The Phoenix Within
Remembering the Self Beneath Trauma
"Some wounds separate us from others.
The deepest ones separate us from ourselves."
The First Separation
Recently, the words of a Soul Society follower, Madelaine, deeply touched me.
She wrote to me in response to a reel I posted on Instagram about trauma:
"Trauma doesn't only separate us from our emotions; it also separates us from one another."
When I look back on my own life, I realize that trauma was never simply pain. It was separation. Not from other people. But from myself.
I spent most of my life wondering why I felt so alone, even when surrounded by loving people. More painfully, I spent much of that time judging myself for it.
How could I feel lonely when I was loved?
How could I still be unhappy?
What is wrong with me?
Over the last two years of intense inner work, I came to understand something that changed everything:
My loneliness was not created by the absence of others. It was created by the absence of my true self.
I learned very early in life that it felt safer to hide myself than to reveal myself. Over time, this became so familiar that I mistook my role for my identity. I thought who I had learned to be was who I actually was.
That is what happens when we lose touch with our essence. Something within us knows there is more. And it longs to be seen.
Yet the environments we unconsciously create often require us to remain inside the role that once kept us safe. At some point, I no longer remembered who I was.
That disconnection manifested as depression first; turning into panic attacks later. The destruction I had buried inside myself slowly turned against me.
What hurt most was not the suffering itself. It was the shame of being, I had internalized.
The feeling that I was somehow failing at being human.
I was met with sentences like:
"But you're smart."
"But you're pretty."
"What do you have to be sad about?"
These reactions became a big lesson to me:
Pain cannot be healed by being explained away. It can only be healed by being seen.
When we grow up having to function, meet expectations, or regulate the emotional states of our parents, our attention begins to flow outward. And attention that constantly flows outward can never fully gather within.
We learn to observe instead of feel.
To anticipate instead of remain present.
To sense what remains unspoken in a room.
We become experts in the needs of others.
And in the process, we lose access to our own.
At the time I thought I was simply easygoing. Flexible. Someone who got along with everyone.
Today I see something different:
I was a girl who learned that love meant making sure everybody else was okay.
Looking back, I realize that I never truly had the privilege of getting to know myself because I had suppressed the deepest parts of my own soul.
For a long time, I believed my symptoms were something to fight against. I thought healing meant getting rid of them.
But awareness changed everything.
Awareness is light.
And light is information.
The more clearly I looked, the more I realized that none of these experiences were trying to hurt me but help.
My depression was love — It shut me down when feeling became too painful.
My eating disorder was love — It gave me a sense of control in an environment that felt unpredictable.
My panic attacks were love — My body desperately trying to show me that something in my life was not safe for me.
What I once viewed as brokenness, I now recognize as intelligence.
Not comfortable intelligence. But the intelligence of a nervous system doing its best to protect a child that had learned survival before selfhood.
The tragedy was never the symptom itself. The tragedy was that I spent years judging myself for the very strategies that once helped me survive.
Learning to Survive
Many sensitive people know this pattern.
A child who learns to read a room in order to feel safe often develops an extraordinary sensitivity to the invisible tension, emotions and the unhealed patterns and unspoken dynamics that run their family.
What later becomes known as empathy is often not born from a spiritual gift. It is a necessity in order to survive because as a child you hold no power.
Kindness is a choice. Hypervigilance is a survival strategy. They can look remarkably similar from the outside.
A child who learns to read a room in order to feel safe becomes exceptionally skilled at anticipating the needs, emotions, and unspoken tension of others. What looks like extraordinary empathy is often an adaptation born from necessity.
The problem was never sensitivity itself.
The problem was the direction in which our attention flowed. Outward.
We learn to understand others in order to feel safe — But not ourselves.
We learn to avoid conflict — But not to set boundaries.
We learn to confuse love with adaptation.
And in doing so, we lose connection to our own truth. For most of my life my family and friends described me as kind, loving, easygoing, never angry.
And for a long time I believed them. Until I realized something startling:
I wasn't free of anger.
I had simply never allowed myself to feel it.
Because anger protects boundaries. And boundaries felt dangerous.
When I look back at my friendships, romantic relationships, and the ways I constantly overgave, I see the same pattern repeating itself.
I struggled to receive. I struggled to ask for what I needed. I took responsibility for emotions that were not mine. I carried burdens that did not belong to me.
Somewhere deep inside I believed: If I can fix their pain, maybe I will finally be safe.
But safety cannot be built on self-abandonment.
Every truth we swallow.
Every boundary we ignore.
Every feeling we hide to make someone else comfortable.
Leaves us a little further from ourselves.
When I turned inward
Carl Gustav Jung once wrote:
"Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens."
For a long time, I did not understand this sentence. Today, I believe many people spend their entire lives looking outward without realizing it.
Just as I did. Seeking validation, safety, approval. Seeking the feeling that one day they will finally be enough.
We compare ourselves. We optimize ourselves. We project ourselves into the future. We justify ourselves through the past.
And somehow we are never enough in the present moment.
Because the present was never a safe place to be.
When I began practicing insight meditation, I initially approached it the way I approached everything else.
As another solution. Another way to improve myself.
Insight meditation gave me something I had been searching for my entire life without realizing it:
For the first time, I was not trying to become someone.
I was simply sitting with myself.
And in that stillness I began to see how much of my life had been spent trying to reach some future version of myself who would finally be worthy.
I realized that I was creating distance between myself and life itself.
Jung called the path back to ourselves individuation. The process of ceasing to be only the roles we learned to play. The process of meeting what we have hidden, rejected, or split off within ourselves.
I walked this path long before I knew there was a name for it.
It was painful as I was sitting with the pain I was avoiding my whole life.
That bad feeling when someone was disappointed because of me.
The pain of being abandoned when I showed my real self.
The bad conscience when I said NO instead of yes.
It was messy and not glamorous. Yet it is often in the midst of the storm that we are invited to go deeper in search of stillness. Yet, what was waiting on the other side would change the course of my whole being.
It consisted of the slow dismantling of ideas about who I thought I should be.
And the even slower remembrance of who I truly am.
The collapse of my relationship. The fear of abandonment. The end of my PhD.
The realization that I had unconsciously tied my worth to achievement and self-love to outside validation.
My ego, which is for me a learned survival strategy or a role and not what we truly are, could not see a way to sustain itself because I achieved everything that I thought I needed. So in a way it buried its own grave. All these endings and pain demanded my shadow to finally look at itself. It was mirroring back.
And what I discovered was pure freedom:
Love was never something I had to earn.
Not through intelligence.
Not through achievement.
Not through self-sacrifice.
In my fear of being abandoned, I had abandoned myself.
Today I no longer fear abandonment in the same way.
Because I know I will choose myself. I will love myself. I will respect myself.
Healing is not about getting rid of trauma. It is about remembering the parts of ourselves that got lost beneath it.
Society Mirrors This Wound
What fascinates me most is the question of how this inner process affects the world around us.
During my studies in economics, I spent years analyzing differences. High socioeconomic status and low socioeconomic status. The rich and the poor. Success and failure.
We build models around categories, clusters, and gaps.
And while these distinctions can be useful, they sometimes obscure something equally important:
The spectrum that exists between them. The movement. The process. The human stories underneath the data.
Over time, I began to wonder whether many of the patterns we observe in society first emerge within the individual mind.
What manifests collectively often begins personally. The fears we do not examine. The wounds we do not heal. The beliefs we pass on without questioning them.
If this is true, then many of the cycles we observe are not merely social or economic phenomena. They are human ones.
And perhaps this is why curiosity matters so much. The moment we become curious about what lies beneath a pattern, we create the possibility of interrupting it. Of choosing something different. I often think about countries shaped by generations of war, scarcity, or collective trauma.
What does survival teach a society?
What becomes normal when uncertainty lasts long enough?
Perhaps greater rigidity.
Greater fear of uncertainty.
Greater attachment to control.
Not because people are inherently different, but because nervous systems adapt. And those adaptations eventually become culture.
Because perhaps the same fracture that runs through individuals also runs through society itself.
A society that has spent generations learning how to function, perform, and survive can easily lose touch with vulnerability, compassion, and genuine connection.
Competition begins to look normal.
Control begins to look normal.
Fear begins to look normal.
But normality is not the same thing as health. Nor is it an indication of truth.
Many things simply become familiar because they have been repeated long enough.
Madelaine's words touched me deeply here:
"To me, healing is far more than a personal process. It is also a social and political act."
The more I sit with this, the more I believe she is right.
Every wound we unconsciously pass on leaves traces. In relationships. In families. In communities. In institutions.
And eventually in society itself.
She continued:
"Every time we learn to meet our emotions with compassion instead of suppressing them, we interrupt the transmission of hurt."
Change does not begin in political systems. It begins in moments when human beings find the courage to feel honestly. To look honestly.
And to take responsibility for what lives within them.
Can you listen to someone who is vegetarian without giving a speech on why people should eat meat?
Can you listen to someone's pain without explaining it away?
Can you listen to a woman talking about violence she experienced without immediately responding, "not all men"?
Can you listen to someone who has lived through war without turning it into a political debate?
Ask yourself: Can you truly listen without feeling personally attacked?
Because often, what gets activated is not the topic itself.
Maybe the person defending meat learned that their way of life is tied to belonging and identity.
Maybe the person explaining away pain learned that emotions are problems to solve rather than experiences to witness.
Maybe the man responding with "not all men" hears accusation where none was intended, because he has built his identity around being a good man.
Maybe the person debating war cannot stay with the human suffering because it evokes feelings of guilt, helplessness, fear, or anger.
The shadow is often not what we say. It is what we cannot bear to feel.
Interestingly, individuation may be one of the greatest gifts we can offer the collective.
The conformity we see around us reveals just how dangerous authenticity still feels to many people. And yet every time we choose ourselves, we show others that they are allowed to choose themselves too.
Not against the collective. But for a collective rooted in truth rather than adaptation.
The paradox is that choosing yourself ultimately serves everyone.
The more integrated you become, the less unconscious suffering you pass on. Authenticity becomes a social contribution.
One painful truth we often have to accept is that not everyone will continue walking this path with us. People who still need their roles to survive are not weaker. Nor are we somehow better for seeing beyond ours.
But we cannot abandon ourselves in order to remain connected to them. The moment we begin choosing ourselves, an entire system shifts.
Not because we punish others but because we stop carrying responsibilities that were never ours to carry: Our energy, attention, time and sense of worth.
People who have become accustomed to that access may not experience our change as liberation.
Often they experience it as loss. This does not make them wrong. It simply means that every system attempts to preserve itself.
Change creates friction.
Even healthy change.
Growth is often met with misunderstanding. Resistance. Projection. Sometimes anger.
But perhaps their anger is not truly about us.
It is simply the moment another person is confronted with themselves. With expectations they placed upon us. With roles we once fulfilled. With needs we unconsciously carried for them.
I want to be honest here. This runs deep.
When you grow up around depression, addiction, or suicidality especially with a parent, boundaries can feel terrifying.
The moment you choose yourself, it can feel as though another person's life depends on your sacrifice.
But it never did.
It was never your responsibility to carry. You are allowed to let go.
The Return to Oneness
Individuation is not the rejection of community. It is the ability to finally enter community as yourself.
From the world to yourself.
And from yourself back into the world.
Not as a role, an adoption, a mask. But as a human being.
Healing does not end with the self.
It naturally returns to relationship.
To community.
To service.
To love.
The wounded person journeys through their wound. Learns its language. Learns its lessons.
And then returns carrying light for others.
Not because they have transcended being human. But because they remember the path.
As Within, So Without
The Hermetic tradition expresses it this way:
"As within, so without. As above, so below."
Perhaps our collective conflicts mirror our inner conflicts.
Perhaps our relationships mirror the relationship we have with ourselves.
Perhaps peace does not begin when we learn to love ourselves.
Perhaps it begins when we become curious about what connects us rather than what separates us.
In every moment, we have a choice.
We can build our identity around difference — Or we can build connection around our shared humanity.
We can connect through pain — Or through love.
But to connect through either, we must first be willing to meet our own pain.
Not run from it. Not project it. Not make others responsible for carrying it.
Simply sit with it.
Feel it.
Listen to what it is trying to teach us.
Because the world does not change when we change other people.
The world changes when we stop waiting for others to become what we ourselves are unwilling to embody.
To me, this is what it means to create a new world. Not building something outside of us. But birthing something within us.
A different way of relating. A different way of seeing. A different frequency of being.
One rooted not in fear. Not in control. Not in identity.
But in love. Universal love.
Because we recognize that no perspective owns reality. Every human being experiences life through a unique lens. And every lens reveals only part of the whole.
Wisdom is not claiming to possess truth.
Wisdom is remaining open to it.
Perhaps this is what Gandhi meant when he wrote:
“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
Not by forcing others to change. Not by winning arguments. Not by convincing people.
But by embodying what you believe is possible.
By becoming a living reminder. That authenticity is possible. That healing is possible. That compassion is possible. That love is possible.
Beneath our stories, the human experience is what connects us.
The longing to belong.
The fear of loss.
The desire to be seen.
The hope to love and be loved.
Perhaps we were never as separate as we thought.
And perhaps remembering that is the beginning of everything.
To those carrying an open heart in a world that rewards armor:
I see you and the burdens you silently carry in your heart, invisible to most people.
Do not mistake your sensitivity for weakness.
It is the very thing this world needs most.
The parts of you that feel different are not mistakes.
They are invitations.
To remember who you are.
Not a soul trapped inside a human.
But a soul having a human experience.
That experience was never meant to make you harder.
It is teaching you to be more fully yourself.
Your presence in this world is a gift.
I love you and I am grateful you are shining your light in this world.
Larissa
Some stories travel further when they are shared.