Have you ever been in a relationship where your partner pulled back a little?
Maybe they went quiet,
Took longer to text back?
Seemed a little distant,
And even though nothing was technically wrong,
You completely spiraled.
You started overanalyzing every message.
You needed reassurance.
Maybe you pull toward them harder,
Or maybe you shut down completely.
And the whole time,
Part of you was watching yourself doing it,
Thinking,
Why am I like this?
I know better than this.
Why can't they just stop?
Or maybe you're on the other side.
Maybe you're the one who pulls back.
Maybe intimacy feels uncomfortable and you don't fully understand why.
Maybe someone told you they needed you to show up more and you wanted to.
But something in you just couldn't.
If any of that sounds familiar,
I want you to hear this.
There is nothing wrong with you.
What you're experiencing isn't a personality flaw or a character defect.
It's a subconscious program that was written before you even knew what a relationship was.
And today,
I'm going to explain exactly how that happened,
And more importantly,
What you can actually do about it.
So let's start at the beginning.
Because to understand why you do what you do in relationships.
We have to go back to where it all started.
When you were born,
Your subconscious mind was a completely blank slate.
Between the ages of zero and eight,
Your brain was in a deeply receptive state,
Almost like a sponge.
Absorbing everything around you and forming core beliefs about yourself and the world.
And certain experiences have a way of really cementing those beliefs.
Things that happened with authority figures,
A parent,
Caregiver,
Teacher.
Things that happened in peer groups,
Being included,
Excluded,
Chosen,
Left out.
Big emotional events that your young nervous system didn't have the tools to process.
And things that happened over and over again,
Repeatedly,
Until your brain just accepted them as truth.
Here's the thing though,
You didn't consciously choose any of it.
You are just a child absorbing and adapting as best you could.
With those early imprints,
They became the operating system you run on for the rest of your life.
And nowhere does that show up more clearly than in your relationship.
This is what therapists,
Hypnotherapists,
Somatic practitioners,
Manifestation coaches,
Joe Dispenza,
They're all pointing at,
Just wrapped in different languages.
The subconscious programming that happened before you had any say in it.
Now here's where it gets really specific because that early programming doesn't just live as a vague feeling.
It crystallizes into what we call core wounds.
Core wounds are deep subconscious beliefs about yourself.
Things like,
I am not enough.
I am unloved.
I am abandoned or alone.
I am rejected.
I don't matter.
Something is wrong with me.
There are many of them,
And most of us are carrying several without even knowing it.
And here's how they show up in relationships.
I'm going to use my own experience because I think it illustrates this better than any textbook example could.
In my last relationship,
I identified as a fearful avoidance,
Which means I have both anxious and avoidant tendencies,
Depending on the situation.
And one of the patterns that would come up was this.
When my partner pulled back,
My anxious side would completely amp up.
I'd feel this almost unbearable urge to close the distance.
And when I really sat with what was happening underneath that reaction,
I could trace it back to two core wounds firing at the same time.
I am unloved and I am abandoned.
Or alone.
His pulling back wasn't just distance,
My subconscious was reading it as confirmation of something it had believed since childhood.
And then there was his side of the dynamic.
At one point he told me he wanted to be chased.
Now I can't know for certain what was driving that for him.
I can only make an educated guess based on what I understand about this work.
But if I had to guess,
I would say his subconscious was running something like,
I don't matter unless someone proves it.
Or maybe I am unworthy of love unless someone comes after me.
The chase wasn't really about the chase.
It was about the wound underneath needing evidence that he was worth loving.
Two people,
Two completely different behavioral responses.
Driven by the exact same mechanism.
Subconscious beliefs formed in childhood,
Playing out in an adult relationship.
Neither of us consciously chose those patterns.
They were written in long before we ever met each other.
And this is the part I think is so important.
Once you can see that,
You stop blaming yourself.
You stop blaming the other person,
And you start asking the right question,
Which is,
How do I actually change the programming?
So that's the question.
If this programming happened so early and it's running so deep,
How do we actually get in there and change it?
And the answer has everything to do with one very specific window your brain gives you every single night.
Your brain has a built-in filter called the critical factor.
Think of it like a bouncer standing at the door of your subconscious.
Its job is to evaluate everything coming in and decide whether to accept it or not.
Or push it away.
When you're wide awake,
That bouncer is working overtime.
But something in those moments when you're drifting off to sleep,
That hazy,
Dreamy,
In-between state where you're not quite awake,
But you're not quite gone yet.
Your brainwaves flow from beta,
The active analytical state,
Down into alpha,
And then into theta.
And in theta,
The critical factor relaxes,
The bouncer steps away from the door,
And new beliefs can actually land.
This is the same state you access in deep meditation,
In hypnotherapy,
In highway hypnosis when you've been driving and suddenly you realize you have no memory of the last 10 minutes.
Your conscious mind stepped out and something deeper took over.
Or in a runner's high when your mind goes quiet and something just opens up.
These are all windows into the subconscious,
But that threshold moment as you drift into sleep is one of the most accessible and most powerful of all of them because it happens naturally every single night without you having to do anything to get there.
And from a science perspective,
This state also activates your parasympathetic nervous system,
Your body's natural healing mode.
It's the same reason doctors tell you to rest when you're sick.
Is when your body and mind do their most profound repair work.
Now getting into that receptive state is only part of it.
What you do as you're crossing that threshold is just as important.
And this is where visualization and emotion come in.
Here's something that genuinely still amazes me about the brain.
When you vividly imagine doing something,
Your brain fires in almost exactly the same way as when you're actually doing it.
This is why elite athletes use visualization as a core part of their training,
Not as a motivation trick.
But because the brain genuinely cannot fully distinguish between a rich imagined experience and a real one,
It's already laying down the neural pathways.
Have you ever imagined a scenario playing out a certain way and then it actually did?
That's not coincidence.
That's your brain having already rehearsed it.
But here's the piece most people miss.
The visualization only works if you can actually feel it in your body.
Emotion is the signal that tells your nervous system,
This experience is real.
A visualization without feeling is like a movie with the sound off.
It's missing the thing that makes it land.
I see this all the time when I work with people.
I'll ask someone how they want to feel in their relationship and they'll say something like,
I just don't want to feel anxious.
So I'll ask,
Okay,
What do you want to feel instead?
Calm,
They say.
Safe,
Secure.
Now,
Where do you feel that in your body?
What does safe actually feel like physically?
And we work through it together until they can actually access that sensation,
Not just describe it.
Maybe it's a loosening across the chest,
Shoulders dropping,
Jaw softening,
Breath slowing down and going deeper.
That physical feeling,
That's the ingredient that makes the rewiring real.
And then there's one more piece.
And honestly,
It might be the most important one because even with the right state and the right visualization,
None of it works.
Without this.
Your brain is neuroplastic.
That means it can physically change,
Form new connections,
Build new pathways throughout your entire life.
You are not stuck with the programming from childhood.
But here's the thing about neuroplasticity.
It doesn't respond to one powerful moment.
It responds to repetition.
Think about how the original wounds were formed,
Not from a single event,
Typically,
But from beliefs that were reinforced over and over by multiple people in multiple situations across years and years of your childhood.
Your nervous system accepted those beliefs as truth because they were consistent and repeated.
We are using that exact same mechanism,
Just in reverse.
We're creating new experiences,
Emotionally rich,
Embodied,
Vivid,
And we're repeating them until the nervous system starts to accept the new story as its default.
Research suggests a minimum of 21 days of consistent practice to begin forming new neural pathways.
Some people notice shifts within the first week.
For deeper wounds,
The ones that have been running the longest,
It takes more time sometimes,
And that's okay.
What matters is the connection.
Showing up every night and letting the news story in.
The good news is you already have the perfect window for this built into every single day.
Tonight,
As you drift off to sleep,
Your subconscious mind is opening and it's ready.
The question is just what you're going to feed it.
So let me bring this all together and give you something practical you can actually start with tonight.
Step 1.
Start to identify your core wounds.
Think about the last time you felt really triggered in your relationship,
Not just annoyed,
Genuinely activated.
Now ask yourself.
What did that moment make me feel about myself?
Not about them,
About you.
That's where the core wound is.
Common ones that come up in relationships are,
I am not enough.
I'm unloved,
I am abandoned or alone,
I'm rejected,
I don't matter,
And more.
Sit with it until something lands.
Step two,
Get into a deeply relaxed state as you're falling asleep.
Slow your breathing down.
Do a gentle body scan,
And use a guided meditation that takes you there.
The goal is to reach that theta state,
That drifting,
Soft,
In-between place.
So the critical factor steps back and what comes next can actually get through.
Step three,
While you're in that state,
Visualize what you want to feel instead and really feel it in your body.
If your wound is,
I am in love,
Imagine what it feels like to be deeply,
Securely loved.
Helps to do it with like a scenario as well.
Not just think about it,
Feel your body soften into it.
Feel the safety of it.
Let your nervous system absorb it as real.
Step four,
Once that visualization has taken you there,
Let the affirmations carry you the rest of the way into sleep.
This is actually how my recordings are structured.
The visualization comes first while you're still in that conscious enough space to fill it fully in your body.
And then as you cross into sleep,
The affirmations continue playing under the music all night long.
So the repetition keeps working even after you're fully asleep.
And your critical factor is completely offline.
Your subconscious is absorbing the new story on a loop while you rest.
Step five,
Do it every night for at least 21 days.
The patterns you've been living in your relationships,
The spiraling,
The shutting down,
The pushing away,
The overgiving,
Those were never character flaws.
They were adaptations.
They were a child doing the best they could with what they had.
But you're not that child anymore,
And your brain is not fixed.
A story that got written back then can be rewritten.
And that quiet moment as you drift off to sleep is one of the most powerful places to do it.
See you in the next one.
