safety, their professional demeanour legitimising contexts that were in fact predatory.

This weaponisation of women’s perceived trustworthiness is itself an expression of misogynistic logic: women were used to lower other women’s defences precisely because their gender was assumed to signal safety.

The broader Hollywood ecosystem also sustained what might be described as an economy of female self-policing. Reporting on Weinstein’s behaviour was, for decades, professionally lethal for women. Those who remained silent, and those who actively assisted in maintaining silence, did so within a system that had made the alternative — speaking out, departing, refusing — economically catastrophic.

The moral analysis must account for the coercion embedded in the structure. Complicity is not the same as equivalence of culpability.

Yet the question of where the threshold of complicity becomes moral responsibility is not one that feminist analysis can avoid. The women who facilitated Weinstein’s access to victims, whatever the pressures they faced, contributed to the harm of other women.

Feminist solidarity was, in these instances, sacrificed to individual survival within a patriarchal system. Understanding the systemic pressures does not require us to absolve individual action. It requires us to identify the system that generated the conditions for that action and to hold both simultaneously in view.

IV. Ghislaine Maxwell: Complicity as Architecture

If the Weinstein case represents complicity as occupational adaptation, the case of Ghislaine Maxwell represents something more systematic: complicity as deliberate construction.

Maxwell, the British socialite convicted in December 2021 of sex trafficking and related offences in connection with the Jeffrey Epstein abuse network, was not a bystander who failed to act.

She was, according to the trial record and survivor testimony, a central architect of a system designed to recruit, groom, and sexually exploit girls and young women.

What makes Maxwell’s case analytically significant is not its extremity (though the

scale and severity of the harm she facilitated were extreme) but the ways in which her gender was instrumentalised within the structure of the abuse.

Survivor testimonies consistently described Maxwell’s role as that of the “safe” adult woman: it was she who initially befriended victims, who normalised the sexual nature of interactions with Epstein, who framed exploitation as education or opportunity, and whose female presence was used to neutralise the alarm that a lone older man might have triggered.

Maxwell grew up in an environment in which female worth was subordinated entirely to male power. Her father, Robert Maxwell, was a domineering and abusive patriarch whose attention and approval were the determining currency of family life.

Psychological analysis cannot be applied retrospectively with certainty, but the pattern that her adult behaviour represents — the seeking of male approval, the subordination of other women to that project, the deployment of her own femininity as an instrument of male power — is consistent with the operation of deep internalised misogyny in an individual who had learned, at formative depth, that women’s interests were expendable to men’s.

Maxwell’s own defence, both legally and in her post-conviction interview with journalist Jeremy Vine, was essentially one of non-recognition: she refused to acknowledge the harm of the conduct, referred to victims in dismissive terms, and framed her own actions as peripheral or innocent. This refusal of recognition is itself psychologically diagnostic.

One of the most consistent features of deeply internalised misogyny is the incapacity, or unwillingness, to recognise other women’s suffering as real and as mattering. The logic that women’s pain is less significant, their testimony less credible, their experience less worthy of protection is, at the extreme, a logic that permits the active facilitation of that pain.

The Maxwell case also forces a reckoning with the question of class and power. Maxwell was not a woman in a precarious position acting under duress. She was wealthy, educated, and possessed of considerable independent social standing. This removes some of the mitigating structural pressures that complicate analysis in cases like those of Weinstein’s lower-level female employees. Her complicity was not survival under coercion, or not primarily so. It was the exercise of power against women with less of it, in service of a man with more.

This is perhaps the purest expression of internalised misogyny at the extreme: the identification with patriarchal power so complete that other women become, in effect, a resource to be exploited.

V. Towards a Critical Framework

What can be extracted from these three cases, separated by centuries and cultures, is a consistent structural logic. Patriarchal systems do not merely oppress women, but rather, they create conditions in which women oppress one another.

They do so by making female status contingent on male approval, by incentivising the policing of female deviance, by punishing solidarity and rewarding complicity, and by teaching women that their own interests are best served by the interests of powerful men.

Internalised misogyny is not a defect of individual women. It is the predictable output of systems that have spent millennia teaching women to devalue themselves and one another. The women who acted as Epstein’s recruiters, who testified against their neighbours in Salem, who kept secrets in Weinstein’s corridors were not uniquely morally deficient. They were, in various degrees and under various pressures, enacting lessons that their societies had comprehensively taught them.

This analysis does not require us to abandon moral judgement. Maxwell committed crimes. Women who facilitated Weinstein’s abuse bear moral responsibility for the harm they enabled. The accusers of Salem sent innocent people to their deaths. The fact that these women operated within systems that shaped and incentivised their behaviour does not dissolve individual accountability… particularly where, as with Maxwell, that behaviour was sustained, deliberate, and unconstrained by economic necessity.

What it does require is that we expand our analysis beyond individual pathology to systemic architecture. If we wish to understand why women are sometimes complicit in the abuse of other women, we must examine the systems that make such complicity rational, rewarding, or psychologically necessary.

And if we wish to prevent it, we must dismantle those systems, not merely condemn the women they produce.

The feminist project has always understood that patriarchy harms women. The harder understanding — and the more complete one — is that patriarchy also works through women, that it enlists them as its instruments, and that the violence it perpetuates is sometimes delivered by female hands. Confronting this is not a concession to misogyny.

It is the fullest possible accounting of its damage.

References include:

Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination (1990); Judith

Herman, Trauma and Recovery (1992); Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a

Woman (1987); trial testimony from United States v. Maxwell (2021); and

investigative reporting from The New York Times and The New Yorker (2017).

I’ve been sitting with this email for a week or two, trying to find the right words. Not because I don’t have thoughts (actually, I have too many) but because I also know this community. I know how much Chopra’s work has meant to people. I know how disorienting it is when someone whose words held you together during your worst moments turns out to be someone different behind closed doors.

But what has been unfolding recently isn’t just one man failing in a single isolated moment. It was a masterclass in how the tools of our own tradition get weaponised against us, and how we have to be able to name that if we’re ever going to build something different.

What Chopra Did (The Short Version)

When the DOJ released over three million pages of Epstein files in January 2026, Deepak Chopra’s name appeared 3,466 times. What followed wasn’t peripheral association. The emails showed a warm, financially entangled friendship, maintained for years even after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Chopra told Epstein he was “deeply grateful for our friendship.” He signed messages with “Love” and “XO.” He invited Epstein to bring “your girls” on trips. He wrote, “God is a construct. Cute girls are real.” When an assault accuser dropped her civil case against Epstein, Chopra’s response was a single word: “Good.”

His initial public statement on X, with comments disabled, acknowledged only “poor judgment in tone.” No naming of what he actually did. No acknowledgment of the girls. No accountability to the community that had trusted him with their grief and their seeking.

And then he sent this email to his list.

The Email. Uninterrupted. Read It First.

As reported by Dr. Lissa Rankin, who received it from a colleague:

“Dear Friends,

I want to take a moment to speak to you directly. I know this has been a difficult and unsettling time for some in our community.

As long as I’m able to, it remains my intention to continue sharing practices and perspectives on Body, Mind, and Spirit, and to be present with this community as we move through this moment together. This is a process that continues to support me personally, and it is my hope that what is meaningful for me may also be supportive for you.

A Reflection: Integrating the Shadow

In times of change, many of us find ourselves reflecting more deeply on our inner world and emotional patterns. One of the most important aspects of personal growth is learning to recognize and integrate the parts of ourselves we may have previously overlooked or pushed aside.

In this short reflection, I explore the idea of the “shadow” in a universal and practical way, and how bringing awareness to these hidden aspects of ourselves can support greater clarity, wholeness, and healing. [links to video]

Healing Fear and Anxiety

In our troubled times, a prevailing mood of angst needs to be healed, and the first step is to learn how to deal with anxiety rather than succumb to it or engage in a fruitless struggle that never seems to resolve itself. To begin, fear and anxiety normally don’t announce themselves with trumpets and drums. They slip quietly into everyday life, disguised as “being realistic,” “staying informed,” or “just preparing for the worst.” Before you know it, you are rehearsing disasters that never arrive and reliving hurts that no longer exist except in memory. In a world addicted to threat, we have mistaken tension for wisdom and constant worry as a sign of love. Yet beneath this collective spell lies a simple but radical truth: Fear is not your nature, and it is not your destiny.”

As Lissa Rankin wrote when she shared this:

“That’s it? Really, Deepak?”

Not a word naming the elephant in the room. Not a single sentence that begins with “I did” rather than “we feel.”

Here’s what he actually did...

The Architecture of the Evasion

The Subject Line Does the Work Before You Even Open It - “Integrating the Shadow.”

Not my shadow. The shadow. Universal. Collective. Shared by all of us who have unexamined parts and hidden impulses. Before a single word of the body text, he has already dissolved individual accountability into a generalised human condition. You can’t hold a we accountable. That’s the whole point.

This is spiritual bypassing at its most refined - and it’s not the clumsy kind, where someone says “everything happens for a reason” over someone’s fresh grief, but the sophisticated kind, where the framework of inner work is deployed precisely to prevent outer reckoning.

“Our community” / “we” / “us” - The Grammar of Dissolution

Read the email again and count the first-person plurals. He writes to “our community,” moving “through this moment together.” Shadow work is something “many of us” are now doing. Fear and anxiety are a “collective spell” in a “prevailing mood” The specific man who wrote “Good” when a teenager dropped her assault case has been grammatically absorbed into the universal human experience of struggle.

He doesn’t say I need to integrate my shadow. He says many of us are reflecting on the parts of ourselves we’ve overlooked. You, reading this, are invited to join him in that reflection: to see yourself in it, which means you’re no longer just his audience. You’re his co-traveler. His equal on the path. Which makes it harder to ask him to account for something you’ve mutually agreed is just part of being human.

The Pivot to Anxiety Is Not Pastoral Care - It’s Intentional Misdirection

The section on fear and anxiety is elegantly placed. It reads as compassionate. It offers something real: that the lived feeling of dread that many of us carry right now. Naming that anxiety is real and his words about it are not wrong.

But notice what it does: it redirects the source of the anxiety. You arrived at this email unsettled by what Chopra did. By the end of the email, anxiety is the problem - and, apparently, he is the solution. Your discomfort, which is about him, has been reframed as a collective wound he can help heal “for you”. He is simultaneously the arsonist and the fire department.

Lissa Rankin named this precisely: this could have been a moment to sit with the discomfort of having done something hurtful, to use parts language to speak for his ashamed parts, to at minimum admit to the firefighter parts that liked having proximity to young girls and to Epstein’s world. Instead, he offered a video about anxiety.

“This is a process that continues to support me personally”

This line is where the audacity peaks. He is telling his followers that the shadow work content he’s linking to - the product - is also supporting him right now. He is inviting them into his (supposed) healing. The people who are hurt and confused by his choices are being asked to extend compassion toward him as a fellow wounded human being on the path.

This is the teacher making himself the patient. It is a structural inversion that, in a healthy community, would be immediately named. In a community built on devotion to the teacher’s wisdom, it lands as vulnerability. As humanness. As courage, even.

He Diagnosed Himself In His Own Book - And Then Did The Opposite

Here is the deepest irony, and it deserves its own paragraph.

In 2010, Chopra co-authored The Shadow Effect with Debbie Ford and Marianne Williamson. In it, he wrote: “Running from the shadow only intensifies its power. Denying it only leads to more pain, suffering, regret, and resignation.”

Dr. Scott Mills, who read approximately 700 documents from the Epstein-Chopra correspondence, and who went into it hoping to find a reason to still believe in the man whose work had held him together during the worst grief of his life, notes that in The Book of Secrets, Chopra identified the exact conditions that release shadow energies: removing a sense of responsibility, the existence of passive bystanders, and a lack of accountability.

Chopra’s email enacts every single one. He removes responsibility by never naming what he did. He relies on passive bystanders, a community conditioned to receive teachings, not to challenge the teacher. He offers zero accountability. And by treating this as business-as-usual newsletter content, he gives permission to everyone in the industry to do the same.

He diagnosed himself in his own book. And then did exactly what his own book says not to do.

This Is What Cult Dynamics Actually Look Like

I want to be careful here, because “cult” carries images most of us don’t recognise ourselves in. We think of compounds, of isolation, of people who lost everything to a charismatic leader. We don’t think of ourselves - thoughtful, discerning practitioners who read widely and think critically.

But cult dynamics aren’t primarily about the dramatic cases. They’re about structures of interpretation, ie. the frameworks that determine how information gets processed within a community. And in the wellness and consciousness space, we have built some of those structures very carefully, without necessarily meaning to.

In a community organised around a teacher’s wisdom, a few things tend to become true over time:

The teacher’s words are received, not interrogated.

When someone has held you during grief, when their framework helped you make sense of your life, when you’ve paid to sit in their presence, then there is a profound pull toward belief. Skepticism feels like ingratitude.

Discomfort is a signal to go inward, not outward.

Our traditions, at their best, teach us to meet discomfort with curiosity rather than reactivity. But this same training can be activated to prevent exactly the kind of outward accountability that discomfort sometimes rightly demands. When Chopra sends an email about integrating shadows, the conditioned response is to look at your own shadows. Not his.

Spiritual concepts become the frame through which everything is processed - including harm.

Shadow, integration, collective healing, oneness - these are real concepts. They also, in the wrong hands, function as an infinite solvent that dissolves specific harm into the universal. If everything is shadow work, nothing is accountability.

The community’s identity is bound up in the teacher’s validity.

This is the one that really hurts to sit with. If Chopra is what the emails suggest- a man who cultivated a warm relationship with a convicted predator, who found proximity to his world pleasurable, who expressed relief when victims backed down, then the decades of teachings, the retreats, the VIP signings, the stages, the moments of genuine comfort those words provided - well, all of it gets complicated. People are not wrong to resist that complication. But that resistance is precisely what he is counting on.

The Silence Is Also a System

Dr. Scott Mills pointed out something that deserves to be said slowly: twenty-one major figures in the personal development and wellness world stayed completely silent after the files dropped. He named them. Tony Robbins. Mel Robbins. Brené Brown. Jay Shetty. Gabby Bernstein. Marianne Williamson, who co-authored The Shadow Effect with Chopra. Eckhart Tolle. Oprah Winfrey. And many others.

Not one public word.

This isn’t just cowardice, though it may also be that.. It’s the logic of an industry built on individual brands rather than collective integrity.

Speaking up is expensive. Silence is free.

And in a space where everyone’s audience overlaps, where everyone’s been on everyone else’s stage, where endorsements and collaborations and shared platforms have created a web of mutual investment, the cost of calling out a peer is very high, and the cost of looking away is very low.

That is a system. And it is the same system that allowed Epstein to operate.

The willingness of people adjacent to power to keep silent, to prioritise access, to choose the comfort of the relationship over the discomfort of what they might know- well, that is what the Epstein files are really about, at every level.

What We Actually Need From Here

Lissa Rankin, who co-taught with Chopra and has been one of the only voices in this space willing to name what she saw, put it plainly: “This could have been such a potent moment to model accountability. To show us how it’s done when we make mistakes. To own up to our humanity, without distraction, displacement, spiritual bypassing, or avoidance.”

She’s right. And she names what that would have looked like: sitting with the discomfort, speaking for the parts of himself that feel shame, acknowledging the girls, and not abstractly, but as the specific human beings whose suffering his silence helped enable.

It is not too late for that. It would be worth more now than it would have been then, because it would have to cost something.

But whether or not Chopra does it, we can use this moment to ask what we want to build going forward.

What it looks like to have a wellness and consciousness community that has horizontal accountability, not just vertical devotion.

What it looks like when a teacher is genuinely wrong and the community has the structures to say so.

What it looks like to hold the real gifts of these traditions while refusing to hand our discernment to any single person who delivers them.

As Dr. Gemma Newman writes: “The most dangerous teachers are those whose philosophy most beautifully excuses their behaviour.”

The eloquence of someone’s public framework tells you very little about who they actually are. Pay attention instead to the small behaviours: how they treat people with no power, how they respond when they’re wrong, whether they can tolerate being challenged.

This is how you develop discernment.

Further reading:

- The Silence: Inside the Chopra-Epstein Files — Dr. Scott Mills (drscottwmills.substack.com)

- Doctors in the Epstein Files; Who Can We Trust Now? — Dr. Gemma Newman (drgemmanewman.substack.com)

- Blowing the Whistle on Deepak Chopra — Dr. Lissa Rankin (lissarankinmd.substack.com)

- Deepak Chopra and the Epstein Reckoning — Stephen Dinan (stephendinan.substack.com)