Secrets Make Us Sick (And Burn Us Out)
“Researchers found that 60 percent of people lied at least once during a 10-minute conversation, averaging two to three lies each. Most people didn’t even realize they’d done it until watching themselves on video. The lying was so automatic, so woven into normal interaction, that it was invisible to their conscious mind.
But their body knew.”
Any of this sound familiar?
"I'm fine" when you're drowning
Saying yes to plans you have zero intention of keeping
Not telling your partner about money you spent or debt you have
A marriage that's been over for years but you're hopeful your passive-aggressiveness will change things
Exaggerating your qualifications to get a job you kind of deserved anyway
Money stress you don't talk about
Not correcting someone's misconception about you because it benefits you
Anger you smile through because you don’t want to hurt feelings
The fact that you don't actually want this career/life
A secret about who you are, were, or want to be
Making excuses instead of telling the hard truth about why you did something
Family abuse that "we don't discuss."
An affair, emotional, physical, grey area or otherwise
A diagnosis you're hiding
Pretending to be okay at work while falling apart
Keeping silent to keep the peace
This article is about three things:
We all lie, keep secrets, evade, avoid, and stretch the truth at some point. Most often: daily. Some do it more often than others; some more dramatically and obviously than others; sometimes out of necessity; sometimes unconsciously; rarely — but not never — because we intend to harm
No matter what, there’s a bodily cost to this behavior (again, whether it’s conscious or not; morally justified or morally reprehensible) — which is why, where I see burnout, I almost always see secret keeping of some kind.
You can start un-lying and un-keeping secrets, and there will be costs there too (people and things get weird when you change), but almost always less than the costs required to maintain a false self.
Because whatever we call it — lying, secrets, half-truths, creative takes on the truth, omissions, even subconsciously telling yourself something works for you that actually doesn’t — this misalignment creates effort to maintain and track, even if it’s automatic.
If you’re also conscious of the duplicity, regardless of intention, there’s usually a mix of fear of being found out and moral guilt, adding a further stress response.
The bodily costs happen not because you're a bad person (although if you appeared in a recent Dept of Justice document dump, please take a hard look at the palace of lies around you).
But because maintaining multiple realities is one of the most energy-intensive things a human nervous system can do. And if you're running on empty, this exhaustion is almost certainly part of the picture.
Like burnout itself, the bodily stress costs and manifestations aren’t a moral failing. It’s just how your body works.
____
Lying and secret-keeping aren't necessarily moral failures.
They may be well-honed and logical survival skills, trauma responses (fawning is full of lying, secret-keeping, and creative expressions of the truth as a way to keep yourself safe by ensuring the people around you are “okay”). Maybe it’s culturally mandated, accepted, expected. If this resonates, just know that you didn't invent the pattern. You learned it because in your family, your community, your workplace, some version of dishonesty—to yourself, to others—was the way you stayed alive, stayed loved, stayed in the system.
This isn’t true for all situations, and we’ve seen some examples of utter moral failures related to secrets, lies, and untruths lately in the news, not to mention the ten thousand examples you could probably name right now of times when the lies were serving a great purpose of blame shifting, abuse, amassing power, and exacting control.
The point is, though: the nervous system doesn’t really care what the intentions are. Breaks from our true self, even in the name of our own personal safety, are costly.
Most of us are already paying the cost of these lies. Not because we're bad people, but because we fear the costs of NOT lying are even higher. We envision financial collapse. Relationship dissolution. Abandonment. Excommunication. The loss of the only identity we've ever known.
So we lie. We keep secrets. We soften the truth. We tell ourselves it's not that bad, it's for the right reasons, it's protecting someone, it's just how things work.
The costs of lying are high. As you'll learn below. But we're paying them anyway—because we're convinced the alternative is worse.Are You Talking About Bruno, or is Your Casita Crumbling too?
If you know Encanto, you know the song "We Don't Talk About Bruno." Lin-Manuel Miranda didn't just write a banger of a song with an infectious rhythm and rhyme scheme. He encoded the neurobiological and emotional science of why we normalize secret-keeping, how it becomes its own beast, and how we lose the thread about why we even started in the first place.
Then suddenly we're stuck in a large, crumbling house built on our own flimsy reality.
The song tells the story of a man with a gift. A family decided his gift was dangerous—because he told uncomfortable and confusing truths—so they buried it. They didn't talk about him. They didn't acknowledge what happened. They built an entire psychological and relational architecture around the absence of one person, one truth, one thing they all knew but weren't allowed to name.
And the whole family is almost crushed by it.
Not metaphorically. Actually crushed. The house is literally cracking under the weight of what they're not saying.
The song makes us laugh because it's absurd—this extreme loyalty to silence, this almost religious commitment to not naming the obvious. But underneath the comedy is the very real mechanism of how families (and workplaces, and systems of power) maintain control: You control people by controlling the narrative. You keep people small by insisting that what they're seeing, what they know, what they're experiencing, isn't real.
We're living in a moment where this is happening at scale.
We're being asked, constantly, to not trust our own eyes. To accept explanations that don't match the evidence in front of us. To participate in collective denial about what's happening to our neighbors, to vulnerable people, to the basic functioning of our institutions.
The Epstein files, for instance, revealed a network so vast that it required not just the silence of the victims—but the active participation of powerful people in pretending not to see. Not to know. To live in a state of profound contradiction between what they knew and what they were saying.
That takes an enormous amount of energy.
And it has a cost.
And unfortunately for those people, that cost is no different than the cost of your white lies, your half-truths, your strategic avoidance, your well-meaning family secrets.
Here's the thing about how your body responds to secret keeping and dishonesty:
You may only be aware of the strain on your body if you're also aware of your discomfort with your dishonesty.
If the dishonesty feels like it's serving a purpose, if it's a fawn-based trauma response (more on that below), if you grew up in a world where stretching the truth was normal—where being "creative with the truth" was acceptable if the ends justified the means, where lies were told casually and often—you might experience less overt physical strain about lying. Your nervous system learned early that this was the operating system. Less internal conflict means less acute stress signals.
But if you grew up where honesty was demanded, where your authentic self was expected to show up, and now you're maintaining secrets and departures from truth? Your body will make that struggle known. Loud and clear. The contradiction between what you learned and what you're doing creates visible strain you can't miss.
In either scenario, though, your body is registering the misalignment—you just may not be aware of it yet.
As the kids say, "clock it."
No matter how we're wired—okay with creative half-truths, or honest to a fault—all of us are susceptible to normalizing departures from truth, integrity, and alignment.
Here's the trap: over time, we normalize departures from truth, integrity, and alignment.
What started as acute stress—that body-wide alertness to the contradiction—gets repressed. We get better at justifying. More comfortable with the half-truths. The physical signs don't disappear; we just learn to ignore them. It becomes muscle memory almost, a reflex. You stop noticing that you're living in contradiction because you've gotten so good at it.
But the cost is still being extracted.
The chronic stress is still there. The immune dysregulation is still happening. The cortisol is still elevated. You've just stopped paying attention to the signals. And so you push through, and push through, until one day you hit a wall and suddenly everything is exhausting in a way you can't explain.
That's burnout. And underneath it, almost always, is the accumulated cost of living in multiple realities at once.
What Lying Actually Does to the Body
Let me start with the research, because it's important. But I'm also going to start with compassion, because the research is about you, and you're not a monster for having a flexible relationship with the truth. In most cases, it’s your nervous system doing what it learned to do (and therefore, it can unlearn what no longer serves).
-> To be clear: this doesn’t excuse any of us from taking responsibility for the harm done for even the most logical, defensible, unconscious of falsehoods; it just means you also get grace and self-compassion for experiencing life as a human.
A landmark study from the University of Massachusetts found that 60 percent of people lied at least once during a 10-minute conversation, averaging two to three lies each. Most people didn't even realize they'd done it until watching themselves on video. The lying was so automatic, so woven into normal interaction, that it was invisible to their conscious mind.
But their body knew.
The Physiological Split
When you tell a lie—whether it's a small social courtesy ("I'd love to come to that party") or a larger omission (not admitting that you're falling apart, having an affair [or both…])—you're creating a physiological split:
What your mind is doing:
Managing the narrative
Curating your facial expression
Controlling your tone
Choosing your words
What your body knows:
The truth you're hiding
The gap between what you're saying and what's real
Your nervous system registers this gap as a threat.
Why Your Body Doesn’t Care if the Duplicity was Justified
Your nervous system is at once marvelously complex — and remarkably straightforward. It doesn't naturally distinguish between:
A lie told to protect someone else's feelings
A lie told to protect yourself
A white lie, black lie, or grey lie
An intentional deception or an unconscious omission
A lie told once or a lie you've been maintaining for years
It only knows one thing: something is wrong, and you're having to manage it through effortful truth-stretching to stay safe.
No, not every evasion is going to elicit the same level of stress response, acute or chronic. But whether you have an acute response in the moment because your secret keeping consciously doesn’t line up with your values, or more chronic as that normalized misalignment chips away at your soul — your body is still responding through its well-developed, ancient stress response system.
Your body activates the HPA axis—the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system responsible for your stress response:
Adrenaline spikes
Cortisol rises
Glucose (blood sugar) rises
Heart rate increases
Blood flow to the arms and legs skyrockets, diverted from digestion, breathing, and sophisticated brain functions
Digestion slows and becomes dysregulated (constipation OR diarrhea are possible)
Immune system deprioritizes everything that isn't immediately necessary for survival
Cognitively, we focus solely on evading the threat — which also means we lose access to anything not directly related to survival (creativity, generous and positive interpretations of the world). We look for threats to confirm the threat we feel in our bodies.
The Cost of Chronic Lying
But when this becomes chronic—when you're living in constant contradiction between who you are and who you're pretending to be—your body doesn't get to rest. Your cortisol stays elevated. Chronically elevated cortisol doesn't just make you tired.
Dr. Gabor Maté, a physician who spent decades researching the connection between emotional suppression and disease, calls this the body's way of saying no to what your mind is trying to say yes to. In his book When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection, Maté documents how people who chronically deny their authentic needs, feelings, and boundaries are more likely to develop serious illnesses—autoimmune disease, cancer, chronic pain—not because they're bad, but because their bodies are registering the cost of living inauthentically.
Here's the mechanism:
Research shows that sustained elevation of cortisol directly suppresses immune function by:
Inhibiting the production of cytokines—the chemical messengers your immune system needs to fight infection and regulate inflammation
Impairing T-cell activity—the backbone of your adaptive immunity, which is what allows your body to recognize and destroy abnormal cells
Shifting your immune system toward chronic, low-grade inflammation rather than responding to actual threats
This isn't theoretical. Sustained elevation of cortisol is linked in peer-reviewed research to:
Autoimmune disease (where your immune system, dysregulated from chronic stress, begins attacking your own cells)
Cardiovascular disease (inflammation damages blood vessel walls)
Metabolic dysfunction (disrupted cortisol rhythms break your ability to regulate blood sugar, leading to diabetes)
Cancer (a suppressed immune system can't catch and eliminate precancerous cells)
Cognitive decline and dementia (chronic stress damages the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for memory formation)
Chronic pain and fibromyalgia (your pain processing system becomes dysregulated)
You become more susceptible to every infection. Your healing slows down. Your body ages faster. You're not being dramatic. Your body is literally being worn down by the cost of maintaining the lie.
And perhaps most importantly—it's not just the lying that costs you. It's the suppression of what the lie is protecting.
The Suppression Itself Is the Damage
The disease isn't caused by what you're feeling; it's caused by not allowing yourself to feel it.
When you suppress anger, grief, loneliness, or despair—when you smile and say "I'm fine" while your nervous system is saying otherwise—you're not protecting yourself as much as you think. You're creating a state of internal contradiction so profound that your body has to choose: dissociate from the signals, or break down trying to manage them.
Most people choose dissociation. For a while. Until the body can't manage it anymore.
When we make these choices, we teach our nervous systems that our authentic needs are dangerous, and then exist in a suspended state of managed contradiction.
The body keeps score. Not morally. Physiologically.
How Autonomic Dysregulation Accelerates Everything
There's another layer to this that most stress research glosses over: when you're living in chronic contradiction, your autonomic nervous system becomes dysregulated. Your vagus nerve—the primary nerve responsible for calming your nervous system and shifting you out of survival mode—loses its tone.
When your vagal tone is compromised, you lose the ability to:
Rest and digest (your parasympathetic system can't activate)
Feel safe (your body stays in a low-level threat state even when there's no actual danger)
Process emotions (your nervous system is too dysregulated to tolerate feeling what you're suppressing)
Recover from stress (even sleep becomes dysregulated; you can't actually rest)
This creates a vicious cycle: the suppression dysregulates your nervous system, which makes suppression feel more necessary, which further dysregulates your nervous system, which makes it even harder to access the authentic feelings you've been avoiding.
Eventually, your body breaks. Not as punishment. As information.
Your body is trying to tell you something. And you've been saying no to it for so long that it has to get louder.
Moreover, there's our mental health.
The nervous system cost doesn't stop with physical illness. When you're chronically suppressing your authentic experience, your mental health becomes collateral damage.
Depression and anxiety aren't separate from the physiological exhaustion we've been discussing—they're the mental manifestation of the same nervous system dysregulation. Chronically elevated cortisol directly damages the regions of your brain responsible for mood regulation. Your prefrontal cortex (the part that helps you think clearly and feel hope) literally shrinks under prolonged stress. Your amygdala (your brain's alarm system) becomes hyperactive, primed to see threats everywhere.
You also see exacerbated symptoms of neurodivergence, executive dysfunction, mood disorders, and other cognitive conditions. And this isn't coincidental. If you're ADHD, for instance, a dysregulated nervous system makes executive function exponentially harder. Your working memory becomes even more compromised. Time blindness gets worse. Emotional regulation becomes nearly impossible.
The effort and surveillance necessary to maintain a world in which your secrets and deceptions remain intact keeps your nervous system in constant activation. You're not just managing your emotions—you're managing the appearance of managing your emotions. You're not just living a lie—you're monitoring whether anyone can see through the lie. You're not just suppressing anger—you're watching for cracks in your performance of calm.
This cognitive and emotional surveillance keeps the stress response activated and tips you into anxiety, paranoia, and hypervigilance. You become hyperaware of micro-expressions on people's faces. You interpret ambiguous comments as criticism. You catastrophize about being found out. Your threat-detection system is running at maximum capacity, constantly scanning for danger.
Eventually, that level of vigilance is just too much. Your nervous system exhausts itself trying to maintain the surveillance. That's when we see people experience depressive symptoms as the body and nervous system begin to shut down to preserve whatever energy is left. Depression isn't necessarily or only sadness—it's a protective mechanism. Your nervous system is essentially saying: I can't keep doing this. I'm going to conserve every ounce of energy I have.
But shutdown isn't restorative rest. It's collapse because any more than that is too much. But it means you’re in bed, but not sleeping deeply. Constantly thinking, but not clearly. Feeling joy only as “foreboding” — the other shoe will drop. You're just... stuck. Maintaining the lie, suppressing the feelings, watching for danger, and slowly running out of fuel.
And so it goes, stuck in a crumbling Casita.
The Nervous System Addiction
And here's the piece that most burnout literature often misses: the suppression isn't just stressful; the suppression itself becomes addictive.
Your nervous system learns that survival depends on managing other people's perceptions. So you get good at it. Very good. You can read a room and know exactly what to say. You can perform calm while your insides are screaming. You can hold other people's emotions while yours are drowning.
You become excellent at lying.
And this is passed down.
How Children Learn (By Watching You, Not By Listening to You)
Here's what I need to tell you, and I'm going to be gentle about it because I know this lands hard:
Your children are not learning how to treat themselves from your words. They're learning from your nervous system.
When you tell your kids to take care of themselves while you ignore your own needs, they see the contradiction. Not consciously, necessarily. But at a nervous system level, they learn:
Self-care is what you tell other people to do
What you actually do is suppress your own experience to manage other people's comfort
When you tell your kids that their feelings matter while you're smiling through yours, they learn:
Some feelings are acceptable to have (quiet ones, managed ones, productive ones)
Some feelings are not (anger, need, vulnerability, desire)
When you tell your kids to be honest while you're living in secrets—about money, about a marriage that isn't working, about a diagnosis, about how overwhelmed you are—they learn:
Honesty has conditions
It's safe to tell the truth about small, manageable things
The big truths? The ones that matter? Those get hidden
Those get managed
Those get turned into a performance
Your children learn by watching how you treat yourself in the moments when no one is looking. They internalize your nervous system state. They absorb the pattern of "pretend everything is fine."
And then they become adults who are:
Really, really good at lying
No idea how to tell the truth
Convinced, on some level they can't articulate, that their authentic self is dangerous
Believing their needs are too much
Certain the only way to be loved is to be useful, managed, convenient
This is intergenerational. This is how trauma patterns survive and multiply.
What Changes When You Stop Lying
But here's what also happens when you start to change this: your children get to watch you come back to yourself.
They get to see that it's possible to stop pretending. They get to learn that you can be honest and be loved. That your real self is not so dangerous that it will destroy everything. That you can feel your feelings and the world doesn't end.
You know what your kids actually want? Not a perfect parent.
They want a regulated parent.
They want to know that you're okay enough that they can be not-okay sometimes. They want to see you take a walk because you need to, not because you're supposed to. They want to hear you say:
"I'm angry right now and I need five minutes"
Instead of watching you silently seethe for three days and then explode
When you stop lying—to them and to yourself—you actually become more available to them. Because you're not spending all your energy managing the contradiction. You have more capacity:
For presence
For joy
For actual connection, instead of performance
The Emotional Truth You May Be Avoiding
Just like many avoidant-oriented coping mechanisms, this one is about finding ways to not experience something emotionally that we feel we wouldn’t survive.
It sounds extreme, but really ask yourself what would happen if you were fully honest (and kind; clear and true is kind; being an asshole just because it’s ‘your truth’ is not kind).
And then ask it five more times. “And so what then…”.
Eventually, you get to something along the lines of, “I’d be bad”, “I’d lose everything”, “I’d be alone and unloved”, “I wouldn’t survive”.
Which is why the question I ask in coaching when we uncover pockets of innocent, well-intentioned, mistruths is: What feeling are you trying not to feel?
Not what are you lying about or the justification. What feeling is the lie or secret protecting you from experiencing?
Sometimes it's fear. Sometimes it's rage. Sometimes it's grief. Sometimes it's loneliness so profound that you've decided it's better to pretend you're fine than to acknowledge that you're drowning and nobody's coming to help.
Often, it's a belief that runs so deep you don't even know it's there.
The Beliefs That Keep Us Hiding, Lying,
Here’s a sampling of what I hear — from my client, from myself — when we get to the fifth “And so what then…”
"If I show you who I really am, you'll leave."
"If I admit I'm struggling, I'll lose my job, my status, my place in this family."
"If I tell the truth about what happened, nobody will believe me. Or worse—they'll believe me and everything will fall apart."
"If I stop being the one who holds everyone together, the entire system will collapse."
"I am not strong enough to survive the consequences of being honest."
"I will never be loved if you know the real me."
These beliefs aren't necessarily logical — because when we’re in emotion, which is often, “humans aren’t rational; they’re rationalizing”. These are just nervous system survival strategies that made sense at some point.
Maybe they made sense when you were five years old, and your parents' emotional stability depended on you being small and quiet. Maybe they made sense when you were seventeen and your family's survival depended on keeping the secret. Maybe they made sense when you were twenty-five and the cost of telling the truth in your workplace or your marriage felt genuinely dangerous.
But they're still running. And they're still costing you everything.
The lie is protecting you from feeling something you believe will destroy you. The secret is keeping you tied to an architecture that no longer serves anyone—if it ever did.
How One Lie Becomes a Whole Edifice
Here's something I've noticed: people think lying is simple. You tell one lie, and that's it. One discrete act.
But that's not how lying works.
One lie requires another lie to keep it in place. And then another. And then another. Until you've built an entire structure of fiction, each lie strategically placed to support the one before it.
A Concrete Example
You don't actually want to go to your neighbor's birthday party. It's going to be loud. You're exhausted. You don't like their friends and you don't have the energy for small talk and terrible pizza. So you tell a small lie:
"Oh, we'd love to come but we have a family thing that day."
Fine. One lie.
Except now your neighbor asks what family thing, and you have to invent it. Maybe it's a birthday for your kid, or a family dinner that was "already scheduled."
So you add the second lie.
But now you've told your kid there's a family birthday on that day, except there isn't. So you either have to:
Tell your kid the truth (and ask them to lie to the neighbor if they run into them), or
Maintain the fiction
Maybe you actually do a small family thing that day, just so it's technically true.
Except now you're spending emotional and logistical energy on a fake birthday to support the original lie about not wanting to go to a party.
And the neighbor might mention it to your kid's school. So you have to make sure your story is consistent. Or maybe you bump into the neighbor at the store and she asks if the family thing was nice, and you have to manufacture details about a party that never happened. What was served? Who came? What did you do?
You're building an entire false reality. A second full-time job, essentially.
You're tracking:
What you said to whom
Making sure the details line up
Managing the cognitive load of living in two narratives simultaneously
All because you didn't want to go to a birthday party.
When It Gets Baroque
I've seen this escalate into truly intricate territory. A woman who told a small lie about not being available for a work commitment—she said she had a medical appointment, when really she just needed a mental health day—ended up having to:
Invent details about the appointment
"Recover" from it for a few days (move carefully, mention being tired)
Create a follow-up appointment
Eventually have to explain why the "condition" seemed to resolve
Avoid mentioning any symptoms she didn't think she could manage
Never seek actual help for the thing she was struggling with, because seeking help would confirm something real was wrong and she'd have to explain why she lied about it
All of this takes energy. All of this keeps her tied to an architecture that's completely disconnected from reality.
And the worst part? The thing that keeps people trapped?
The fear that if you pull out one brick, the whole thing collapses.
But it won't. What will happen is you'll have a lot more energy.
The Current Moment: Collective Gaslighting and the Cost
We're living in a time when this is happening at scale. Not just in individual relationships, but institutionally.
People are being asked, constantly, to not trust our own eyes.
To accept explanations that don't match the evidence. To participate in collective denial about what's happening to our neighbors, to vulnerable people, to the basic functioning of our institutions.
The Minnesota election where voters watched in-person voting happen and were told it didn't. ICE raids happening in sanctuary cities. Institutional responses to abuse that are designed to make the victim question whether it actually happened. Gaslighting as a systematic tool of control.
This creates the same nervous system activation as personal lying.
You know something is true. You witnessed it. And you're being told it isn't.
Your nervous system has to hold both:
The reality you experienced
The narrative you're being told is the reality
That contradiction is corrosive. It's the same mechanism, scaled up.
And it requires the same kind of energy expenditure:
Managing the gap between what you know and what you're being told to believe
Checking yourself
Wondering if you're crazy
Adjusting your own reality to match the official narrative
This is the nervous system cost of living in a culture built on secrets and lies at the institutional level.
Which is partly why burnout is so widespread right now. People aren't just burning out from work. They're burning out from having to live in constant contradiction with what's real.
What Change Requires
Unfortunately for us intellectualizers, you cannot think your way out of this.
You cannot logic yourself into believing you're worthy of honesty and everything will be FINE. You cannot read an article and decide that starting tomorrow, you're going to be authentic. You cannot willpower your way out of a nervous system that learned, in childhood, that your authentic self was dangerous.
What you can do is:
Start to notice the contradiction
Start to feel it in your body
Start to ask yourself: what would happen if I told the truth here?
Not the big truth. Not yet. Start small.
Small Truths to Practice
What would happen if you told your partner that you're actually not okay? Not in a crisis way, but just... honest.
What would happen if you told your boss that you can't take on another project? Not with a complicated excuse. Just: "I don't have capacity for that right now."
What would happen if you told your kid: "I'm angry. Not at you. At the situation. And I need some time to regulate."
Things may (will) get worse before they get better.
Not because the truth isn't worth it. But because you're changing the rules in a system that was built on a shared agreement to maintain those lies. When you stop fudging the truth, people notice. They get uncomfortable. Some get weird. Some pull away. Some escalate to try to get you back in line. Relationships that depended on you performing calm may crack. Financial arrangements that were built on mutual dishonesty may get disrupted. The person who got used to you absorbing all their emotions might actually have to feel them.
When you change, people get weird.
Your instinct to soften the truth, to lie, to keep the secret—it didn't come from nowhere. It was wired in because there were consequences to telling it. Real ones. Financial insecurity. Relational rupture. The loss of your place in a family system. So yes, some version of those consequences might actually come to pass.
But here's the thing: even your worst-case scenario will not ruin you. You will survive it.
And more importantly—the things that burn down in this fire are things that no longer serve you anyway. A relationship that required you to disappear? A family system built on your silence? A workplace culture that demands you perform okay when you're falling apart? A version of yourself that was never going to lead you toward joy?
Telling the truth when you've lived in a system built on acceptable, expected lying is like a fire. It actually is. It will destroy things. But it's a fire that burns what no longer fits, and it clears the ground for something real to grow.
That doesn't make it easy. The discomfort is real. The disruption is real. The fear is legitimate.
But the capacity you'll have on the other side? That's real too.
And you get to keep it.
What Comes Next
If this resonates—if you're recognizing the architecture of lies you've built, the energy it's costing you, the way you're teaching your children to hide themselves—then you're at a point where something can actually change.
Not because you read the right article. But because you're willing to feel the contradiction and do something different with it.
And because you're willing to feel what comes next—the discomfort, the disruption, the fire. The grief of letting go of a system that kept you safe, even if it was also keeping you small.
This work is deeper than a blog post. It requires someone who understands nervous system healing, who can help you distinguish between the lies that once protected you and the truth that frees you now, who can walk with you as you practice being yourself in a world that may have taught you it wasn't safe.
Especially when that practice gets uncomfortable. When people get weird. When things burn. When you start to wonder if you made a mistake by telling the truth.
You won't have made a mistake. But you'll need support to remember that when it's hard.
Start Somewhere
If you're ready to explore this:
We can start with a single session to see what's possible. Or we can dive deeper with the Regenerate & Relaunch program, where we spend three months untangling these patterns and building a life that actually fits who you are.
You can also refer someone who's ready for this work.
Your authentic self is not dangerous. It's just been waiting for it to be safe enough to come out.
