One of the things I do in coaching is help my clients see how far they’ve come. It’s hard to see ourselves objectively, and I struggle with seeing my progress just like they do. Occasionally though I have an experience where I can very clearly see my progress and the last story I shared, about changing literary agencies, was one of them.
I want to dissect that story for you the way I break things down for coaching clients. Pointing out where I’ve grown, offering insights and education to give you something to think about, and celebrating the moment(s) as the accomplishment it truly was.
Section One 2025. I get an email from my agent and freak out.
I have learned my initial emotional actions are often rooted in my past, and rarely in my present. That panic I felt upon opening her email is the conditioning of how I grew up and the society I was raised in. Abandonment was reinforced constantly from the time of my parent’s divorce, when I was six.
Emotionally my body reacts to any threat of abandonment before my brain can catch up with the reality of what grown-up me knows to be a safe and often magical world. Sitting in those anxious feelings of fear, worry, and abandonment sucks, and in the past, I did everything I could to suppress them—including abandoning myself.
There is no way to stop my body from having that initial survival based, awful feeling reaction. But I am practiced enough now to know I don’t have to stay in them.
The healthiest, and fastest, way through emotions is to feel them. All the way, through every single harrowing aspect. I have a choice: stay stuck in old survival patterns or reach for new healthier ones. I am proud of myself for choosing health over familiarity.
Section Two 2023. I’m deep in grief and trying to figure out how to re-enter my writing career.
Holding space for grieving people and letting them sit in their pain as long as they need—without expectation of everything returning to “normal” immediately—is a huge kindness.
I learned many people cannot or will not hold space for you. Many times, this doesn’t happen because your grief makes them feel uncomfortable and they don’t want to sit in that discomfort alongside you. I feel very lucky to have an agent who gave me all the time and space I needed, which was literally years.
Furthermore, there is no going back to “normal.” You are a totally different person and exist in a different reality after experiencing deep grief.
Section Three 2025. Meditation through abandonment issues leads to acceptance of the situation.
The only way for me to get to the point my intuitive gifts work with any accuracy is by letting feelings run their course through my body. The mirror-touch synesthesia and feeling-ALL-the-feels are part of symbolic information coming in. Feelings are puzzle pieces, just like songs, images, words, animals, or cards I might pull from a deck.
But the feeling puzzle pieces are tricky, because they can high-jack the interpretation process. If feelings have not been allowed to fully run their course and are still floating around in my body, I can easily think the message is something my conditioning has trained me to believe. (i.e. Everyone will abandon you.) Sometimes it will take days (or weeks/months/years) for me to get through the emotional processing and make sense of the message that is trying to come through.
At the end of that mediation session my claircognizance kicked in, and I knew this change was for my and my agent’s best interest. This wasn’t a guess. It was a knowing of fact, just like I know my eyes are green and I live in a condo with two cats. There’s nothing anyone could have said to invalidate this knowing to me.
What was truly remarkable to me as an individual is: 1) I made it through all those feelings in a one-hour meditation. Previously something this clearly tied to abandonment and the belief I only have value if I am of service to someone would have completely derailed me for weeks. 2) I reached for a healthy solution (meditation) immediately. Previous me would have talked about it with everyone, amplifying the conditioned feelings and leaving me paralyzed—drawing out the process. 3) I didn’t ruminate upon the email after my meditation. It was just acceptance that what was happening was done, and the knowing it was good—even if good didn’t look like what I hoped it might. Rumination is an ugly place I have lost soooo much time to in the past.
Section Four, 2023. I feel a deep intuitive need to sign a new agency contract.
At that time, I had eighteen-months less experience in interpreting intuitive messages than I do as of the day I write this essay. I was, and still am, learning the entirely new language of energy and intuition. Like learning any language there are pronunciation errors, and sometimes I put the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syll-a-BLE.
The agency merger experience is an example getting a very clear message but applying my focus to only part of the message instead of the entire thing.
I’ve since learned 1) emotional regulation allows me the clarity to examine all parts of a message 2) everything about a message is important. How it is delivered, placement, words, emotions, time, any and every minute detail is telling me something.
Section Five, 2025. My agent tells me she’s changing agencies. I am going with her, and intuitively I understand this is part of a larger energy realignment.
The energy re-alignment and relationship shifts I told my agent about are global. What I am seeing and experiencing (as are my intuitive energy teachers and colleagues) is people who are learning to self-regulate their nervous systems are stepping into exciting changes in their lives with a level of ease, flow, curiosity, and excitement they have never felt before.
Yes, we still read the news and know the world appears to be on fire. But we maintain a level of calm centeredness that calms the collective energy, instead of throwing gasoline on the societal fire by becoming dysregulated ourselves and amplifying the fear, chaos, and panic.
A person does not have to have mastered emotional regulation, in order to see the benefits. They just have to actively be working to take accountability for the own emotional well-being, and not expect other people (or jobs, or drugs/alcohol, or escapist coping mechanisms, etc.) to regulate their nervous system for them.
People who have historically been called on to help regulate others’ nervous systems (i.e. people-pleasers, parentified children, highly empathic individuals, etc.) are learning it was never their responsibility to emotionally regulate other adults. They are now learning to put their emotional health first and using their well-refined co-regulation skills judiciously.
My personal decisions have been:
I fully accept responsibility for my emotional health and don’t expect others to fix me.
I will never entirely regulate another grown adult again.
I will co-regulate people who I know are actively working on their emotional regulation skills.
The most reliable marker I’ve found to identify the co-regulation individuals is: they are willing to stick around through multiple hard conversations and face, feel, and process all of the emotions and insights those conversations may bring.
While I once feared what was happening to me energetically, I am now grateful for my HSP-empath-mirror-touch-synesthesia abilities. They allow me to help my coaching clients, friends, and others with a depth and expediency that has profound impact.
Section Six. I sign a new agency contract.
It felt good to sign that contract, but what impresses me even more is I am enjoying every part of where I am at in my writing career at this very moment.
Yes, there are big things I feel coming, but the fact I haven’t experienced them yet does not detract with how satisfied I am in this moment. And there are also things (and people) that are missing, which makes the experience very bitter-sweet. But by learning to be happy where I am and choosing healthy support systems and relationships now, it gives me confidence I’ll be able to find satisfaction and happiness wherever I go next.
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p.s. If you’ve never tried a coaching session and want to see what it may unlock for you, please book a discovery call for yourself. We’ll both learn something. I promise.