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JOURNAL


In high school, I wrote a 40-page research paper about how positive thinking is bullshit. This paper centered around the book, Bright-Sided, written by Barbara Ehrenreich.


Ehrenreich began noticing this trend of overly-positive thinking when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Ehrenreich saw a common trend of pushing a positive narrative and being referred to as a “fighter,” “survivor,” and someone whose “life will change after beating this.” She felt guilt for wanting to feel like shit and be angry, something that everyone seemed to be pushing down.


This led to a deep dive into researching the self-help industry and criticizing mainstream ideas, like The Secret, a book on the law of attraction. A key issue Ehrenreich took with the positive mindset movement was that we are pushing the narrative that if we are not happy then we are broken.


Now, I might just be a pessimist, but I have noticed that there is an influx of “manifestation coaches,” claiming that you can create your dream life just by positive thinking and scripting. I also just want to say that I do believe in manifestation; HOWEVER, I do not believe in spiritual bypassing and I believe that we do a huge disservice to the possibilities of re-mything our narrative by saying that the key is to see ourselves happy and we will attract.


The Evolution of the American Dream

Happiness is one of the main six basic emotions of human psychology, something that is fleeting. However, as a society, especially in America, we push this narrative that happiness can be a constant state to be achieved and this idea has been preyed upon by the self-help gurus and the wellness industry.


This is not something new and I don’t believe it only resides in the wellness industries. My theory is that it stems from the byproduct of marketing tactics over the years; most notably, the American Dream.


The American Dream was repurposed over the years, beginning as a representation of the nation’s dream of equality, justice and democracy. This idea eventually transitioned into the American Dream many of us know today. This dream became skewed into this desire for individual wealth and success.

Businesses used this phrase throughout the 1950s as a consumerist ideal to push products to those seeking out this individual wealth and success.


Though this is just a personal theory, I think that as we began to globalize, this phrase turned from the American Dream into the general, “happiness.” Where businesses were advertising products that pushed the American dream narrative, they soon started pushing products to help you create a better version of yourself and “achieve happiness.” If you buy this product or service, you will find love or success and ultimately happiness.


These marketing tactics inadvertently attributed to happiness becoming synonymous with success. Modern consumerism does not function if we all have high self-worth. In order to get you to buy into a brand, the business needs to make you feel like you are missing out if you do not do what they are saying. That you are not worthy until you have that product or achieve that societal milestone.


I don’t think this is fully the result of consumerism; I just believe we should look into trends that have impacted the narrative we are telling ourselves. Ultimately, I think this American Dream and goal of happiness has influenced us to avoid the more uncomfortable emotions.


Happiness or Bust

The more we grew the self-help industry, the more we gravitated towards the idea that happiness was a goal to be achieved and negative emotions were the enemy. With this shift in society, I believe most people began hiding away these emotions in order to feel like they had obtained the American Dream. We as human beings are always looking forward. If I become a lawyer, I will be happy. If I get to the house, I will be happy. If I get married, I will finally be happy.


This created dissonance with many, feeling that if they expressed these negative emotions, then they would not attract those things in life. This became even more prominent with the social media boom and with more and more “gurus” coming out and saying that we are capable of attracting things through positive thought.

We all identify what we believe to be that key point of “happiness,” yet no one really knows what true happiness is. If you look in the dictionary, the definition leaves you even more unsure, stating “happiness is the state of being happy,” and happily stated as “showing pleasure.” Not the most useful definition out there.


We seek out the easiest path. We are lazy creatures by design, so when someone comes to us, saying that we can have our dreams without going through those uncomfortable emotions, we desperately want to believe them. But, there is a reason that the majority of the basic emotions are “negative.” We would not be here today if we did not go through those negative emotions as a species in order to survive.


We hold onto fear and grief more easily than we do joy because we needed to in order to remember where and what we needed to avoid. We would remember certain areas that we knew a tiger was because we were attacked there, or we knew not to eat a certain leaf because we would remember a reaction. Bad emotions create a deeper knowing in ourselves and our environment. The only way to thrive is to fully lean into those emotions and to release them in a healthy and nurturing way.


The Way Out is Through

When we try to avoid uncomfortable emotions, we turn to vices that numb us. Whether we turn to alcohol, media, sex, drugs, we all have coping mechanisms in order to shut down certain emotions. We are taught to suppress and deflect.

This causes us to shut off our emotional channels, which causes stress on the body and discomfort in our energy. Through this avoidance, when emotions finally do come up, our body and energy go into a state of shock, causing us to turn to numb even more.


Disconnection from our emotions and our body also can affect our environment. Everything is the matter, right? So we are all vibrating and different frequencies, and when we shut down our emotional channel, we are either causing our frequency to lower or we are pushing those emotions through to someone whose channel is actually open (hello empaths). We have the power to affect those around us, so in an ideal world, we all would show up for ourselves through our emotions, learn from them, and then grow together. Instead, we have large groups of people blocking off those difficult feelings and causing those that are emotionally sensitive to feel the emotions tenfold.


So we know all this, but how the hell do we fix it?



Connecting to Your Emotions

If you have been numbing or avoiding emotions, then I have listed a few tips for connecting to your body and emotions. I am not a licensed therapist, these are just experiences from my own healing journey as someone that prided themselves on never crying in the past.


Journals Save Lives

Firstly, I just want to say how important it is to get a journal. I started journaling almost every day five years ago, and I credit writing as one of the main sources for my emotional development. When we journal, we free our minds from looping and allow ourselves to dump everything onto paper, decluttering the mind and offering new insight into our emotions.


Observational Indulgence

I have been through multiple rock bottoms in my life. I have experienced situations in my life where I felt I could not get out of, could not find motivation and felt completely lost. One of these rock bottoms involved a traumatic experience that was coupled with grief from my mother being diagnosed with two types of cancer. Instead of acknowledging my emotions and seeking help, I shut down and sought out coping mechanisms to numb myself.


I had adopted an OCD tendency of picking my skin in order to cope and “turn off” to my environment. When I did seek out help, my therapist offered me a technique to start identifying my blocks and what I was hiding from. I do not recommend this if your coping mechanism is harmful to you or others.


I call it observational indulgence. Instead of shaming myself for the ways I chose to cope, I would allow myself to indulge in the coping mechanism. I would allow myself to feel the desire and would just observe as it was happening. In my journal, I would date and time when I would pick my skin, write anything that occurred before that may have triggered that desire, any feeling that may have happened during, and how I felt after.


If you are pushing down emotions for so long, there is a chance that you have created numbing acts as well, which can be from anything. I encourage you to start observing your own behaviors and triggers to start opening up channels to emotions that may have been hidden from you.


Reidentifying Sensations

After logging my behaviors, I began journaling the basic emotions. I would write out ways in which each emotion presents in my body. This included any sensation that would come up for me, any trigger in which I found I experienced that emotion, and any memory that may be linked to that emotion.


Taking time to connect with my actions and sensations really began opening my emotional channel and allowed me a deeper insight into where I wanted to begin healing from and understanding.


Shadow Work Meditation

If you feel called to more spiritual practices, this meditation technique really helped me connect to my body.


I adapted this from a spirit hack from Shaman Durek.


Using this meditation music, I lay down somewhere that I can have complete calmness. I begin the music and take deep breaths (4 counts in, hold the breath for 4 seconds, 6 counts out) for 10 minutes to get into a relaxed state.


When I am ready, silently to myself, I ask “Spirit, show me where I am holding emotion.” This is based on the theory that our bodies hold onto emotions and many pains that we feel are trapped emotions and memories.


I will feel a sensation somewhere in my body and then say silently to myself, “thank you, I felt that. Spirit, show me why I am holding onto this emotion.” Then I let my mind wander as I keep a focus on my breath. The more I did this meditation, the more memories and emotions would come up. I would cry, sometimes I would feel the need to yell or hit something.


When I felt I was finished feeling the emotion fully, I would silently say, “I am ready to release this emotion.”


Once I came back up from the meditation, I would journal about any memory or emotion that I felt called to address.


Schedule in Sadness

When I was really sad or was holding a lot of grief, I would schedule in time to fully feel those emotions and wallow. I think we feel we constantly have to be busy, which makes it harder to fully acknowledge and experience our emotions.


I would give myself maybe one or two days to fully express my emotion, loud sobbing, and all. One of the mistakes we tend to make with emotions is when we start tearing up, we instantly try to hold it back, and then we never address it. Scheduling in sadness might feel strange at first, but an emotion cannot be released until we fully embrace it and let it move through us.


After I fully felt those emotions, I would write down what I was ready to release on tiny strips of paper and then burn them (safely).


Reinforce Yourself

Once we begin opening the flood gates of emotions, it can become easy to get trapped in wallowing. It’s important to step back into a high self-worth once we are ready to release the emotions we have been working through.


When I am ready to get out of those states and have gained the insights I have needed from those emotions, I begin writing out a chart.


On one side I write down things that light me up and on the other, I write down things that drain me.


For the next week, I focus on as many things as I can from the “light” side and try to remove as many things from the “drain.” This helps solidify the release and reminds me of the power I hold.

Shadow. Your dark side. Your “I hope people don’t find out about this,” side. We all have it. We all experience things about ourselves that we reject and shut down in order to feel accepted from the rest of society.


I like to think of my shadow as that dark twin from the Kingdom Hearts video games. I first started thinking about the Evil Twin complex when I was doing the work in To Be Magnetic; Lacy Phillips was the first to mention shadow to me and then the idea took off. I drew out who I thought my evil twin looked like, what her name was, all of her personality traits. I kind of created this comic book persona. And then I started identifying her backstory, why she was all of those traits. This gave me a more visual representation of what I was ashamed of or rejecting in myself. If you want to explore your shadow, I would first identify what your unique communication style is; are you more of a visual communicator, written, auditory, you can even communicate through smell really. And then create that picture of your dark twin through your communication style. Maybe you record your voice, explaining the details, maybe you draw out a comic or paint colors etc.


So why do we have a shadow? As humans, we crave acceptance; we are tribal creatures, meaning if we were different way back when, we probably would have been cast out of the tribe to fend for ourselves. We don’t have to fear that happening anymore, but our psychological reaction is just the same.

We haven’t evolved out of that type of thinking. The thinking that states, if I am different, if I am seen as an outcast, I won’t be loved and I won’t be accepted into the tribe. While we are children, we witness our parents, peers and teachers reacting to their environment, showing us what we can and can’t do. Let’s say your mother has her own insecurities and then one day a woman comes on the screen that is beautiful, successful and funny, and then your mother starts commenting that the woman doesn’t write her own jokes, that she must have slept with people to get where she is, that there must be something wrong with her because no one can be that great. You start associating beauty with shame and then you start putting down compliments on yourself so that you will be loved and accepted because that is what you subconsciously believe needs to happen.


Or let’s say you’re crying one day. As a child, you don’t see social norms for crying, you just let it out when you need to. But, then your parents come up to you and call you their “happy girl,” and that “happy people don’t cry.” They may just be trying to console you, but you may internalize that as “if I cry I am unlovable.” This may seem an extreme belief, but as children, we don’t see subtleties, we just learn things in absolutes; and that absolute creates our shadow.


So now, you’ve written, drawn, spoken, or even smelled your dark self into existence. You know their characteristics and are working on their backstory. How do we start loving it?


If you are someone that looks for a structured way to accept and love shadow aspects, check out the To Be Magnetic podcast or even sign up for their membership. This gives you detailed explanations of what shadow has on your subconscious and offers journal prompts and meditations to learn how to love and accept shadow. I would also read Joe Dispenza’s book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, to dive into the scientific side of why shadow occurs and how to get through it. If you don’t give a shit about the nitty-gritty details, I would start with Marisa Peer’s I am Enough.


Seeing that this Dark Twin of yours is still worthy and deserving of success and love, helps you step more into your authentic power and learn about yourself. At the very least, spending time alone and getting to know who you are without the pressure of being enough can drastically change your relationship with Self. Take a moment to identify where you are trying to prove yourself. When we are dog-paddling for acceptance or external validation, there is something that we believe is not inherently lovable so we have to be shown by others that it is. When we begin to do shadow work, we can show ourselves that we are lovable and deserving, without that validation. It’s hard fucking work, I’m not going to lie, but once you get through the emotional release once, you become more and more resilient and addicted to the growth.

You’re doing a great job.


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and a fear of holding on to anything good

When I was in college, I became obsessed with time.

I would constantly roll over the minutes in my mind, ordering everything by the exact amount it would take me to move on to the next task. “This tram takes 22 minutes to get to my stop, and it takes me 6 minutes to walk home. I’ll have 2 hours and 31 minutes before I have to leave to get to my next class.” Just on and on I would log my time. Something about it was so soothing as my deadlines loomed over me and I was getting ready to graduate.

But time-tracking didn’t end with the mental planner in my mind. I logged everything. It was less about enjoying what I was experiencing and more about making sure I “beat my time.”

Jobs for example. I started working when I was 13. And all those years I didn’t keep a job longer than a year, which seemed normal for a young person. But, I thought it made me broken. So it became my mission to keep a job longer than my last.

It didn’t matter if I hated the job, knew it wasn’t for me or wanted to leave. I had to make sure I hit that year mark and one day. I would log the day in my mind. “Day 63.” “Day 82.” “Day 102.”

I did this with where I lived. When I was 17, I started moving constantly. It made me feel like I couldn’t stay in one place. That I was such a sporadic person who wasn’t capable of settling down. Even if I couldn’t afford rent any longer. I stayed. I counted.

Relationships. By the end of college, the longest relationship I kept was 1 year and 2 months. You could even argue it was only 10 months, but that’s a different conversation.

So I found a relationship. Counted. Ignored the signs. Counted some more. I made it to 2 years and 3 months before it crumbled. At least I beat my last time.

This time obsession lasted until I realized that everything I was doing in my life was something I hated. That everything I had or was achieving was focused on the time, and not if I actually enjoyed it.

Once the awareness around this time=achievement ideology became apparent, I started seeking my why.

Did I have a fear of abandonment? Did I have OCD? Was there some milestone I was trying to achieve that made me feel successful?

The conclusion I came to was this: I latched on to this narrative that I was incapable of holding on to anything good. It wasn’t about if I was worthy to hold on to anything or a fear that I would be abandoned. But, a knowing that nothing will stick for me. That I am not here to have; I am here to rent. So if I can reach a new time, then I’m doing a little bit better than I was.




It’s as if I took the phrase “all things are temporary,” ran with it, and attached “because I’m not worthy,” at the end for some flavor.

I’m still not sure where I picked this idea up. My parents have had the same house since I was born. My dad has had the same job for nearly 20 years. My grandma still lives in the house my mom grew up in. No one in my family has been divorced.

Oh, you know what? It might be BECAUSE I saw all these stable things in my life, and I was the “black sheep,” that wanted to travel and experience different things, that now I assume I’m incapable of holding onto anything because I didn’t follow their life path.

Mid-newsletter revelations are so trippy.

My solution to this time obsession was something that I don’t necessarily recommend. But, I was constantly thinking about how long I could hold something, right? So, the only choice was to hold absolutely nothing.

I ended my lease on my apartment. I didn’t date for years. I left my job. Anything that I was logging, I ditched completely. My love of chaos truly came out in these moments.

This wasn’t all at once either. I started with the relationship because that was when I first became aware of this. I told myself a relationship wasn’t worth it if I was just seeking to reach my next time milestone.

Then came the job when I realized how unhappy I was in it and was just trying to get through another day.

Then the apartment.

When Covid hit, I traveled into this vortex of non-ownership. There was nothing to track. No milestone to reach. No fear of holding something that I felt was never mine to begin with.

It’s less of a fear of holding onto something and more of a fear of being proven that I’m not worthy of holding something good. Is that extremely meta?

It’s the most obnoxious with relationships. Ever since I was a prepubescent teen, I saw myself as a rest stop on the way to the final destination. The one you enjoy before you find the one you truly want. If you ever saw that 2000’s Dane Cook movie, Good Luck Chuck. I was Chuck. If you don’t know that movie, Chuck was cursed by a witch that every woman he dated immediately found true love after ending the relationship with him. A truly wonderful movie to watch as a girl who felt she was a walking pit stop.

I would go into relationships, knowing that they were not going to last. And it was almost a game to me to see how long I could make it last before it crumbled. Not really the most healthy way to view someone you’re supposed to love.

The jobs too. I would go all in to the job when I first started. I romanticized it. I would think, “maybe this is where I’ll feel like I belong.”

Then a few months in, the sparkles would fade and I would become restless and feel like I was trapped in something. I would start becoming frustrated that I couldn’t just be happy with what I had. Then the clock would start ticking and I knew I had to set a date to leave.

I would become ashamed and feel like I was self-sabotaging (see “I Love Drama,”) and another part of me felt like I was a failure since I didn’t seem to belong in anything I was supposed to belong in.

It’s the pedestalizing that does this. I’ll put a job I love so high above me, so far out of reach that every time I find a job, I know it’s impossible to keep. A person I love that doesn’t leave me to find someone they love more? Pedestal. An apartment that isn’t shrouded in constant discomfort and tension? Pedestal.


Poem by Me

Is there something you believe is so high up that anything you receive similar to it you know will never last?

It’s not about keeping something. Or being worthy to receive and hold it.

It’s about knowing you’re worthy to receive it over and over again, without needing to latch on.

The sanctuary feeling you receive from your dream apartment is a feeling that will never leave you, regardless if you have an apartment or not.

The feeling of pure love and support you receive in a relationship is something that you never have to seek out or ask for, because you are always with that feeling regardless of being in one.

The success you feel from a job. The joy you feel from travel.

These feelings you’re hoping to receive from the things you are putting on a pedestal are what to hold. Because they are within you. Holding on to the things you think will bring you those feelings are where that feeling of losing something begins.

It’s the classic, seeking outside yourself leads to sorrow vs seeking within yourself leads to peace.

It’s something I’m still working on, something I may always be working on. But, this is what has helped me thus far.

Journal Prompts

  • Were you taught that you had to follow through with all your commitments? “See it to the end?” Were you told that if you left a job before a year that it would be harder to find another job? Write out any narratives that are centered around time and commitment.

  • Do you have a fear of losing something? Imagine yourself losing that thing and write out any feelings that come up. How would it feel?

  • Find your pedestal. What is something that feels like you could never have? The house? Amazing job? Business? Relationship? Write out the reasons you don’t think you could hold this. How far away is this thing from you? What would have to happen for you to hold this thing?

  • Imagine you disappeared for a month, you shut your phone off and just explored? Do you think you would lose anything? Friendships? Jobs? Love? Do you think you have to constantly put the effort into those things for you to keep holding them?

  • Keep a list of everything you are currently holding. Next to each thing, give a score out of 10 for how you feel about it. For anything under an 8, ask yourself why you’re holding onto it? Necessity? Fear? Do you think that’s as good as you can receive? What would happen if you let yourself release that?

One time I looked in the mirror and told myself, “I don’t need to achieve to receive. There is nothing I need to do to prove I’m enough.” And I started crying. It felt very cinematic.

When we have a fear of abandonment or a meta-fear that we are incapable of holding anything good, we are telling ourselves that we do not matter unless we hold on. That we are not enough unless we own or are owned. Is it better to be so worried of losing something that we hold on with dear life or to know that we are incapable of holding something so we hold on to see how long we can last? My vote is neither. Both seem to suck.

The only solution I’ve found so far is to de-pedestalize the things I think I’m incapable of holding on to and to develop the trust that I’m worthy whether I hold those things or not.

My time-less fantasy is to roll over in bed one day, see the person I’m in love with, and realize that I have no idea how long we’ve been together; I just know it’s been filled with love and no worry of not being able to hold them any longer, because holding them in that moment, is enough.

Should I be a romance novelist?

With love, Tally

To Support My Work

Listen to the new season of Cracks in the Foundation

Sign up for my weekly newsletter! You can sign up for the free 1–2x monthly newsletter or become a paid subscriber to receive weekly newsletters and exclusive podcasts.

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