Returning to Ourselves, Returning to Each Other

I was practicing (meditating) recently, quiet, unremarkable, when a familiar current moved through me. Thoughts of not enoughness. Self‑doubt dressed up as discernment. The low hum of maybe it’s me, maybe I did something wrong.

And then, without effort or forethought, something else came through, clear, firm, compassionate:

Why would you turn on yourself? Of everyone, you are the last person you should turn on.

It landed less like a thought and more like a remembering.

I keep a framed poem in my home by a friend and brilliant poet, Jacqueline Suskin. It’s called Take Care, and it reads like a set of vital, elemental instructions:

Hold yourself with both
hands. Submerge yourself in water.
Use lemon, use piano, use
language and summon a soothing spell.
Gently now, touch the crown
of your head, sing some
affirmation, show your body
that you remember it.
Find the source in the center of your being
and cradle it, give it
your honest thanks, watch
how it floods with fortune
Just knowing that you care.

Clinical language might call this self‑regulation, interoceptive awareness, or self‑soothing. Poetry calls it what it is: remembering that your body is not the enemy.

I told one of my dearest friends in a voice memo last week that my current work is simple to name and hard to live:

I am learning to stop turning on myself.

I’ve begun to notice how reflexive it is to assume fault. How quickly I arrive at it must have been me. This isn’t a personality quirk; it’s a pattern shaped early.

In family systems theory, this often emerges from parentification, when a child becomes emotionally responsible for a parent’s emotional wellbeing. When harmony depends on a child’s vigilance, adaptability, or self‑erasure, self‑blame becomes a survival strategy.

If I am the problem, then the people I depend on can remain intact, idealized, safe enough to survive.

This is often reinforced by enmeshment, or fused boundaries, where emotional lives blur together and it’s difficult to know where one person ends and another begins. Responsibility leaks across generations. Autonomy or difference, feels like betrayal.

From a nervous‑system perspective, this isn’t pathology it is adaptation.

Confession: I really do love myself.

I have written that sentence and deleted it more times than I can count.

Immediately, the internal committee convenes:

This will sound righteous.
This will alienate people who are actively struggling.
Talking about self‑love ignores shame.

But here’s what both research and lived experience confirm: self‑love is not the absence of self‑doubt, it is the refusal to abandon oneself because of it.

Kristin Neff’s research on self‑compassion shows that people who practice kindness toward themselves are not less accountable, less motivated, or more self-obsessed. They are more resilient, less defensive, and more capable of repair.

Self‑criticism, despite its familiar authority, does not produce growth, it produces contraction.

Mind you this care, was incredibly hard‑earned. It came from learning not to collapse my identity into my behaviors. Yes, what we do matters. Our actions have impact and shape who we become. But a more integrated, whole sense of self allows us to say: I caused harmwithout concluding I am harm.

That distinction changes everything.

For years, if a friend was upset with me, I collapsed immediately into an old rejection wound, earned through prolonged emotional, psychological, and physical bullying. Shame followed fast. Then came the swing in the other direction: analysis, defensiveness, certainty that they were the problem.

Blame, whether directed inward or outward, is the same nervous‑system move. It’s an attempt to discharge discomfort rather than metabolize it.

My work has been to notice this oscillation and find my way back to the middle.

Yes, this is where I say differentiation, my favorite psychological term and the one I am fully aware I overuse. I keep returning to it because it sits at the center of nearly everything.

Differentiation is the capacity to stay connected without losing oneself. To tolerate disagreement without collapse or attack. To know which feelings are mine, which are yours, and which belong to the space between us. It is not emotional distance, it is emotional clarity.

The more I work with relational ecosystems, couples, families, organizations. The more I see how undifferentiated systems reproduce shame, burnout, loneliness, and resentment. And how deeply human this inheritance is. No one is trying to pass down harm, they are passing down what kept them intact.

Something mildly cliché but undeniably true: the more generous I am with myself, the more generous I become with others.

Pema Chödrön says, “War and peace start in the human heart.” I take this less as a spiritual abstraction and more as a practical mandate.

If we long for local, national, or global harmony, we cannot bypass the work of inter and intra-personal regulation. And that work begins with refusing to turn on ourselves and each other. 

Self‑betrayal is contagious.
So is care.

There’s a line from Brandi Carlile’s song Returning to Myself that I can’t stop returning to (the irony is not lost on me):

“Returning to myself is just returning me to you.”

This is the truth that often gets lost when we talk about self‑work in isolation. Turning toward myself does not pull me away from others; it brings me back into right relationship with them.

Attachment research and relational neurobiology echo this: secure attachment isn’t built through self‑erasure or rugged emotional independence, but through interdependence, the ability to stay rooted in oneself while remaining open and responsive to others.

When I am in contact with myself, my body, my limits, my care, I am more capable of empathy, repair, and presence.

Returning to myself allows me to see others more clearly. To recognize myself in them, and them in me. It reminds me that we are not separate projects of selfhood, but members of one human family, constantly shaping and being shaped by one another.

Maybe the practice isn’t becoming better, clearer, or more evolved.

Maybe it is simply that when the old reflex appears, the instinct to attack, collapse, or disappear, we pause.

We hold ourselves with both hands.

And we remember: of everyone in this world, we are the last person we should abandon.

You might be asking, But how? What if I’m caught in a spiral of self‑shame?

This is not a one‑time insight. It’s a discipline. A continual practice of awareness, training the mind, working with the nervous system, learning to interrupt inherited reflexes with choice.

Sometimes it looks like naming what’s happening in real time. Sometimes it’s slowing the breath, orienting to the room, placing a hand on the body. Sometimes it’s asking a gentler question than the one you were taught to ask.

Not What’s wrong with me?
But What happened? and what is happening right now?
Not How do I fix this?
But Can I stay with this? How can I bring in more care?

In a moment of profound global, national, and local crisis, cultivating internal and relational harmony is not indulgent, it is an act of resistance.

Is it enough on its own? Undoubtedly not. Structural harm requires structural change. We need policy, collective action, and systemic transformation.

But systems are made of people. And people shaped by shame, self‑betrayal, and chronic self‑attack will reproduce those dynamics wherever they go.

Care, practiced internally and relationally, is not the opposite of justice. It is one of its conditions.

So perhaps this is too:

To stop waging quiet wars against ourselves. 
To choose presence over punishment.
To remember that returning to ourselves is, in fact, returning to one another.