In this episode, I explore something that keeps surfacing in my clinical work: the resistance many of us feel toward admitting that we need relationship.

There’s a cultural narrative that equates needing with weakness — that if you were secure enough, whole enough, evolved enough, you wouldn’t need anyone. You would simply want them. But when we slow down, that distinction starts to feel less clear.

What is the difference between dependency and need?
Why does naming a relational need feel so vulnerable?
And what happens when independence becomes armor?

In this conversation, I reflect on how our relationship with need forms early, how culture reinforces self-sufficiency as virtue, and why the human need for connection doesn’t disappear just because we grow up.

To be human is to need. Not in a collapsing way. Not in a childlike way. But in a relational way.

This episode is an invitation to notice your own relationship with needing — where it feels charged, where it feels defended, and what might shift if you let it be simple.

If this resonates, I explore these themes more deeply in Phase Two: Unraveling inside The Process of Unbecoming.

You can learn more at theunbecominghub.com.

This episode turns to the myth of Psyche and Cupid—not as a symbolic puzzle to decode, but as a lived map of human relationship, trust, and rupture.

Rather than treating the myth as a story about love rewarded or trials overcome, this reflection stays with its central tension: what happens when intimacy is organized around certainty rather than contact. Psyche’s desire to see Cupid—to know, verify, and secure what she already feels—marks a deeply human moment. Not a mistake born of weakness, but an expression of fear in the face of vulnerability.

The episode explores how love often collapses under the weight of needing reassurance, clarity, or proof. When trust is replaced by surveillance—when closeness must be explained, illuminated, or guaranteed—connection fractures. What follows is not punishment, but consequence: separation, longing, and the slow work of repair.

Psyche’s trials are not framed as tests of worth or endurance. They are understood as the reorganization of relationship—away from possession and toward maturity. Love, here, is not something that can be held intact through effort or certainty. It survives only when allowed to remain partially unknown.

This episode speaks to the grief of lost innocence in relationship, the inevitability of rupture, and the deeper intimacy that becomes possible when love is no longer asked to protect us from uncertainty.

The myth is not offered as instruction, but as recognition.

If this episode resonates, you can explore The Process of Unbecoming and related work at theunbecominghub.com.

This episode names an experience many people recognize but struggle to articulate: the sense that something essential has gone missing, even when life appears functional, successful, or stable from the outside.

Rather than treating this feeling as pathology, depression, or a problem to solve, the episode explores it as a relational and cultural loss—a gradual disconnection from the deeper current of life that once organized meaning, vitality, and belonging. Not a loss caused by personal failure, but one shaped by adaptation, survival, and the demands of modern life.

The loss of the soul, as described here, is not about spirituality in a religious sense, nor is it about reclaiming a forgotten essence through effort or insight. It points instead to what happens when attention becomes narrowed around performance, identity, and management—when experience is reduced to function, explanation, and control.

In this narrowing, life can feel flatter, thinner, and more effortful. People often respond by trying to fix themselves, understand themselves better, or optimize their inner world. Yet these strategies frequently deepen the very disconnection they’re meant to resolve.

This episode offers a different orientation. Rather than searching for what was lost, it invites a recognition that what we call “soul” was never destroyed—it was obscured by the conditions that required us to adapt away from contact. The return, if it happens, is not dramatic or sudden. It arrives quietly, through relationship, presence, and moments of being met without needing to perform or explain.

The episode stays with the grief of this loss without rushing toward repair, and gestures toward a way of living that allows depth to re-enter experience without effort or manufacture.

If this episode resonates, you can explore The Process of Unbecoming and related work at theunbecominghub.com.

This episode speaks to a quiet but persistent confusion many people carry: the belief that wholeness must exclude struggle, contradiction, or difficulty in order to be real.

Rather than framing the human condition as something to rise above, outgrow, or heal past, this reflection places it inside wholeness itself. Fluctuation, inconsistency, emotional pain, ambivalence, and limitation are not evidence that something has gone wrong—they are part of what a whole human life actually includes.

Much of personal growth culture subtly teaches the opposite: that peace should replace tension, that clarity should resolve uncertainty, that integration should smooth out the rough edges of experience. When those expectations don’t hold, people often assume they’ve failed the work or missed something essential.

This episode challenges that assumption.

Wholeness here is not defined as stability, regulation, or coherence of experience. It is the ground that holds experience as it is—before improvement, before understanding, before resolution. The human condition doesn’t interrupt wholeness; it expresses within it.

As this orientation settles, the relationship to difficulty begins to change. Experience no longer needs to be corrected in order to belong. Struggle can be present without being pathologized. Moments of contraction or disconnection no longer threaten something essential.

This is not a call to accept less or bypass pain, but an invitation to stop using pain as proof of incompleteness.

The episode offers a reorientation away from managing experience toward recognizing that nothing human disqualifies wholeness in the first place.

If this episode resonates, you can explore The Process of Unbecoming and related work at theunbecominghub.com.

This episode stays with one of the most difficult truths to live inside: that nothing—no state, no relationship, no sense of self—lasts forever.

Rather than approaching impermanence as a concept to accept or a mindset to adopt, this reflection explores how deeply unsettling this reality can be when it’s actually felt. Much of what organizes human effort—attachment, striving, identity, hope—is built around the wish for continuity. When that continuity fractures, even briefly, it can feel like something essential has been lost.

The episode speaks to how people often respond to impermanence by tightening their grip: trying to preserve states of connection, regulate away fluctuation, or secure meaning through certainty and control. Yet these strategies tend to amplify suffering, not relieve it, because they ask life to do something it cannot do—stay still.

Here, impermanence is not framed as a spiritual ideal or a lesson to master. It is treated as a lived condition that shapes grief, fear, longing, and love itself. The pain of loss is not bypassed or reframed; it is honored as the cost of contact.

At the same time, the episode gestures toward a quieter truth: that meaning does not come from permanence, but from participation. When experience is allowed to move without being held in place, presence becomes less about preservation and more about meeting what is here while it is here.

Nothing lasts forever—but something essential is not lost in that fact.

If this episode resonates, you can explore The Process of Unbecoming and related work at theunbecominghub.com.

Many people arrive at The Process of Unbecoming with a familiar concern lingering quietly in the background:
Is this just another version of insight work? Another way of understanding myself without anything actually changing?

This episode stays with that question rather than resolving it too quickly.

What’s explored here is the difference between insight as management and reorientation as contact. Not insight that explains experience from a distance, but a shift in how experience is met. Not awareness that produces more information about the self, but a change in the relationship to the self that no longer depends on fixing, resolving, or improving what appears.

Insight work often leaves people sharper, clearer, and still efforting—still responsible for holding themselves together. In contrast, the process described here moves underneath explanation and strategy, where patterns are no longer treated as problems to be solved but as intelligent adaptations that once made sense. When that shift happens, insight may still arise, but it no longer functions as control.

This conversation speaks directly to the fatigue many people feel after years of therapy, self-work, and personal development—the exhaustion of always needing to understand themselves better in order to feel okay. It names why that exhaustion isn’t a failure of effort, and why more insight often isn’t the relief it promises to be.

What becomes possible instead is quieter and harder to define: a sense that nothing needs to be resolved before life can be met, that experience no longer has to be organized into meaning in order to be valid, and that wholeness doesn’t depend on awareness staying online.

This episode is less about answering the question and more about letting it reorganize how the question itself is held.

If this episode resonates, you can explore The Process of Unbecoming and related work at theunbecominghub.com.

This episode is an introduction to Unbecoming You—what it is, how it came to be, and why it exists.

Rather than offering another path of self-improvement or personal optimization, Unbecoming You is an invitation to step out of the endless cycle of becoming. It’s a way of relating to yourself that emphasizes understanding over fixing, orientation over effort, and humanity over performance.

I share a bit about my own path—how years of therapy, training, and self-work led me to question the frameworks I had been operating inside of, and why the process of unbecoming felt like the most honest response. This is not about rejecting therapy or growth, but about loosening the pressure to constantly become someone else in order to feel whole.

This episode offers a grounding orientation for anyone who feels tired of striving and curious about another way of relating to themselves.

In this episode, we explore:

What “unbecoming” actually means

How this work differs from traditional self-help and therapy models

Why wholeness isn’t something you achieve, but something you uncover

The role of identity, adaptation, and survival strategies in shaping who we become

Why slowing down can be more transformative than pushing forward

If you’re new here:
This episode is a good place to begin. There’s nothing to fix, nothing to master—just an invitation to listen, notice, and return to yourself. If this episode resonates, you can explore The Process of Unbecoming and related work at theunbecominghub.com.

This is where it all begins. I share my story—the exhaustion of trying to become who I thought I was supposed to be, the moment I realized the paradigm was broken, and how that led to writing The Process of Unbecoming. If you're new here, this is your invitation to stop trying to find what was never lost.

If this episode resonates, you can explore The Process of Unbecoming and related work at theunbecominghub.com.