02 · Where our stories come from
Most of the stories we carry about worth weren’t consciously chosen.
They were conditioned in us: picked up from mom, experienced with dad, absorbed from the atmosphere of the home we grew up in, from culture, from religion.
They were learned from our earliest heartbreaks, our earliest experiences of pain, our earliest experiences where we felt unsafe, our earliest experiences where we just wanted to belong and didn’t.
They were written by younger versions of ourselves, in moments that were too big for us to handle alone.
And they become protective patterns. Bracing for rejection, scanning for faults, people-pleasing, shutting down in conflict. They fire whenever your body senses a threat, often in ways that quietly run your life.