You are functioning. You answer the emails, you cook the dinner, you check the homework, you keep your tone measured and your image intact, and then you lie in bed at night wondering who you are inside any of it. Nothing is wrong, and something is missing, and that combination is more disorienting than an actual crisis would be.
In this episode I give that experience a name, because carrying it without one turns it into a personal failure instead of a process you can locate yourself inside. I call it core abandonment, and it is not something someone did to you. It is the gradual leaving of yourself, need by need, in order to keep everything around you intact, and it happens so functionally that most people do not notice until they are already in too deep.
We walk the three stages of how this moves through a person. The mask, which is not a flaw and is one of the most intelligent things your system has ever built for you. Erosion, where sustained adaptation begins taking a real biological toll, your window of tolerance narrows, and your ability to feel yourself from the inside starts to dull until numbness arrives before pain does. And the threshold, my favorite of the three, which is the moment your body finally surfaces what your mind has been managing, and which is not a breakdown but the most intelligent signal your psyche can produce.
I bring in Winnicott's false self, allostatic load, interoception, and what happens to a prefrontal cortex that has been regulating your presentation for years without relief, and then I bring it back into the body with sixty seconds of return before we close. I also tell you my own to be's, including the one I did not want to say out loud, because this framework did not come out of a textbook. It came out of a life. Mine, and probably yours.
The question is not about existence. It is about which version of yourself you are willing to let live.
Thank you for taking a seat at my table.
Find me on Instagram and TikTok at dvntherepe, and everything lives at dvntherepe.com. The Deep Lantern of Soulwell is on YouTube, and All Things DVN is on every platform, so keep listening.
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