Self-Devotion Starts With Releasing What Was Never Yours
Why the most devoted thing you can do is stop abandoning yourself to avoid pain and start locking into your true identity
There’s a truth I’ve learned slowly, painfully, and honestly through my healing and reclamation journey: Most of us will never find peace until we are willing to heal what we’ve spent our lives avoiding.
The wounds. The trauma. The things that crowd the mind with pain, regret, and struggle—especially for those of us who experienced real harm early in life and were taught to survive it instead of process it.
The Illusion of Outrunning Pain
For years, I tried to bury what happened to me through perpetual motion and performance. I worked harder, leaned into religion, became compliant, and people-pleased my way through relationships and professional spaces. I told myself that if I just kept moving. Be “good” enough, grateful enough, productive enough, spiritual enough…it would all go away.
It didn’t.
Because I was looking for peace outside of myself, hoping something external would fix what was internal. And it never works that way. Healing doesn’t mean remembering and ruminating forever or endlessly asking why. It means processing what happened so it stops running your life.
When You Don’t Remember “Before”
For many of us, that work feels terrifying because we don’t remember who we were before the harm. Some of us were born into families that weren’t protective, born into systems that didn’t honor us, born into conditions that made life harder, not easier. That is the unfortunate truth.
But I’m realizing now that this is also what becomes the catalyst; the moment we wake up and realize this is not all there is. That survival is not the same thing as living.
Yes, healing takes effort. And I am very much devoted to an easeful life. But this is the one place where effort is worth it, because what most people call “struggle” is actually resistance. They’re afraid that if they open the door, they’ll never stop crying. That if they touch the anger, they’ll lose control.
The Truth About Feeling Your Feelings
The truth is, you won’t stay there.
Yes, you may be angry for a while. Yes, resentment may rise. Yes, you may enter what people like to call a villain era. But those emotions aren’t coming up for you to act out. They’re coming up to be expressed, felt, and released. You can acknowledge them without becoming them.
Until that shift happens, you will keep fighting yourself. You will keep fighting the joy that is trying to come back online. You will keep blocking the peace that wants to settle into your body.
Releasing What Was Never Yours
Here’s what changed everything for me: I realized I didn’t need to become a different person. I needed to release everything that was never me. All the baggage other people piled on, all the labels they projected, all the ways I learned to shrink so I wouldn’t be abandoned.
When I was younger, people called me mean and difficult. Not because I was cruel, but because I had boundaries. Because I wasn’t here for the nonsense. Over time, shame did its work. I buried that part of myself, softened my edges, and became agreeable. And I lost myself.
What I’ve learned is this: the people who abandoned you when you were being yourself were never really there for you to begin with. They were catalysts. Nothing more.
Getting a PhD in Yourself
Everyone has their own journey, and when people refuse to face their own pain, they project it onto children, teenagers, and young adults. That projection becomes identity if you’re not careful.
My work has been about undoing that. I call it getting a PhD in me.
And that’s what I offer now through my work at The School of Self Devotion. Not rescue, not hand-holding, not accountability policing. I offer tools, frameworks, and a way back to yourself. But you have to be willing to meet yourself there.
The Peace on the Other Side
Because the peace on the other side isn’t shallow. It’s deep. It reaches your toes. It settles your nervous system. It lets your life breathe again.
You don’t need to become someone new. You just need to release what was never you and remember who you truly are.
If you’re ready to begin your own journey back to yourself, explore the Self Devotion Ph.D Degree program as well as my resources on nervous system regulation, radical rest, and reclaiming your authentic self.