I never thought I would write an article about fixing your mindset. Not too long ago, that would have sounded like a cosmic joke to me.

Maybe you remember when the movie “The Secret” was a thing. I quite liked it back then, although it sounded a bit woo-woo to me.

But hey, we only know things when we try. Right?

I experimented with different visualisation techniques and did all sorts of affirmations to change my mindset for the better.

Long story short... none of that worked for me. So I gave up on it.

Recently I stumbled upon so-called gratitude rituals and somehow got curious. I read that there is actually scientific proof they can help.

Maybe worth a try...

So here we are. Me doing this gratitude thing and writing about it.

Why..?

Because it did something for me and I think it’s worth writing about.

And now that I hopefully have triggered your curiosity a bit, I can start with the actual article. Yes, a somewhat long introduction.

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From Healing to Living

Most of my articles are about getting out of your mind into your body. That’s quite the opposite direction from working on your mindset.

That almost sounds as if these two don’t go together.

But hear me out...

When you have a physical wound, you first clean it, then put a Band-Aid on it, gently scratch when it becomes itchy, and in the end apply cream to help with the scars and get your skin nicely soft and smooth again.

In other words, there is an order in how things work.

If you apply the cream before the wound is healed, you might mess with your wound in the worst case.

Of course, for healing wounds from your childhood, the order is often not so clear, and there are many approaches.

From my experience, it is best to first understand the dynamics to some degree and understand what actually happened.

The next step was to find a safe place; by this I mean getting distance from everything toxic for me. That was like cleaning the wound and making sure that no new dirt could get in.

That’s what I needed to do the inner work and let my wounds actually heal.

And once my wounds had closed, it felt right to turn towards life and the future I could have.

Not before.

Because before I was, like so many of us, a fear-driven person.

Now I know. Back then I didn’t.

Why Positive Thinking Never Worked for Me

Even now, I am not a fan of this think positive and the world will become your oyster kind of thing.

Yes, positive thoughts should have their place as well as negative ones. In the end, it’s just thoughts. And I have never found that forcing myself into positive thinking changes anything for the better.

Sometimes thinking “everything will be fine” simply felt like avoidance. Or like self-betrayal.

They say you have to believe in it just enough to make it come true. Otherwise, the magic of positive thinking cannot work.

Well, as a child I firmly believed I was Superman, but stretching out my arm with a tight fist never made me fly.

Yep, that’s been my experience. But I do know that other approaches work.

Like what top athletes do, for example.

I am not sure whether they do this positive thinking stuff, but they do mental exercises. Sports psychology, they call it, and it seems to be effective enough that many top athletes use it these days.

So there is something...

Maybe the real thing is less about fixing your mind and instead working on what you feed it.

Your Mind Isn’t a Machine

We are not machines. We know that. Nevertheless, when I read about how our nervous system, including the brain, works, it often sounds as if we were some sort of bio-robots.

Luckily, we are not.

We cannot simply get programmed and reprogram ourselves. That’s not how things work. At least according to my experiences. Or maybe I am just reluctant to receive commands even if I receive them from myself.

I know programming sounds so much nicer, but in the end it’s giving instructions that must be followed. At least by a computer...

Still, we can do something to change the quality of the thoughts our mind produces. It’s a bit like adjusting the course in more favorable directions without knowing where we'll end up.

We all know that it’s hard to have peaceful thoughts when we suffer from a toothache or any other pain that eats up all our attention. No matter how hard you try to force yourself into positive thinking, it won’t work because the pain reminds you instantly of your current reality.

The story is different when you feel fine and are at a place where you love to be; Like taking a walk in nature, hearing the birds sing, squirrels climbing up the trees to watch you, breathing in fresh air, and sensing the beautiful floral scents around you.

In such a setting, it’s easy to have peaceful thoughts. And even if you’d try to force yourself into negative thought loops, a squirrel may come your way and give you a short reminder that life can be beautiful. At least when it’s a life with cute red squirrels in it...

Long story short: Attention matters.

The Gratitude Experiment

After all the explanations, I now come to the gratitude ritual.

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When I started my healing journey, I hoped to get more control over my life. My reasoning was that I would finally get the life I longed for.

Of course, that goal was a bit naive. Because life often just happens. It doesn’t care too much about our wishes or commands. We are not its master and never will be.

However, we do have a choice in how we want to react to what’s thrown at us.

I know it often doesn’t seem like that. But the calmer we are, the more clearly we can think and make decisions we are less likely to regret.

In other words, being calm allows us to be more in control of ourselves. And that’s quite something.

It took me quite a long time to learn to stay relatively calm when I got triggered, not losing myself in emotions or thought spirals that would further drag me down and trap me in my past.

Yep, I still can get upset, angry, and raise my voice when necessary. I am not Mr. Chill from Laid-Back Island. But the big difference is that I am aware of what’s going on. I am in the driver’s seat and can change the direction.

I had to do a lot of work to get there. My advantage was that I already knew how being calm and in control felt. I had experienced it several times before.

But only when my life was actually in danger.

The Moment Time Slowed Down

I was paragliding in the beautiful valleys near Bucaramanga (Colombia) when I suddenly lost altitude and saw a rock face right in front of me.

In less than 10 seconds, I would crash into it. Not a single chance to avoid it.

My only option was to reduce the impact and not damage my face.

No panic, no thought spirals, no drama.

Just one question: What can I do?

Time slowed down.

I figured out that stretching my legs at a slight angle could work as a shock absorber. That’s what I did. No second-guessing. Then everything went dark.

When I opened my eyes, I had no idea where I was. Lying on the ground, I watched the canopy of my glider slowly falling down on me.

I took a few deep breaths and noticed pain spreading through my feet. I got up, being happy that nothing was broken and worked as it should.

I was still in shock. But I knew that staying calm had allowed me to make the right decision.

How could I stay calm in such critical situations yet lose myself in emotions and thoughts when something triggered me?

What made the difference?

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I remember when I did the MBTI test several years ago. To my surprise, it showed that I was an INFJ-A.

I knew that I was an introvert, a thinker, and that I always felt like I didn’t belong. But I didn’t know about my levels of empathy and intuition so much. Because these were traits I tried to suppress as best I could.

Later I learned that this was totally normal for INFJs to do that.

Seems like I was not the only one who was called too sensitive and who found that feelings were often overwhelming or simply too painful.

Long story short, I found a box for me. The INFJ label served me well. It gave me a better idea of who I was and helped me understand how I function as a person.

The spooky thing is that when you get such insights, it often can feel as if we are somehow wired like a robot. I mean it can quite help you to fix some things.

Ultimately, it’s also the question of whether our personality is something static, something we have to live with all our life once it is more or less set in stone.

But let’s stick with knowing your personality type a little more before I come to the answer. Yep, you need to read a bit more before you earn it, hehehe....

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Healing Can Free You From Old Roles

You probably know the story of the ugly duckling. Basically, a swan grows up among ducks and is the odd one out. No fun.

Once the swan knows it is a swan, the story changes. It won’t feel wrong or defective anymore and instead does more of the things a swan does. Looking handsome, proud, and finding its mate.

Basically, knowing it is a swan helps to turn its life around and live according to its very nature and be happy and content from there on.

Yep, that’s quite a bit romantic. But that’s what swans also are, right? I mean, at least for us they are, in our mental image or when we paint them on a canvas to make the lake scene look way more romantic.

So what does this have to do with us?

With healing from our past, the story is similar. We may have lived a life that was not really fitting for who we really are. But once we have an idea about our real identity, we can make changes and live more according to our true nature.

Now to the romantic part...

Many of us believe that once healing is done, we finally have become who we are and everything is sunshine and roses. Maybe even fairy dust, lots of synchronicities, and all the magic you had hoped for. Because once you are in alignment with yourself, the universe gives you everything you need.

I am quite exaggerating here to make my point very clear.

No, I don’t make fun of anybody here. For a long time, I also believed that life would magically be better once healing was done. A bit like leaving my past behind, being in the now, and living my purpose.

And if you have not reached that point yet, maybe your healing is not complete yet.

It’s a logical thought, right?

Finding Yourself Can Become Another Trap

For many, the MBTI personality is just a starting point.

It opens a door for you. You do your research and find out how much more there is to explore. You learn that there are at least two different kinds of INFJs: the assertive and the turbulent one.

Then you stumble upon Enneagrams and how that may explain your INFJ personality type even further. The deeper you go, the more information you get.

And trust me, the whole thing has no end.

You can fall into a very deep rabbit hole until one day you hopefully become aware that your search makes no sense anymore.

Maybe we have to accept that we will never really know who we truly are.

There is actually a beauty in it.

If knowing ourselves is not totally possible, maybe that shows that we don’t need to fully know who we are. I mean, would you bother with all the soul-searching when your life feels more or less good? When you feel like you belong, have a strong purpose, or when you draw energy just from exploring life?

Maybe we just need to know ourselves well enough to get the rubble from the past out of our way. And from then on it doesn’t really matter.

Maybe it’s even more important to have an idea of who we want to become rather than knowing who we are.

Maybe...

Life Is Always Changing — And So Are You

Life is always changing, they say.

I had no problems with accepting that for as long as I could prepare for those changes. We know that after school we might go to university and then get a job.

So we try to get decent grades and make sure everything goes according to the plan laid out for us. It may not be the most fun, but we feel somewhat in control and don’t question the path we are walking on too much.

This questioning might come later when we find out that somehow we are not happy. It’s not that we need to have constant happiness, but when we are rarely happy, life will feel more and more empty.

For many, it’s a slow change. Life isn’t suddenly meaningless. But the less you can shine your light and just function somehow, the more the current of life will wash out your energy. A bit like an ocean washing down the edges of the rocks at the shore.

Other times, life changes are directly visible. Like when you become a mother or a father. Hopefully it’s a change you welcome, and you will be surprised by how much this will change you.

And then there are changes we don’t want at all. Like when we lose our jobs, the place we live, or a loved one. We might not even be prepared to handle the intensity such changes might come with.

It can feel like our world is totally falling apart.

But over time, when we have deeply grieved, licked, and healed our wounds, we learn to adapt to the new life we are now experiencing. And looking back, one day we may become aware of how much we have changed during such tough times.

That’s when you also get a sense that there is not just one you.

You didn’t suddenly change from a toddler to a teenager and then to an adult.

Of course, in your growing up phase, your changes were more visible on the outside. Later, you change more on the inside. But the single changes are often so subtle that you only recognize them after many of them have accumulated.

It’s like being on a journey and adjusting your course.

At one point, you will not encounter totally new territories but still will find new things to explore and learn about you if that’s what you want.

We Used to Be More Fluid

Sometimes we forget where we are coming from.

As children, we could be anything, at least in our illusions. One moment, we were Superman; the other, we wanted to be a gynecologist. Speaking of my own experience here, hehehe....

The thing is that we didn’t think so much in boxes. We didn’t bother too much to know who we are. Instead, we wanted to conquer the world and have fun.

If we were told to walk barefoot through the snow every day to become the tough guy who can climb the highest mountains, we would do exactly that.

And if nobody told us what to do, we would try and figure things out. We only needed to believe things were possible. And in vivid illusions, everything was possible unless someone talked us out of it or called us stupid or whatnot.

The older we get, the stronger our beliefs become. We made our experiences. We know what worked and what didn’t.

The stronger those beliefs, the more rigid and static we become. At one point, we may fall into the trap again of thinking pretty well about who we are.

And we might be even totally right with that.

But still, it might be more fun to find out where we can walk from there instead of remaining standing where we are.

Self-Knowledge Should Give You Freedom

Knowing yourself is a starting point to have an even better idea of what you want to do with your life.

As a child, we imagine we can be everything. Later we learn that we might not be built to become a world-class swimmer, cyclist, or never be able to crack a nut as elegantly as a squirrel. Simply because we are not a squirrel...

But once we know where we are standing, we have a map in our hands that is not completely white anymore. From where we stand, we can choose a direction. And that’s where true freedom lies.

Without a map and no idea of who we are, we may just float around in life and be carried by its tides. In this scenario, life would be nothing but an endless movie. Neither could we change it nor could we walk out of the cinema. Because for that we would need to know where we are in the cinema and then choose a direction.

Long story short, learning about your personality makes sense as long as it helps you to find a direction in life.

Don’t be too fixated on being an INFJ. Maybe that’s where you are currently standing. But maybe you don’t want to be trapped in all the things INFJs typically experience.

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Before You Go…

This was the final part of the INFJ Healing Series.

The next episode will be something new, something a dear and long-time reader has proposed that I write about.

That being said, if you want me to write more about a certain topic, just let me know in the comments below. It's your chance to get even more of what you enjoy reading.

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I admire squirrels for how they think. When they want a nut, they make a plan, pause for a second, and then take action. If they fail, they think for a moment and try again. No overthinking. Because when things become too difficult, they simply walk away and come back later when their mind is relaxed again.

How I envy them...

It took me many years to manage to get out of my head. It’s a place I liked to be in so much. When I was all in my mind, I felt somewhat in control. It also allowed me to make sense of the world around me that often made no sense at all.

But like many INFJs and very sensitive people, I used my mind as an escape from feelings that were too painful and often undesired. Like when I was called too sensitive, told I was making things up, and whatnot.

Excessive thinking prepared me for all the worst-case scenarios. Though most of them never happened, some did. And that’s the point when being all in my head turned out to be overall quite beneficial.

Whenever unpleasant feelings surged, I found a way to reason myself out of them. And the more I did this, the more I disconnected myself from my emotional world.

I mean, I always felt kind of empty and not belonging. Like I was somehow different. I thought that’s just how things are. Also, it wasn’t exactly painful. Just strange...

I am telling you all this because overthinking often isn’t so obvious for people who are all in their heads. It often only starts to become visible when we wake up at 3 am at night with our thoughts spinning like a vortex ending in a dark hole.

That’s when we get an idea of how busy our brain is and what overthinking in its extreme form feels like. Powerless and exhausted, we feel.

If only we could see it coming earlier... but for that we would have needed a better connection to our emotional world.

Of course there are also milder forms of overthinking.

I remember when I researched for hours which toaster to buy, the model for 25 EUR or the one for 32 EUR?

Sounds like a simple decision. For me, it was not. And the same was true for so many other things. I wasn’t really aware of how much mental energy I wasted that way but wondered why I often felt tired and exhausted.

Perfectionism is one of those things you also tend to not see for what it truly is as an overthinker. In my mind, I just wanted to do a decent job, or study just enough to make sure I don’t fail the exam.

From the outside, of course, the story looked different, as I now understand. People often called me an overthinker, an overly rational person, as if this was a problem. Well, it was. But I was unable to see it for a very long time. Because I was functioning so well with it.

And once I finally became aware of it I tried to solve it like any other problem I had. With my mind...

The problem is that you can’t think yourself out of overthinking.

So, how to stop overthinking?

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Many INFJs and other very sensitive people feel like they don’t belong.

From the outside, everything may look very normal. They have friends, seem to have no problems socialising, and don’t really look like outsiders.

Yet, that’s how they often feel. Like outsiders. Not really connected to the people around them. More like a bystander who is not a part of the group.

One common reason for that?

They have learned that they need to adjust to somehow fit in. Because their authentic self wasn't appreciated by their environment. At least they were made to believe they were either unwanted or of little value.

That’s the mild version.

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The harder version is when you are born into a family that never wanted you and has no understanding of your levels of sensitivity at all. They see your sensitivity as a weakness, as something that needs to be fixed. And it gets even worse when you start seeing things they are trying to hide.

If only you knew they couldn’t let the truth be seen. But that’s something many sensitive souls learned in many painful lessons. And that’s why they adjusted. To avoid the pain inflicted on them and ending up all alone.

But all this adjusting came at a price...

The obvious point is that playing a role is very exhausting. The less obvious is that this role is giving you nothing back. People may like your role and might even praise you for it. But you know it’s just a role and not who you really are.

The story would be very different if people praised you for how well you have played your role. And when they do, and tell you that they admire how you made it through all the hardship, kept your smile, were always nice, supportive, and fun to be around; you may end up sobbing and crying your eyes out.

That’s when you get an idea of how painful hearing the truth can be. A truth you knew all the time but tried to push away so hard . Because after all, you wanted to belong and somehow fit in...

Maybe you have tried to reveal your true self here and there and again found that people did not really get you. Almost as if you spoke a different language and just couldn’t find the right words for them to understand you.

The thing is that the longer you experience not being understood, the more you may end up trying to explain yourself. And somehow this also doesn’t work well. At least from my experience.

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For many years I tried to improve my communication. Phrase things more clearly. Simplify things, try to explain in pictures... you name it. I even took voice training, as I thought something with my intonation was wrong or that I just sounded too boring.

Didn’t help... But people who hardly spoke my languages understood me pretty well whenever I explained technical things to them. That’s when it dawned on me that mere communication was not the actual problem...

Maybe the simple reason for feeling like you don’t belong is that you actually don’t belong where you currently are.

Yes, that’s very simplified, maybe even a bit too much.

But somewhere we have to start...

INFJs and highly sensitive people make up only a relatively small part of the overall population. INFJs are estimated at around 1-3%, while the numbers for highly sensitive people vary quite a lot depending on the definition.

Additionally, many cultures do not really encourage being sensitive. It’s often seen as a weakness.

As a result, in many places, very sensitive people are just too unusual to be understood or seen for who they are.

As we get older, many of us get softer around the edges and start to value sensitivity as something that may actually have been missing from our lives.

But you don’t want to wait that long to finally feel like you belong...

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The INFJ door slam is quite a famous thing. It’s when an INFJ or a very sensitive person ends contact with someone seemingly abruptly. People who are affected by it are often stunned, as they neither saw it coming nor have any idea why the door slam happened to them.

Of course, from the perspective of an INFJ, things look totally different and actually do make sense. I’ve slammed the door a couple of times in my life. So I can speak from firsthand experience. But I also found healthier ways, which I will share with you below.

Why INFJs Slam The Door And Suddenly Go No Contact

Let’s forget about the term INFJ for a moment. Just imagine a very sensitive person with high levels of empathy. Someone who tends to see the good in others and gives them a second, third, and maybe fourth chance even when they messed up big time.

The thing with high levels of empathy is that you often understand why people behave in certain ways. You might even feel their pain to some degree.

You don’t want that. You want people to be without pain, because at some point you learned that other people’s pain can quickly become your pain, too.

So you try to be soft with them, as you don’t want to make their pain bigger than it already is.

But often you are not heard or taken seriously with that approach. To others, it may look like you are always forgiving or that their behavior didn’t matter that much to you. It’s a bit like they can walk all over you as if you were a rug...

But ultimately there comes a point when you can’t take it anymore. When you have swallowed down too much, explained yourself over and over again, and have to finally admit that all the chances you have given others to improve didn’t work.

That’s also the point when your pain is bigger than your empathy.

You are done with them. You know that another chance or explaining yourself again is pointless. You felt never heard or seen, so why should that be different now?

It’s pointless. That’s your conclusion. And the logical consequence is to end the contact. Everybody goes their own way, no hard feelings. All you crave is getting back your peace.

You set the ultimate boundary, because none of the things you have tried before worked. Going no contact is your last resort.

Why The Door Slam Hits Others by Surprise

The problem is that people who are not as sensitive and empathic as INFJs don’t recognise the stages before the door slam comes.

A typical sign is that the INFJ withdraws and becomes less available. Or that they seem to care less. And yes, that’s all subtle; nevertheless, it’s there.

People often don’t recognise it, as we kind of live in a loud world. It’s a bit like everything seems to be okay unless someone is shouting out their pain.

The next problem is that there is often a misunderstanding about people who are always kind and understanding no matter what. Some people see that as some kind of weakness and a free ticket to do whatever they want.

Little do they know that even the kindest person has their limits.

I guess it’s a bit in our nature that we tend to believe that others see the world with similar eyes as we do. So a rather rough-edged person might expect others to speak up loud, clearly, and maybe even a bit offensively when they are bothered by something.

It’s not that such a person cannot get along well with an INFJ. When both respect one another and feel accountable for their behavior, everything can still go very well. But it can become a problem when the relationship is one-sided, and the INFJ is taken too much advantage of or taken for granted.

Now that we have that, let's come to the point of how INFJs and very sensitive people with high levels of empathy can find healthier ways to avoid things escalating that far.

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Sometimes the world feels just too much. It’s a feeling many of us INFJs can relate to.

We suck up the emotions of others around us as if we were a sponge. Somehow, this often makes us understand people better than they understand themselves.

We often don’t want to see it this way. But there is a reason why people gravitate toward us for advice or when they need someone to listen to. They know afterwards they feel better.

If only the same would be true for the INFJs...

Instead, we feel drained, as if someone sucked life juice out of us. Of course, there is no problem if this only would happen occasionally. But even when no one is coming, we somehow recognise what’s going on at the neighbour table in the restaurant where we try to enjoy our meal.

It’s a bit like our antennas are always on. Not only for one channel but for almost everything our radio can receive.

That’s when things become a problem. Too much input becomes overwhelming. We feel the need to retreat and just be with ourselves to recharge our batteries.

For a long time, I thought that’s just how things go...

Today’s part is about how to find healthier ways to cope with your levels of empathy so that you won’t be overwhelmed so quickly.

But before I come to that, let’s first have a look at the different kinds of empathy.

Emotional and Cognitive Empathy

Most people have empathy; even psychopaths can. This may sound like a surprise. But it’s not when taking a closer look.

Cognitive empathy is judging how someone feels by their facial expressions, how they move, and anything else that is directly observable. When someone is sobbing, they are probably very sad. Slightly shaking hands may indicate that a person is nervous and so on. Sometimes we understand how someone feels from their overall situation.

So this kind of empathy is something you can train. All you need is observation and a somewhat intact memory to connect it to experiences you’ve had before.

Emotional empathy goes way deeper. It’s like putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and feeling what they feel. Like their pain or their joy is yours, too. You can see this with mothers who are deeply connected to their children.

And that’s the kind of empathy many INFJs recognise in themselves.

Empathy itself is not the problem. Losing yourself in other people’s emotions is.

Why Rationalising Emotions Does Not Help

The sum of your own emotions and everything you pick up from those around you can quickly become too much. So, like many INFJs, I tried to rationalise my world to avoid emotional overwhelm. It’s easy to find reasons why an unwanted feeling doesn’t make sense and is just stupid.

By doing so, you fool yourself and abandon parts of yourself.

This can work quite well for a very long time. But the more you bottle up, the more the pressure inside you rises. The funny thing is that it often feels like the opposite. So not like pressure, but as some kind of emptiness you feel inside you. Something that steals your sleep and makes it pretty clear that it wants to be heard and seen.

No way around it...

Now that we have that, we can take an even closer look at the quality of the emotions we tend to pick up too easily.

The One-Sidedness of Emotional Overwhelm

Emotional empathy would go both ways along the spectrum. If people around us are joyful, so would we. So far I have covered mainly the other side of the spectrum, as this is what’s causing all the trouble for INFJs.

Laughing is contagious. Even if we are in a group of strangers and they all laugh from their very hard for minutes, we would join in at some point. But for most other positive emotions, we don’t do that. All that happens is that we are not overwhelmed.

In other words, there is some one-sidedness. We get overwhelmed by the negative, but the positive end doesn’t affect us much, apart from contagious laughter or when your nation wins the soccer World Cup.

So why is it that we tend to have a bias for absorbing negative emotions?

I mean, it doesn’t have to be that way. The mother-child example from above shows that it can go in both directions equally. Happy child, happy mother...

This finally brings me to the point of how to heal overwhelming levels of emotional empathy.

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As announced on Tuesday, I am starting a new healing series. This time it’s about the INFJ personality type from the MBTI framework. No worries, you don’t need to know any of the specifics.

INFJs are basically introverts, with high levels of inwardly directed intuition and a very empathic nature. You could also call them sensitive souls, but then you would have to add their dominant intuitive nature.

So now that we have that, let me start the series with the biggest item, the introverted intuition. It’s the very core of the INFJ personality, yet many of them experience this gift often as a curse, until they learn to embrace and reconnect with it.

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What Intuition Is Really About

Intuition is often described as knowing without really knowing. Like it’s some kind of magic. But it is not. It’s actually something INFJs learn so well that it becomes second nature.

INFJs often wonder why others cannot see the obvious. They simply are not aware that the things they pick up are some kind of superpower.

Again, it’s not magic.

Intuition, at its core, is picking up patterns and making sense of them. The more you have to deal with such patterns, the better you get at recognising and interpreting them. As sensitive souls, INFJs have kind of a head start in that regard.

Due to their higher levels of sensitivity, INFJs pick up signals more intensely than most people around them. And when they additionally grow up in a somewhat challenging environment, they have to read the room and pick up other people’s emotions all the time.

This may sound a bit abstract, so let me give you a more relatable example.

My grandfather loved to repair engines. It was his job, and even in his spare time he couldn’t live long without machine oil on his fingers. Sometimes, when a car passed by, he told me something like this:

“Tim, this car has a problem with the ignition.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“You need to listen closely,” he answered with a warm smile.

Well, I didn’t hear anything other than normal car noise. But I trusted that my grandfather knew what he was talking about. Because everyone in the neighborhood asked him for advice whenever they had problems with a machine. He always knew how to fix things like he had X-ray vision or whatever.

No trial and error. Just opening the damn thing, doing something, and it worked right away.

Magic for bystanders. For him, just doing the obvious.

INFJs have similar abilities when it’s about people and social dynamics.

Why Intuition Often Feels Like a Curse

We live in a world that doesn’t value sensitivity too much. Especially when you grow up and yet have to learn to stand on your own two feet, you are taught to be tough, swallow your tears, and move on.

I’m oversimplifying a bit. Things have changed a bit over the last 10 to 20 years. Currently, it feels like the pendulum is swinging a bit back again, though.

When times are getting tougher, you often cannot afford to be too sensitive. Because it will simply overwhelm you. That’s also why we try to push away our feelings when the going gets too tough, just to remain somewhat functional.

Sensitivity is the foundation for the INFJs’ intuition. When we learn to suppress our feelings, we also learn to ignore when something feels off. But that’s often exactly what the voice of intuition sounds like. An odd feeling. Something we don’t really want when we are already overwhelmed by what is going on around us.

The far bigger reason why intuition can feel like a curse is that it is often invalidated by others. When those close to you constantly tell you that you are too sensitive, or make stuff up, you begin to see your intuition as something flawed.

The third reason is that intuition and hypervigilance are close neighbors. When your environment feels unsafe, your brain is constantly checking for potential dangers and threats.

Better safe than sorry is the program that runs in the background. And that can actually lead to catastrophizing and confusing a rope in the dark with a snake. But that’s not intuition, though it can very much feel like it.

The point I want to make here is that we also learn that what we think is intuition causes us a lot of drama and thus is something undesirable.

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The Problems With Neglecting Your Intuition

When you silence your intuition, you basically abandon a wonderful inner guidance system. This can actually work well for quite a long time. You still have your brain and can get very far with rationalising everything.

But by doing so, we become a bit like logic-driven machines. Being all in your head is a much nicer description. It gives you an intellectual touch and is socially far more acceptable than being all in your feelings. Of course, neither one-sidedness is any good in the long run.

When we abandon parts of ourselves, we simply cannot feel whole.

It’s much like pretending that one of your arms doesn’t exist. You can get very far using only your dominant arm. But life is so much better when you use both, and one supports the other...

Of course, if you never had that strong intuition, you wouldn’t miss it. But the thing is, it doesn’t go away when you have it. You carry it with you, much like the arm you pretend not to have.

The abandoned arm doesn’t disappear. You will feel its weight; sometimes it might feel cold, give you a tingling sensation, or send other signals to show you it’s still there. And it’s the very same thing with your intuition that wants to be heard.

So this was the explanation for logical minds. But there is more.

A squirrel will only have a happy life when they can collect nuts, climb trees, and make people smile with their cuteness. Yes, their cuteness, because they have personality and are not just things.

Okay, this point is optional in terms of their happiness.

The point I want to make is that our lives tend to be most pleasant when we are allowed to fully be who we naturally are. And when you are a very intuitive person, you want to use that intuition in daily life. It’s your gift from Mother Nature, and she wants you to use it. In other words, the world needs it. Already too many machine-like people or tough guys out there...

Of course, you can decide to abandon your unique gift as an INFJ and accept living a life that somehow never feels really connected.

I know, I know... this may sound a little bit dire. But look around and see how many people numb themselves and are scared of getting in touch with themselves. And then look at the squirrel who fully accepts who they are.

Then make a choice if you still want to abandon parts of yourself...

Reconnecting With Your Intuition

This one sounds bigger than it actually will be. The thing is that you have never lost your intuition. You don’t have to build it up to get it back. You simply have to stop neglecting it.

But simple doesn’t necessarily mean that it is easy.

Back then, when I tried to get it back, I tried to test it. So I listened to what was coming up, noted it down, and checked whether it had spoken the truth or not.

However, that’s not how intuition works. It’s not an omniscient oracle.

Nevertheless, this exercise can still help you to separate hypervigilance and the underlying anxiety from intuition. Because it helps you become more aware of when your mind machine makes things up. And that part is not your intuition.

Intuition in its simplest form is that something feels off, odd, or somehow strange. Something that you don’t really have a word for.

Maybe you notice how a person walks differently, that the modulation in someone’s voice has changed, something so subtle that if you mentioned it wouldn’t be believed. Something that makes you wonder whether it is really there or just made up by your mind.

Don’t dismiss that. It’s a valuable cue.

Just listen to what is coming up inside. Don’t try to make sense of it. Just let it be there. Drop your resistance. That’s all you need for the start.

The more you allow this to happen, the more you will notice.

Opening up for your intuition is only one part. The next one is to get a deeper understand why you once abandoned it. And for this, it makes sense to take a closer look at your childhood. How would you describe the dynamics you see in your family system today? Were you really too sensitive back then, or did you simply speak out the obvious that others wanted to hide?

Was there really any reason to dismiss how you felt back then and what you observed?

This exercise can take quite a while. Because we were often made to believe the family story and kind of accept that there was something wrong with us. Some family systems need such alternative realities to stay at least somewhat functional.

The biggest breakthrough for me was to finally allow myself to feel my feelings. Out of the head into the body, so to speak. In the beginning, this can be very overwhelming. Because once you allow yourself to feel again, all those bottled emotions will come to the surface again, much like poking a high-pressure tube...

You don’t need to do this all alone. There are many courses that help to connect with your body and feelings again. Search for somatic exercises or try Reiki or choose from the variety of yoga offered.

Some of these courses come with a spiritual touch. In mild doses, this can help create an overall pleasant experience. Then it’s a bit like putting on a nice perfume. But when it’s all spiritual, I would take a closer look and check whether this is really something you resonate with.

So these are the three main things you can do. Another important element is to give the whole process time. Things will find their way the less you resist the process.

As mentioned before, none of your parts want to be suppressed or abandoned. There are mechanisms that will help you reconnect with yourself. Much like the body heals its own wounds, sometimes with help from the outside when they are too big. But in the end, the body does the healing.

Your main job in the whole process is to get out of your own way.

And that’s basically it. For today, of course. More will follow.

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As most of you probably know, Substack has integrated the AI detector from Pangram. You can check all stories from July 28th onwards or so.

If the author has not disabled it...

And this is where things actually get funny.

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We live in a world that is full of fake and made-up stuff more than ever. So these days it’s quite a bit difficult to find out what is real.

Politicians have been lying all the time. We know that. In some countries, too much lying still has consequences, though. In others, it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

Good journalism uncovers those lies and points its fingers at them. But this only helps when people actually listen. If they don’t, the liar can go on with his game. And things just get worse, as you can see very clearly these days.

Sometimes journalists get silenced. In autocratic countries, all it takes is a finger snip. In more liberal countries, the game is a little different nowadays. Media is called fake news. Often that’s enough for deflection.

It works because the media got caught here and there spreading false information. Sometimes on purpose, other times by accident or by doing sloppy work. And yes, that should have consequences, too.

The point I want to make here is that we need third-party testing for things that are important to us. Food is an excellent example of that. We want it free of toxins and to be only what’s shown on the ingredients list. Then we can decide whether we want it or not.

Substack offered free third-party testing for articles posted since the end of July. So now we can check whether the text is AI-generated or not. Checking how it’s made, so to speak.

Many people say Pangram is not a reliable detector and that it shows too many false positives. They come up with all sorts of funny stories, such as that Pangram classifies the Declaration of Independence as AI-generated.

Bullshit...

Pangram shows 100% human-written as the result.

Do you need to trust me on that? No, you don’t.

Click the following link to see for yourself:

https://www.pangram.com/history/0daa74a9-831e-49fc-8651-70e2b03d03a9?ucc=UiMOED5oP8Q

Everybody could share the links from the results they got. But they rarely do and present screenshots that don't show the whole story…

The next thing is that people make up fragile test cases. They put a short text block inside. Then they demonstrate how Pangram gives a totally different result after only changing a few words.

While this can be reproduced, it actually proves nothing. Changing a few words in a short text is actually not such a small change percentage-wise. Try the same with longer texts, and you will see that it isn’t that easy to totally flip the classification.

But even if that were the case...

Let’s say I could easily turn a fully AI-generated text into something that Pangram 100% recognises as human-written... then of course I would do those few changes.

The thing is that authors can check their Pangram verdict before publishing a story. So if it just needs a bit of polishing to get it all green, why not do it...

Well, well... people say they wanna stay authentic and not change their writing to please the Pangram algo.

Sounds like a legit point at first. But we writers adapt our writing all the time for those bloody algos.

We know pretty well that we need a good headline. Otherwise, people don’t click it, and the algo does not push the distribution. We also know that we need to avoid certain phrases or words because otherwise Gmail might put our article in the promotions or spam folder where only a few people would open it.

We also want to be found by search engines and accordingly make sure that we please them just a little bit.

So... why in hell should we not want our writing to be classified as 100% human-written...?

Why do some writers switch the detector off and come up with funny excuses?

Should we really trust them when they claim all work was done by themselves?

Would you trust a factory that says the smoke coming out of their chimneys is totally safe? Or would you rather have a look at an independent third-party test?

I am not against using AI. Sometimes we just like fast food, extra creamy chocolate, or whatnot…

I just find it very weird when people deactivate an independent test that you could do with a simple copy and paste anyway. Everyone can sign up for Pangram and have 4 free checks per day, or any other of the better detectors.

But as much as I don’t trust politicians easily, I don’t trust writers who claim they don’t use AI and at the same time deactivate the integrated Pangram test. I also don’t buy into their stories that those detectors don’t work.

I have done my own testing and find them pretty neat.

Long story short, I want to encourage you to use Pangram and other AI detectors to get an idea of what is going on out there.

The more these tests are being used, the higher the entry barriers for all those people who just wanna try their luck. Or, in other words, people being a bit more critical about what they consume could help to reduce the flood wave a bit.

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A few years ago, I stumbled on the term family scapegoating. And far, far before that, I learned about introversion and extraversion.

Now there is also Otroversion. But before I come to that, let me give you a short overview of how these concepts have developed over time.

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It was Carl Jung who defined introversion and extraversion as psychological concepts much as we understand them today.

He understood an introvert as a person whose psyche is primarily directed inwardly and an extravert as the opposite.

Or to put it more simply:

Introvert:
What does what’s happening around me mean to me?

Extravert:
What is happening around me, and how do I respond to it?

While this was a more theoretical definition, it was Hans Eysenck who made extraversion measurable as a personality trait.

He understood extraversion as outgoing, sociable, and active. And likewise introversion as reserved, quieter, and less socially outgoing.

But the story doesn’t end here....

The Big Five model treats extraversion as a continuum and breaks it down into several facets like friendliness, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity level, excitement-seeking, and cheerfulness.

That’s much of how we understand introverts and extroverts today.

If this is a bit too complicated, pop psychology has a very simple model.

Introvert = Needs alone time to recharge their battery.
Extrovert = Needs interactions with other people to recharge their energy.

Okay, that was long. But why am I telling you all this?

Well, all models have their limitations.

If you are like me, you may have experienced yourself sometimes more as an introvert and other times as an extrovert. So maybe you are in the middle of the spectrum. But that has been solved too with the label ambivert.

So until recently we had introvert, extrovert, and ambivert...

Still not enough.

Because there are people who can connect with people, be very social and empathetic, but still don’t feel like they belong. From the outside, they may look like an integral part of the group, but they don’t experience it like this.

It’s like a new dimension, as it doesn't really fit into this distinction between an inwardly or outwardly directed psyche. And that’s what “otro” in otrovert basically means.

Okay, okay... I know this sounds all very complicated. And before I bore you with paragraphs of boring explanations, I have something new for you. Yes, again...

I have created a short video explainer for you. Currently, it’s still with a female voice. But if you give me plenty of positive feedback, only if you really like it, of course, I will use my voice for future explainer videos.

If you want to dive deeper into the concept of otroversion, read Kaminski's book:

The Gift of Not Belonging: How Outsiders Thrive in a World of Joiners.

He coined the term otroversion. So you get firsthand knowledge from it directly.

Want to Know If You Are An Otrovert?

As you probably know by now, I love to create self-assessment tests.

So... if at least FIVE of you want an otrovert test, I will create one.

Drop a comment below to let me know.

Coming Next

This Friday I will publish the first part of the new INFJ Healing Journey.

My Substack initially started as INFJ Reflections. I know that many of you see yourself as INFJs or at least have a big overlap with this personality type.

So with this healing series, I kind of will close a circle that has been open for a long time.

Looking forward to having your eyes on this new series.

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No, I didn’t get lost, have any health problems, or whatnot.

The simple reason is that things got a bit too much for me. Two essay-like stories per week plus preparing some exciting new things were more exhausting than I thought. So I cut things down a little for my own sanity.

Well, after a bit of a break, I hope you still remember me. Or in other words, maybe you are even a little happy that something from me landed in your inbox again. The mere thought of it makes me smile.

But let’s not just leave it at hope alone.

Today I have two new things to announce. Yes, two, so there is still room to deliver even more later.

Okay, let me start with the biggie first.

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Practical Tools

So far I have mainly written essays and healing journeys. The idea was to share some of my experiences and help you reflect on your life. Often the big shifts happen when we become aware of our patterns.

But sometimes we need something more practical. Like tools that show us directly where we are standing and then, of course, give us ideas on how to work with those findings.

My boundary test was the first attempt. And since it was well received, I thought I'd create something really big, like in the very meaning of the word big.

Sounds bold, right?

And so it should....

Some drum rolls, please.

Here comes the Big Five Neo 120 Personality Test. It’s the bigger and more granular personality test based on the world-renowned Big Five model.

Still big words.

But the Big Five is really one of the heavyweights when it comes to personality models. It has been used for decades and is one of the most extensively researched and scientifically supported personality models there is.

The Big Five Neo 120

The standard Big Five has 50 questions and gives you the result for the five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism).

While this gives you something to work with, it doesn’t really go under the surface into the details. And that’s exactly where the Big Five Neo 120 shines. With 120 questions, it goes much deeper and gives you insights into so-called facets.

There are thirty of them. Yes, thirty. But see with your own eyes.

Are you still with me?

The results this test gives you are something you can work with for weeks, if not even months. They can serve very well as a compass to help you understand yourself and your underlying patterns. Something you can hold in your hand and read again and again.

Taking the Test

I have decided to make the test available to all subscribers.

Everybody will get their scores for the five personality traits right after finishing the test.

Paid subscribers will receive a complete test report of at least 10 pages including:

• Your Big Five OCEAN profile

• 30 detailed personality facets for a more precise and nuanced profile

• Key patterns in how you think, feel, decide, and respond to stress

• Strengths, challenges, and growth areas

• A clearer understanding of the deeper structure behind your personality

I will personally review your results and create an individual report for you. So you get all of the above plus a bonus chapter that goes deeper into the patterns that I identified in your results.

Take the Test

Introducing Short Reads

I love writing and do it whenever I can, even if it’s just some scribbling in my journal. I need it every day. Almost...

However, what I don’t like at all is when I have to force myself to write. Then I simply struggle, get my fingers totally twisted, and study the texture of the wallpaper in front of me.

Not nice.

But that’s exactly what happens when things get too much.

So I decided to publish the additional public content whenever I feel like.

Doesn’t need to be much, my gentle inner voice said. Just sharing some bits and enjoying the process. And most importantly, without jamming your inbox.

Long story short...

I created a new section called Short Reads.

You can find the link in the top menu of my publication or just click the button below.

Open Short Reads

What’s With The Public Tuesday Letters?

The short answer is: I will keep them.

The longer answer...

I will change the format and turn them into a newsletter, which I still will publish on Tuesdays, but not necessarily on a weekly frequency.

I mean, for a newsletter I need some news, right? Like today, for example, though it’s Wednesday. My bad. Should not happen too often...

Okay, now back to serious again.

I’ll keep on writing additional essays and healing journeys. For the next few weeks, the focus will shift a bit towards creating guides, workbooks, and other tools for you.

The basic idea behind this is to support you not only for self-reflection but also in taking action to find the way back to yourself. And this finding back is basically what this publication is about...

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Wow, butterflies remember us from their caterpillar stage — what a heartwarming story. Like we matter to tiny insects. Just treat them well, and they come back to you as beautiful butterflies.

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And then I noticed that I read the text with my heart and not with my mind.

It didn’t say that the butterflies remember him. And later on in my research, I also found out that the memory thingy is not exactly true.

My story could have ended here like it’s often the case with many of these clickbaity things. But there was actually something valuable in what the Japanese boy discovered.

What did actually happen?

The 10-year-old Jo Nagai raised swallowtail butterflies at his home in Kobe, Japan. He noticed that the butterflies he cared deeply about when they were caterpillars didn’t fly right away when he released them. They stayed with him for a bit until they eventually moved on.

He then set up an experiment to test whether the memory of caterpillars stays intact even after metamorphosis. For this, he released some lavender scent right before giving them a mild vibrational stimulation. Well, actually it wasn’t that mild, as the caterpillar had to vomit from that. But hey, they survived it.

Later, when they were butterflies, he released lavender scent again, and the insects directly avoided it. He tried the same with the 2nd generation of those initially stimulated insects. The young ones also avoided the lavender scent without ever being stimulated.

What does this show?

Somehow the tendency to avoid lavender was passed to the next generation. The experiment does not show whether actual memories were passed.

Still, it’s incredible to see how learned responses are passed from one to next generation.

There are similar experiments with mice which showed the same.

I don’t know about us humans. Maybe we have that too. And if that’s the case, maybe we still avoid things that are no longer harmful to us.

For me, that’s something to ponder.

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Many of us have only a vague understanding of who we truly are. Of course, we know the roles we played and often the ones we were assigned to without our consent.

But what is underneath all that?

For a long time I thought knowing who you are was the first step on your healing journey. A bit like finding your way back to yourself requires that you have an idea where you need to go.

While this makes sense on a logical level, it’s also a bit demotivating. Because getting a solid idea of who you might be can take a lot of time. And then the answer might even be that you are not one fixed individual that is cast in some kind of form.

I know, I know... this is more complicated than it needs to be. But here is the good news:

Knowing you are of worth is much more important than knowing who you truly are.

Yes, you just need to know your worth. This may sound almost too simple and trivial. It most likely is. Yet finding out you have value can still be a big eye-opener.

Maybe it’s because value is such a vague word. On material things we can put a price tag, not so when it’s about us humans. And that’s a good thing.

Long story short, let me start by showing what it means when you see yourself as having no particular value.

The Problems With Feeling Worthless

Value is a relative measurement that we use to compare one thing with another.

When something is of low value, there consequently are other things of higher value.

So when you see yourself as of low value, this also means you regard some other people as more valuable than you. The people, not their jobs or money they make...

Accepting bad behavior:

When you see yourself as a small potato, you might accept being thrown around like one. Or take the family scapegoat role. It only works when the scapegoat accepts or internalizes being seen as lower value and therefore carries what the family puts on their back.

Life has to be earned

When you see yourself as of low value, you basically think you don’t deserve any of the nice things without having worked hard for it.

Giving up too fast:

Why should you even try big things when all you see yourself as is a tiny, insignificant being? You can spare yourself pointless struggles and just stick with the things that you think are realistic in your tiny world. So in a way, seeing yourself as of low value is kind of a reinforcing mechanism.

Seeing yourself as defective:

This one is probably the toughest. Even if we see ourselves as low value, we don’t like to be in such a powerless state. So we try with self-improvement, healing all the broken parts. But we might lose ourselves by focusing on fixing a false reality we were either made to believe or once chose as some kind of coping mechanism.

When there is nothing defective or wrong with us, the attempt to repair anything is pointless. But it could easily take half a lifetime before we find out that simple truth...

Now let’s compare this to the state of being aware you are of value as a human being.

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Every few decades, we humans like to scare ourselves. Not just a little, but like in a real horror movie.

No, I am not talking about wars.

I talk about things that often improve the quality of our lives. But before we finally accept and learn to live with them, many of us join the collective fear cycle and try to make it even bigger.

What I am talking about is the advent of a new technology.

I remember when, in the eighties, robots became good enough to be used in mass production. People were scared that they might lose their jobs. You couldn’t escape that topic in the media, and even if you tried, one of those dystopian movies would eventually get you.

No escape unless you lived under a rock...

People made Mr. Robot their main discussion topic. Everybody had an idea how doomed we might be in the future. Of course, there were also some optimists. But apart from a few exceptions, nobody could really see what would be coming.

At one point we forgot about the hysteria as if it never happened. Peaceful times. Until the collective fear struck us again; currently it’s all about AI, and we might soon come to a point where the fear cloud loses a bit of its steam.

What I noticed is that the underlying patterns when new technologies arrive are somewhat similar.

1. A few nerds play with a new technology, and things get traction

2. The new technology gets hyped up with its benefits in focus

3. As people get aware of the downside, fear starts to arise

4. The fear gets amplified and can reach panic levels

5. Depending on the impact of the technology, the Zeitgeist changes

6. A sobering set in once there is more clarity in what the new technology actually can do

7. People get used to and adapt to the new technology and forget about their fears

8. Life goes back to normal for maybe a decade or two

And the funny thing is that most of us don’t see this cycle only for what it is. Only when we are old enough and have gone through the seasons several dozen times do we begin to see the cycle for what it is.

In the 19th century it was “Railway Madness”, in the 1920s the advent of the radio, then the internet, the CERN Large Hadron Collider potentially creating a black hole that would swallow us all, and lately AI.

Maybe it all started with Gutenberg, the wheel, the fire, or using urea to bleach your clothes.

Who knows...

But before this article is over, I eventually want to come to the point I wanted to make.

Collective fear is easy to spot when you are not a part of the crowd. From the outside, things look wild and maybe a bit crazy, or let’s call it irrational. Sounds a bit softer and probably politically more correct.

And now imagine an outsider looking at you?

What self-created fears might they see in you?

How do you create your own suffering and even fuel it further?

And finally, what will you need to get out of that self-created cycle?

That’s it for today...

Before You Go…

This article is the first in my new section, Short Reads.

I created it to publish whenever I feel like writing without spamming your inbox. Meaning, there will be no notification for new stories in this section.

So you can either bookmark the above link and come here from time to time. Or you subscribe to Reflections where I will include updates of the most popular or meaningful short reads.

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I write a lot about healing your past and becoming who you truly are. Once you are on that path, you quickly learn that life can be bumpy.

For many of us, this journey starts after we have experienced major turbulence in life.

I don’t know whether it always has to be this way. I just know it was like that for me and many others.

Over the years I have learned that you can actually work with bad days. They often carry messages that want to be heard.

And surprise surprise, those messages are often not what we are made to believe they are.

In the following go into what worked for me and what didn’t

Everything will be fine

Ooh, how I hate this one.

I had a friend who used to tell me that everything will be fine in the end and if it isn’t fine, it’s not the end yet.

Maybe there is truth in it. But would you tell that to anyone who is severely wounded? Would you tell it to someone who tried to get out of their darkness for weeks? Where do you draw the line?

For me, saying everything will be fine feels like a slap in the face. To me it’s very much the same as saying: Deal with it and leave me alone.

The story is slightly different when you fall on your knees as a child, scrape your skin, and have this burning pain. When your mother tells you after she has cared for your wound that everything will be fine, then that’s something different. You can trust that, because your mother knows.

Of course that only works with mothers or people who deeply care first.

Others have it worse

This one isn’t helping either, though it’s less cruel than the former. Nothing changes for you when there are people with more pain in the world than you.

I mean maybe a sadist would care for a smile since that maybe makes him happy... but I would rather have nobody need to suffer or at least have someone who cares.

Apart from that, your pain doesn’t go away by invalidating it. Actually, it could make things just worse, as you might feel like an unworthy wimp while others seem to carry bigger pain with more dignity than you.

No, no... You don’t want the spiraling thoughts that then ask what’s wrong with you. They would just add to your suffering and let you fall even lower

Showing Gratitude

This one is somewhat similar to the above. Be grateful for what you have, and more good things will find their way to you.

This one can feel a bit like a lie when you are at a low point. The point here is that when you are low, many of your achievements can feel insignificant, much like they don’t matter at all since none of that currently seems of any help.

Seems is the word here.

The thoughts you have on dark days are not necessarily true. Pushing away your thoughts, of course, will not help. But you can at least ask yourself what measures you took on your good days to make your suffering less intense.

And that’s something you can be grateful for. At least a little.

Let me give you a few examples.

Taking care of yourself could be building up a financial cushion for the bad days. Having a few things in your place that make things a little better, like a cushy warm blanket, some bath oils you love that help you calm down. Often it’s simple things. Much like a grandmother who can heal so many things simply by preparing a cake you love the most.

So when you are at a low point and remember that you took care for such days, you can be grateful for exactly that. Because then you understood how much your well-being mattered to you even on the good days.

Now let’s come to the points that helped me (for paid subscribers only)

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I remember when I realized that some of the fuzzy memories from my childhood actually happened. The realization made me so dizzy that I almost collapsed while walking through the city center, completely lost in thought.

Luckily, there was a pole I could hold on to…

I wanted to tell a friend about what was causing me so much trouble. But before I could even touch on what happened in my childhood, she started comparing her family with mine and found that I was so much better off.

Such situations can make you feel so damn lonely, even among people you may call friends. It's like shouting into a void, only no sound comes out.

Why couldn't she at least listen first to what I had to say?

Isn't that what friends are supposed to do?

Well, I’ll come to that below, as it took me quite a while to understand that dynamic.

I remember when I was a student, a 30-year-old man poured out his heart to me while I was eating at a fast-food restaurant. Not really sure how the conversation started, probably with some innocent remarks…

So I listened… and that man told me more and more about his life. And I kept listening because I was genuinely interested in what he had to say. I couldn't even explain why.

“You did that man a huge favor,” my friend said after he had finally left the restaurant.

I didn't understand my friend back then. But now I know how rare it is to have someone who listens to your story, who can carry it, and doesn't try to stop you or run away.

It is actually a little ironic that nowadays there is so much public discussion about childhood trauma, dysfunctional families, and narcissism, yet these conversations often become much harder when they enter our private lives.

So why is that?

Your Life May Look Fine from the Outside

We are quick to put people into boxes. If you have a good job, seem healthy, are kind to others, and show no obvious signs that something is wrong, people assume you must have a good life.

He smiles, so he must be fine. Easy as that…

But when that person starts telling you that their life is hell, that they had a terrible childhood, and that they do not know how to fill the emptiness they feel inside, things become more complicated. It does not make things any easier when they have difficulty expressing themselves and finding the right words.

Your eyes still see a person who looks fine. Your ears hear a different story…

Perhaps that person also told you very different stories about their family in the past. Stories that put the family in a good light.

In fact, dysfunctional families often try to look good from the outside. They do not want anyone to see what is really going on behind closed doors.

As a child, I quickly learned that I must never do anything that could make my parents look bad. Of course, small things still happened sometimes. But I was punished hard to make sure I would never forget the lesson.

So that’s how I learned to keep up the false image of my family…

People Prefer Simple Truths

Family is often regarded as a sacred institution. The general assumption is that our parents only want the best for us. And if they made some mistakes, they simply didn't know better and still gave their best.

After all, you somehow made it through all that and learned to stand on your own two feet.

So the conclusion often is: It can't have been that bad.

It is a simple explanation.

And according to that logic, the only thing you need to do is to let go of the past and move on in life.

Problem fixed. No need to complicate things. Just move on. Simple as that…

Accepting your story and all the pain that comes with it may actually lead them to question their own stories. But they might not be ready to go down that road.

I cannot blame them. I tried to push my childhood memories away for as long as possible. Numbing my emptiness with alcohol, working hard, and other distractions didn't work for me. But for others, it can seem to work for a surprisingly long time…

I am not saying that everyone carries pain from the past and tries to push it away. But many more people do than you might imagine, because that pain is often not visible from the outside. Simple explanations can protect us from truths we are not ready to face.

So far, I have covered what can make it so difficult to share your story and be heard. This leads to the question of how you can deal with all of that.

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For a long time, I thought I just needed to figure out life to live it finally. First the work, then the reward, so to speak. As if life itself was something that needed to be earned before I deserved its sweeter fruits.

Of course, I tried to speed up the process. And while trying this, I kept stumbling upon the right mindset thing again and again. It came in so many different forms.

The simpler one was that you just need to be positive, and then everything will be possible. That was already a problem for me. I will come back to it later.

Affirmations and, in particular, the Law of Attraction were more complex approaches. You needed to be positive here as well. Additionally, you really needed to believe that things would actually manifest. And if things didn’t work out, you apparently didn’t believe strongly enough.

I have always been a doubtful and very self-critical person. So the above didn’t really work for me.

My mindset was that thinking things through and working hard would improve my little world. That’s at least how I made it through university and my first years in corporate life.

For quite a while, that mindset worked. And that’s maybe why it was so hard to see the trap for what it was.

Now I understand that the right mindset often comes after we have started changing our lives, not before.

So does that mean we can forget about this mindset thing completely?

Of course not.

The point I want to make is much simpler. Let me explain...

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Many years back, when I was still searching for my inner light, I asked myself whether this search would ever end.

I had seen many people along the way who got lost in their own journey, almost as if the search itself had become the purpose of their life. Every new insight they got made them hungry for even deeper knowledge.

They never seemed satisfied.

Probably the reason for this was that they waited for a magic moment when everything in their lives would make sense. Something like ecstasy, divine bliss, or at least one overwhelming moment that would prove they had finally made it.

But we are humans. That’s one thing we should never forget. We are made of flesh and bone and all the experiences that shaped us. Of course, we can heal large parts of all that and integrate the parts we once abandoned.

That being said, finding your inner light will not be a reset that undoes everything you experienced. It’s more like your inner light has always been there deep inside you. It was buried under all the unprocessed pain and suffering. And now that you have done lots of inner work, it can shine through you again.

No magic moment, but a reconnection with yourself. That’s still quite something as it will allow you to live your life.

The previous part of this series was about your life stabilizing, finding direction again, and feeling overall more aligned with life itself.

This part is about the final stage of your Finding Your Inner Light journey. As mentioned above, there won’t be bells and whistles. Nevertheless, there will be clear signs that you have finally arrived.

Compassion Without Losing Yourself

Once you know who you are, you begin to see people more for what they really are. You can see through the illusion. Because you know what it was like to play roles you were not even aware of for so damn long.

You know the pain behind those roles. But now you also know that other people’s roles have nothing to do with you. Their pain is their pain.

It can be a bit like with a cranky child. You are not responsible for its feelings. However, you know what it’s going through and try to calm it the best you can. But you sure take a few steps back when the child tries to attack you.

And, you wouldn’t take this personally. It’s a child, you know...

For me, it was quite a surprise how many wounded children still live inside adult bodies. It’s hard to believe. That’s why we feel bad when a boss, our parents, or any other authority person yells at us, puts us down, or does anything else an immature child would do.

We may have even learned at a young age that our mother or father needed us for their emotional stabilisation. And once we began to feel responsible for their emotional well-being, we also had to abandon parts of ourselves to do that job. For many, that was also the point when we lost the connection to our inner light.

But hey... now we have it back. And now we can see. Now we know that other people’s pain doesn’t have to be our pain.

It’s in our hands how much we want to help. We do not have to lose ourselves just because someone else is suffering.

The rest of this essay is for paid subscribers. Below the paywall, we go deeper into what changes once anxiety no longer runs the show.

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In the last part, we looked at the phase that comes after deep inner work.

While this brought us peace, it was also a phase when we felt empty and somehow lost in life. Almost as if we were between two worlds. We left the old one, but haven't arrived in the new one yet.

In the beginning, the space in between is not a problem. It's an invitation to take the rest our body, mind, and soul have been craving. So we allow that, and look forward to the day we are fully back in life.

And that's where the challenging part comes…

The process can take much longer than we might imagine.

For some, it can be months, while for others it might be years. There is nothing you can do to push it, other than get out of its way, much like when you were a child and wanted to grow up more quickly.

You were growing all the time and simply couldn't see the small but continuous growth. It's the same for the integration process.

Of course, there are signs that you are moving forward in life. While they are rather subtle when you are going through the process, they will be more obvious in hindsight.

In this part, I want to shed more light on those signs, so you have an outlook on how your journey might continue.

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I started with self-help books to find words for what I couldn't describe.

Back then, I thought I lacked purpose. You know, this magical thing you only have to find once, and suddenly life starts making sense. You do what you are supposed to do, everything falls into place, and the emptiness quietly leaves the room.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple.

Before finding my purpose, I first had to heal parts of my childhood. And that was when my healing journey actually began.

I tried yoga, which helped for a while. Then I took several Reiki courses. It was wild when I suddenly could feel my hands without using them. Nothing short of exciting.

But again, that effect didn't last for too long.

So I kept searching for the real thing, the method that would finally fill the unexplainable hole inside me. But the more I tried, the more frustrated I became. The effect got smaller and smaller. It felt like walking in a big circle for months, only to arrive where I had started.

There she was again, Miss Emptiness…

But this time, something else came with her.

When I started healing, I was full of hope. Now, even that hope began to leave me. I stood there with empty hands and the same emptiness inside me.

I felt more lost than ever as none of the things I had tried seemed to work.

The story doesn't end here. Actually, it's right where it begins.

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Relief vs. Healing

With physical wounds, we usually understand the difference between treating the wound and taking a painkiller.

Painkillers can feel like a solution first, as they give us relief. That's not necessarily bad because sometimes we need to ease the pain to allow healing to happen. As long as we don't confuse painkillers with real healing, there won't be any problems.

The story is not so easy when it's about healing your past. We often have no idea what only brings relief and what might actually contribute to our healing.

Take spirituality, for example.

Looking at our lives through a different lens can help us see the bigger picture. It can help us recognise patterns, find meaning, and understand that our pain is not just some random punishment from life.

But sometimes even beautiful practices can become a way to escape the pain for a while. When we use meditation just because of the calm it brings us. Or when we do forgiveness rituals, believing everything will be fine from now on.

Sometimes we do need to ease the pain. But real healing often asks us to turn toward the pain we were trying not to feel.

We Don't Know How Much There Is to Heal

When you cut your finger while preparing food, you know what to do. You clean the wound, maybe put some cream on it, and cover it with a Band-Aid.

You can watch the wound heal and know when the process is finished.

Healing from your past is way more complex.

You often have no idea about the damage done. You feel the wounds, but you don’t know exactly where they are and what it takes to heal them.

So it is easy to have the wrong expectations. And if somebody had told me that my little healing project would take 15 years, I probably wouldn't have believed it.

Maybe that's actually a good thing.

Fifteen years is a very long time. Back then, it was almost half of my life. An eternity I could hardly describe. Easy to lose all hope with such knowledge…

Healing Can Feel Stuck When We Never Rest

There is this German saying:

Walk slowly when you are in a hurry.

Healing your past can be very exhausting. The inner changes you go through often need way more energy than we might imagine.

When we try to rush things, we might end up like someone who tries to run a marathon like a sprint. After two kilometers, we run out of air and can barely take the next step. We are forced to stop for a while until we have recovered enough to keep moving slowly again.

When you run too fast, you usually know what happened. But with healing, it can feel as if you are stuck.

And in a way, you are.

Not because healing is not working, but because your system may have no space left to process what has already come up.

Every Layer Reveals the Next One

I climbed many mountains in my life. The more challenging ones had one thing in common. Usually, in the last third, I felt as if I was not moving at all.

When the mountain is steep, you just see the wall in front of you. Often, you don’t know what to expect behind the rock you are trying to walk around.

Maybe another rock, a glacier crack, or an overhang…

The more complex the terrain becomes, the more it seems like you are making no progress at all.

Healing can feel very similar. Once one layer softens, the next one may become visible. That can make it feel as if nothing has changed, even though you have actually moved deeper.

Sometimes What We Need Is a Map

Climbing a mountain becomes much less of a drama when you have a map.

It doesn’t need to be super precise. As long as it shows the important segments and what challenges to expect, you are good to go. You wouldn’t be surprised when the ascent suddenly becomes hard. Instead of losing hope, you’d adjust, take it a bit slower, and manage your energy levels a little better.

And once you make it out of one segment, you know you made progress and thus can keep your spirits high.

But there is more to that…

If you focus on the summit only and make reaching it your only goal, you lose orientation quickly when you cannot see it. You may keep on going, but see no progress. Climbing the mountain becomes torture. At times, you may even wonder what made you do such a stupid thing…

However, if you regard climbing the mountain as a journey instead, you might even enjoy walking it despite all the hardship that you may face. You would simply regard it as part of a journey. Much like a riddle. The fun is in solving it. The actual answer still matters, but it is no longer the only reason you keep going.

Now imagine that healing your past could be like that.

You don’t know exactly what to expect, but having a map can give you an idea of the terrain and the major healing phases.

When you feel lost, you still need to find your own way. But the map can help you navigate. You wouldn’t rush things as much. You would accept the challenge from one rock to the next, knowing that you are making progress, no matter how small it may look.

And while you walk on your healing path, you may actually begin to appreciate the journey itself. Because deep down, you know that this journey is a journey back to yourself.

Arriving there is a reward, like solving the riddle. Maybe the deeper reward is that you slowly learn to live again while you are still healing.

Before You Go…

Understanding healing as a journey helped me move through all the challenges, dark days, and setbacks.

I now know what my path looked like. And while it was my very own path, it also followed a larger pattern many of us seem to go through.

To make your journey a little easier to walk, I created the Finding Your Inner Light series. You can find it in the link below:

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