“It is traumatic when people we trust end up being predators. The type of people who target those among us are generous, vulnerable, kind or sheltered”.

-Dr. Judith Joseph | High Functioning

This quote had me in a headlock for weeks. I’m currently performing an exorcism on my subconscious mind while reading the book High Functioning.

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In patriarchal religious environments, women are often taught that direct power is unfeminine. They aren't supposed to be ambitious. They're not supposed to be aggressive. They're certainly not supposed to admit they enjoy being desired.

When a woman cannot openly pursue power, she may begin pursuing moral authority instead. When she cannot openly compete, competition becomes indirect. When she cannot admit she wants attention, she becomes preoccupied with who is receiving it.

This is why the “modesty” conversation is so rarely about clothing.

It’s about hierarchy.

Who is allowed to be seen?

Who is allowed to take up space?

Who is allowed to feel beautiful without apologizing for it?

In this episode, we unpack the hidden psychology of the "mean church girl". We'll examine the connection between sexual repression, moral superiority, female competition, and patriarchal power, and why the women policing modesty are often navigating desires they were never allowed to acknowledge. Check out the episode!

Stop Denying. Start Listening.

If this conversation made you realize how often you’ve ignored, minimized, or moralized your own desires, you’re not alone. The Desire Dares is my guided nervous system training designed to help you reconnect with what you actually want beneath the conditioning, people-pleasing, and self-abandonment. Start The Desire Dares →

Somewhere in the middle of rebuilding my life after an abusive relationship, this one insisted on being written.

Go Love Yourself explores power through three different perspectives: the Victim, the Villain, and what I call the Director. It’s part memoir, part psychology, and part attempt to understand the invisible dynamics shaping the way we relate to ourselves and each other.

This episode is an audio chapter from the book. I hope you enjoy it.

If you’d like to keep reading, you can find the book below:

📖 Paperback

📱 Digital Edition

-🤘🏽Britnei

I was in an abusive relationship. And I am still integrating that experience. Part of recovering from abuse is putting your self-image back together piece by piece, projection by projection. When someone who was supposed to love you spends years telling you who you are, those labels don't just disappear when the relationship ends. They live in the body. They show up in how you move through the world, how you respond to being seen, how much space you allow yourself to take up.

Rebuilding your self-image means taking those words out of your being and giving them somewhere else to live. Sometimes that’s via conversation. Sometimes it’s via creative ritual. Writing is the way I metabolize a lot of shadow material.

I write. I give it to the air. And I become free.

These words don’t belong to me. And they don’t want to live in me anymore. So today I write to free myself from the projections of a very sick human being. This is not an essay. It’s an exorcism.

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Protecting Yourself From Me…Is Childish

You want to use protection? That’s childish. You’re treating me like I’m some kind of threat. Grow up. You hired an attorney to divorce me? You’re being dramatic. Do you hear yourself? You’re ridiculous.

I digested these projections. They calcified in my throat burying my voice underneath. Quieting me. Taking me under. I swallowed doubt and for years it landed right in the unformed land of my psyche where my self had yet to solidify. But I am solid now.

I am loud now.

Asking Me To Be There For You…Is Controlling

I am a second generation eldest daughter. Asking for help is the bane of my existence (working on that). For years, I confused having valid human needs with being controlling because I was married to someone who saw my dignity as an inconvenience.

I could not be sick, sad or in need. But when I was needed, I didn’t bat an eye. Didn’t flinch at the multiple surgeries that required bathing, encouraging + uplifting the same individual who wouldn’t even pick up medicine for me. And I thought I was controlling because he said so.

I was never controlling. I was just alive and with someone who didn’t think I deserved to be.

You Are “Too Much”

This is the ineffable wound. There are too many memories, too many insults, too many cut downs. Just…too many. I could be combing my soul for an eternity trying to name all the ways I was conditioned to see myself as too much.

The most useful mechanism I know for metabolizing a “too much” projection is to eat it. Yes I am too much. Yes, I am.

And?

How exactly do I benefit by being less? Why exactly should I delight in being the right size for an idiot? I’m not idiot size.

I am too much.

And I like that.

-🤘🏽Britnei

I ended up spending hours having conversation with a male colleague in a cramped office. It wasn’t spicy. That’s not the spicy part. The spicy part was the way my body felt after the conversation. Trembling. Alive. I could feel the electric current of my humanness for the first time.

I was recently separated + after years of degradation, abuse + numbness I was beginning to feel again. Traumatic experiences + relationships can cause the body to shut down your access to your senses as a mercy. This is like the nervous system’s version of ibuprofen. What I was experiencing that Tuesday was a major unthawing + a regaining of access to my own senses.

At the time, I didn’t have language for what was happening. I didn’t know that numbness was a sensation. I didn’t know the body could go offline and come back online. I didn’t know there was a difference between existing inside my life and actually feeling it.

All I knew was that something had changed. That experience marked the beginning of a new relationship with my body.

Let’s Talk About Pleasure

In this episode of Pretty Brilliant, I sit down with Sex Witch, Educator + Embodiment Guide Nadia Lune to explore a topic that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in our culture: pleasure.

As you watch the episode, I invite you to sit with a few questions. Why does it feel so normal to disconnect from our bodies? Why do so many of us feel embarrassed by our desires, uncomfortable with our needs, or guilty for wanting more from life? Why is it often easier to discuss stress than joy, exhaustion than pleasure, or sacrifice than satisfaction? I’d love to hear your comments below ↓

Come Back Into Conversation With Yourself

Your life has been trying to get your attention through your subtle signals. Your discomfort? your curiosity? your desire? All messages from you to you.

My training course The Desire Dares is designed to help you rebuild your inner conversation. Through guided exercises and nervous system training, you’ll learn how to reconnect with your desires, expand your capacity for discomfort, and make decisions from self-trust instead of self-abandonment.

-🤘🏽Britnei

Something got in. Something snuck into the sanctuary of my mind and fucked with my outlook. Something snuffed out my desire to steward this mission etched into my bones. Something, some heavy thing, crawled in through my attention and began dragging me down. That something is depression.

We’ve met before. She comes but she usually only brings an overnight bag. This time she brought a suitcase. I’m annoyed, but I know better than to ignore this signal. I feel slower. More tired. More sick of everyone’s shit. I feel less generous. More confused. More vulnerable. It’s uncomfortable but…I don’t look away. I look inside.

This essay is the first installment of Footnotes*, a new column for paid subscribers where I share the books shaping my thinking and the ideas I'm carrying back into real life. Right now, my mind is having a conversation with a book called High Functioning by Dr. Judith Joseph. She talks about how depression for some won’t look like depression from the outside at all.

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Have you ever come across the kind of person who lives rent-free in your mind simply because they seem to exist in their own essence freely? Have you ever studied, obsessed or hated on the person whose existence made your life feel smaller + tighter next to theirs? Good.

That’s data.

Most people are taught to treat the feelings of envy, jealousy and longing as a failure. An ugly, embarrassing, immature thing to overcome immediately. But what happens if you don’t rush to deny or avoid the feeling?

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The People Who Haunt Us

The uncomfortable truth is that many of us spend our lives circling the edges of our desires without ever touching them. We watch other people embody qualities we secretly crave. We admire them. Judge them. Resent them. Study them. Compete with them. We do almost everything except ask the obvious question:

Why does this matter so much to me?

In this episode of Pretty Brilliant, we explore the hidden relationship between desire, envy, projection, and personal freedom. Using the song Girl Crush as a starting point, we examine why the people we obsess over are often reflecting something important back to us, and how longing can become a powerful source of self-knowledge when we stop treating it like a problem to solve and start treating it like information worth understanding.

Stop Thinking. Start Becoming

If you’re ready to stop studying the life you want and start building it, check out The Desire Dares my guided nervous system training that helps you uncover what you really want and break the patterns that keep you settling for less.

-Britnei 🤘🏽

We know what it looks like when a man wants something. We recognize the focus. The hunger. The willingness to risk comfort, reputation, relationships, and certainty for the possibility of getting closer to the thing he’s pursuing. But when that same energy appears in a woman it tends to create a different reaction. Why?

Why are we so familiar with desire when it wears a masculine face and so suspicious of it when it wears a feminine one?

Why do we celebrate hunger, ambition, and relentless pursuit in men, but often ask women to soften, justify, or sanitize those same impulses?

And then there’s a more intimate question. Even when a woman knows what she wants, why can it feel so difficult to want it fully? Why is it often easier to desire indirectly, to wait, to hope, to be chosen, than to inhabit the raw certainty of “I want this, and I’m going after it”? What happens in a woman’s body when she stops asking for permission and starts trusting her own appetite?

This week’s conversation with Ashanti explores those questions through the lens of desire, money, religion, nervous system conditioning, power, pleasure, and the invisible contracts many women inherit without realizing it.

As you listen to the episode, I invite you to notice what happens in your own body when these questions arise.

What do you want?

Not what feels reasonable. Not what you think you’re allowed to want. Not what would make other people comfortable. What do you actually fucking want?

I’d love to hear what comes up for you in the comments *hands virtual mic* 🎤 ⬇️

I have had a bout or two (or 70) with parasitic relationships in my day. I know what it feels like to go from completely emotionally fused with others to developing an separate self. It’s brutal.

How To Develop Your Emotional Immune System

When you have always been emotionally fused with others your body may not yet know the difference between love and emotionally fused over-giving.

Just like the immune system becomes more intelligent through exposure, the emotional immune system develops through relationships, reflection, and recovery. A healthy immune system learns to recognize what belongs in the body and what harms it. Discernment works the same way. By paying attention to how relationships actually make you feel you learn your needs + your limits.

Signs You Need a Discernment Booster Shot

The following experiences may indicate your emotional immune system has been exposed to chronic proximity with emotionally parasitic adult babies.

• You always leave certain people feeling tired, heavy, or overstimulated.

• You don’t feel comfortable setting a boundary without explaining it.

• You feel selfish for wanting space from people who seem to want or depend on you emotionally

• You become more emotionally available, soft, or attentive around certain people without consciously deciding to.

• You notice yourself feeling relief or more like yourself immediately after certain people leave your presence.

• The difference between emotional closeness and emotional compatibility is unclear to you.

• You don’t clearly recognize when you are tired, disgusted, resentful or need space.

How To Detox From Emotional Parasites

Parasitic relationships are relationships that leave you chronically emotionally drained. Just like a parasite survives by feeding on the host, emotionally parasitic dynamics survive by keeping one person in the role of constant giver. If you are used to being the emotional regulator in relationships but rarely experience receiving regulation, pleasure, support, safety, or emotionally nourishing experiences in return, your nervous system will eventually burn out. 📺 For more information on negative energy dynamics check out my video here →

If you are someone conditioned to be the giver, healing often begins with interrupting the automatic compulsion to emotionally manage or emotionally provide on demand. Small moments of separateness matter. Letting someone feel disappointed without fixing it. Not offering emotional labor that feels “owed.” Allowing yourself to receive care, grounding, pleasure, attention, or support without immediately trying to earn it back. These experiences slowly expand your emotional range. Your nervous system begins observing that connection can contain separateness + reciprocity.

Resources For You 🔎: A Nervous System Dare

Your nervous system learns through lived experience, not theory. Which means discernment is not something you think your way into. It’s something you train into your body through small moments of separateness. So I’m giving you a dare.

I dare you to leave one conversation the moment your body starts feeling drained.

Not ten minutes later. The moment you notice the heaviness, the overstimulation, the subtle “I want to leave.” I dare you to respond to it in real time.

Notice what the experience was like for you. Did you feel weird, empowered, guilty, something else? Tell me below ⬇️

-🤘🏽 Britnei Nicole

Living with animals has changed the way I understand people, relationships, and even my own nervous system. My dogs + I have a language and a rhythm that belongs to the pack and the pack only. We are energetically attuned to one another. If I sound annoyed, they come to check on me. If I feel them staring at me, I know I’m running behind on their feeding schedule.

For my dogs, emotional math is simple: I have emotional needs + I believe my emotional needs. When it starts thundering outside, my boy baby doesn’t stay in his bed pretending he’s fine because he doesn’t want to be “too much.” He gets his ass out of his bed and climbs directly into mine. shamelessly.

My girl baby, she likes being guided + expects it. She’s not embarrassed about wanting closeness. She’s perfectly comfortable letting someone trustworthy lead her. And watching that softened something in me.

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Judging Our Boundaries + Needs

Another thing my dogs forced me to learn is boundaries. And this one was harder for me because I love my dogs deeply. Like irrationally deeply. But even with that love, I still need space sometimes.

I have a very sensitive nervous system. I notice everything. I feel the energy of attention pulling at me. And sometimes my body genuinely just needs silence. Distance. Separation. Not because I don’t love them, but because my nervous system needs recovery.

For a long time I felt guilty about that. I thought wanting space meant I was selfish or cold or emotionally unavailable. But the truth is, needing space is just as valid as needing closeness. That’s something animals understand naturally.

Human animals have learned to judge ourselves for needing reassurance, affection, support, closeness, rest, guidance. We act like having emotional needs is cringe instead of a basic part of being alive.

Listening to your body is not cringe, it’s Natural Intelligence. And healthy relationships are not built by pretending everyone has the same needs. They’re built by learning how to coexist with different nervous systems, different boundaries, different attachment styles, different capacities, and still choosing care anyway.

📌 Resources For You : The Desire Reset

Your desires are not random flaws you need to manage into silence. They are body data. The problem is that many of us learned to suppress instinct before we learned how to trust it. That’s why I created The Desire Reset a self-care course designed to reconnect you to the intelligence underneath your wants.

Through a guided shadow exercise sequence, you’ll identify the places where shame, fear, hyper-independence, self-protection, or conditioning disconnected you from your natural desire signals and begin rebuilding trust with yourself from the body outward.

This work is about learning how to hear yourself clearly enough to make decisions that actually feel aligned from the inside out. Explore The Desire Reset →

-🤘🏽 Britnei Nicole

I’m so fortunate to have proximity to different generations of women in my own lineage. What’s privately visible to me is each of their character development stories. We’ve had our own unique phases of womanhood ranging from “I don’t know better” to “fuck this shit” and everything in between. Unfortunately, one phase that has yet to skip a generation is the shitty relationships phase. It’s not uncommon in our world to see brilliant, loving, energetically rich women unconsciously settle for crumbs, competitive BS and chronic dissatisfaction.

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The Shitty Relationships Phase

I’m being facetious, but the reality isn’t actually funny. All relationships are energetically expensive, even healthy ones. So if a relationship isn’t feeding you, it’s eating you. Your relationships impact your health. Don’t argue with me. Argue with math. Want To Go Deeper on This ➡️ ? Dealing With Negative Energy In Relationships

Here’s What I Know…

The one benefit of learning things the hard way is the clarity you earn if you don’t ignore the lesson. Being in abusive relationships taught me psychological self defense. Being betrayed taught me discernment. Solitude taught me that my best relationship needs to be the one with myself. And all of my experiences taught me what healthy people don’t do.

Healing from shitty relationships requires you to figure out what healthy looks like. And if you’ve never seen it, that’s actually quite challenging. Unexamined habits can easily become generational curses exactly this way.

One of the most important questions you can ask when retraining yourself to recognize healthy relationships is: how aware is a person of their own emotional hunger? Because emotional hunger by itself is not the problem. We all want love, validation, closeness, attention, reassurance, intimacy, and belonging.

The problem begins when someone is unaware of how strongly those unmet needs are driving their behavior. That’s when people start confusing consumption with love. A person’s level of self-awareness around their own hunger often determines whether they can handle relational access responsibly or whether they will unconsciously create damage while trying to get their needs met.

📌 Resources For You : The Emotional DUI Scale

The Emotional DUI Scale is a mental map I created as I rebuild my relationship standards and become more intentional about who gets access to me. It helps me look beyond chemistry, potential, attraction, or words and ask a more important question: how much emotional hunger is driving this person’s behavior?

Hungry

This person is heavily driven by unmet emotional needs they do not fully recognize in themselves. Validation, loneliness, desire, attachment, rejection, and attention distort their judgment and often override their ability to relate responsibly.

Observe This 🔎: Can this person tolerate distance and boundaries without becoming punishing, manipulative, reactive, or destabilizing?

Heady

This person has strong self-awareness and emotional language but has become overly identified with analysis, concepts, and intellectual understanding. They can explain emotions beautifully while remaining unable to be emotionally present with you.

Observe This 🔎: Do you constantly feel like you have to explain, defend, prove, or intellectually validate your emotional reality to this person before they will actually acknowledge it?

Healthy

This person is aware of their emotional needs without being controlled by them. They can experience intimacy, attraction, conflict, and connection while still maintaining empathy, discernment, accountability, and self-control.

Observe This 🔎: Does this person have consistent emotional, psychological, and spiritual habits that help them process themselves responsibly, or does their inner chaos become everyone else’s environment to manage?

Keep In Mind..

None of these categories are permanent identities or moral verdicts. They are simply language tools designed to help you organize what you are experiencing more clearly and distinguish someone’s ability to do relationship with you.

What have your shitty relationships taught you about emotional sobriety?

-🤘🏽 Britnei Nicole

If you grew up in an environment where you had to be responsible early, where you had to be aware of what was going on around you, where you had to manage things that were bigger than you at the time, your body adapted to that.

You’re capable. You know how to handle things. You know how to move, how to figure things out, how to take responsibility, how to get results. If something needs to get done, you’re not confused about how to do it. You can step in, you can lead, you can make it happen.

The issue is that when there’s nothing pressing, nothing actively requiring you to perform there’s still this underlying sense of needing to anticipate…something.

This is a pattern in your nervous system which can be exposed in how you can tolerate the sensation of softness vs. How you tolerate the sensation of pain.

I’ve created a spectrum of Nervous System States for you to taste + feel into. Is this hard science? No. And it doesn’t need to be. These are textures of being. Some that you might recognize in yourself or others.

Check out My YouTube Video : Why Can I Do Everything…But Relax?

-Britnei Nicole 🤘🏽

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For a long time, I thought my struggle was confidence or belonging. What I understand now is simpler: I was shaped by environments that reflected back resentment, competition, projection, and misunderstanding. I was around people who tolerated me more than they truly saw me. Some felt threatened by my growth. Some related to me through comparison or hidden agendas. Over time, those distorted reflections changed how I saw myself.

When the mirrors around you are warped, self-perception becomes warped too. You begin to question your strengths, mistrust your instincts, shrink yourself, or feel unclear about who you really are.

Why Reflection Matters

We do not learn who we are in isolation. We learn partly through the quality of the eyes around us. If those eyes are envious, dismissive, manipulative, or invested in keeping you small, your self-concept absorbs confusion.

You may feel invisible while people constantly react to you. You may feel unimportant while having real impact. You may feel “wrong” simply because the people around you could not reflect you accurately.

You Long To Be Seen Well

Imagine speaking and watching someone truly follow you. Their face does not tighten with comparison or glaze over with disinterest. They stay with you. They catch the meaning beneath your words. They notice the strengths you stopped mentioning because no one ever recognized them. They see the wound without reducing you to it.

Imagine not needing to explain yourself three different ways to be understood. Imagine your reality being met cleanly instead of argued with, minimized, or turned into something else. Imagine feeling your body soften because nothing in you has to brace, perform, shrink, or prove itself.

Imagine being looked at without hunger, envy, suspicion, or agenda. Just clear perception. Just truth with warmth in it. The relief of that is deeper than praise. It feels like coming back into your own life.

Choose Whose Eyes You Use

There is grief in realizing how long you have gone without being seen well. Name that. Here are some ways you can:

“I did not deserve to be shaped by distortion.”

“I did not deserve to be unseen this long.”

“I did not deserve wounds that interfered with my self-knowledge.”

Going forward, become highly selective about whose eyes you use to see yourself. Not everyone earns the right to help shape your self-perception.

Some people distort by default. Some cannot perceive deeply enough to reflect accurately. Some can perceive clearly but resent what they see. And some perceive clearly and reflect cleanly. Learning the difference can change your life.

Why Coaching Matters

This is one of the deepest functions of real coaching. A skilled coach is not just someone who gives advice. A real coach becomes a clean mirror.

They help you see your patterns without judgment, your strengths without inflation, your blind spots without shame, and your next level without confusion.

If you are ready to heal the damage of distorted environments, reclaim accurate self-perception, and build your life from truth instead of old projections, my Level Up Coaching program is designed for exactly that work. You can get started here.

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We are living in a time where many systems are visibly crumbling. Economic models, cultural expectations, career paths, and definitions of success no longer feel stable or trustworthy in the way they once did. That can feel unsettling, especially when the old maps stop working before the new ones are clear. But moments like this are also powerful portals to new realities. When inherited systems fracture, we are invited to imagine differently. One of the most important places to begin re-imaging is wealth itself.

What would the world look like if Nervous System Wealth was the aspiration + not “winning capitalism”?

What Is Nervous System Wealth?

Nervous system wealth is a way of living that prioritizes the electric health of your being. It recognizes that success means very little if your body is chronically stressed, your relationships are draining, and your days leave you depleted. Nervous system wealth looks like relationships that refresh and recharge rather than destabilize. It looks like work that energizes, engages, and gives back more than it takes. It includes adequate rest, spaciousness, and rhythms that let the body recover. It values play, pleasure, joy, and beauty not as luxuries, but as medicine. In this model, wealth is not measured only by income, but by the quality of energy available inside your life.

Better Money Questions Begin in the Body

Most people inherit their relationship with money unconsciously. Family stress, scarcity, status pressure, trauma, culture, and past experiences shape a money lens that often goes unquestioned. But real freedom begins when we start asking more embodied questions like:

How has my past shaped my view of money?

How much money do I actually need? why?

How much effort feels healthy and sustainable?

How much time do I want for living?

What level of responsibility do I want to carry?

What level of income best supports the life I respect?

These questions move money out of abstraction and into alignment with the body, values, and real life.

A New Relationship With Money

If you are ready to examine your money story at the root, Mind Over Money inside my Brain Training Library was created for that work. This course guides you through shadow work to uncover the hidden beliefs, emotional patterns, and inherited narratives shaping your relationship with money. From there, you’ll build a new internal framework that honors your body, protects your energy, and supports a version of wealth that feels nourishing instead of costly. The goal is not just to make money. The goal is to create a relationship with money that supports your being.

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This is usually interpreted as laziness, lack of discipline, or low confidence. But in many cases, what looks like avoidance is often self-protection.

The fear of being seen is rarely about visibility itself. It is about what visibility has come to mean in your nervous system.

For many people, being seen became associated with pain long before adulthood. Maybe standing out got you criticized. Maybe expressing yourself got you mocked. Maybe your family rewarded obedience more than authenticity. Maybe you learned that being easy to manage was safer than being fully alive. Maybe you watched other people get punished for shining and unconsciously decided it was smarter to stay dim.

If any of this feels familiar, this episode will speak directly to you. In today’s conversation, we unpack why visibility can feel so charged, how fear of judgment gets wired into the body, and what it actually takes to move through it. We talk about nervous system safety, baby steps, self-trust, rejection, and the inner work required to stop hiding in plain sight.

Level Up Coaching: Train Your System to Be Seen

Sometimes the issue is not that you need more motivation, better content ideas, or another pep talk. Sometimes your mind wants expansion while your nervous system still associates visibility with danger. That is why you keep stopping yourself even when you know what you want.

Level Up Coaching is my 6-week nervous system training program designed to help you overcome the deeper patterns holding you back from sharing your real self with the world. Together, we work on rewiring fear responses, building self-trust, expanding your capacity to handle visibility, and releasing the conditioning that taught you to shrink. This is for the person who is tired of hiding, tired of overthinking, and ready to become unapologetically who they actually are. If that’s you, step into your spot now.

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From the moment you were able to perceive yourself you began doing so in a house of distorted mirrors. Those mirrors take the shape of people, advertisements, media, etc. that subtly reinforce negative ideas about you. If you wanted, it called you greedy. If you rested, it called you weak. If you tried harder, it said it still wasn’t enough. If you’re reading this it’s likely, you believed those mirrors and have spent years trying to fix a person who only existed in the glass.

Without a clean reflection of yourself you begin to believe the distortion is reality. You think maybe you really are too much, too complicated, too intense, too difficult to love. So you work on yourself. You try to become easier, smaller, quieter, more agreeable, more acceptable. You spend years trying to fix what was never broken, yet no matter how much you change, the mirrors keep giving you the same warped image.

What The Actual Fuck?

Many people are raised in families, relationships, workplaces, and systems that benefit when they are disconnected from themselves. When you doubt your value, you ask for less. When you mistrust your instincts, other people get to define reality for you. When you feel small, you become easier to control. When you stay busy proving your worth, you keep feeding structures that were built on your self-abandonment.

Sometimes this distortion is intentional. Sometimes it is unconscious, passed from one wounded person to the next. Either way, the result is the same: you learn to see yourself through eyes that need you diminished in order to feel safe.

Begin To See Yourself Clearly

Being seen can feel so emotional. When someone sees you clearly without needing you smaller, quieter, weaker, or confused, something profound happens. Pieces of you begin to return. Your voice comes back. Your standards come back. Your desires come back. Your energy comes back. Your self-respect comes back. It can feel like getting parts of your soul back that were scattered in the funhouse.

This is the work I do in coaching. I help people identify the distorted mirrors they have been using to define themselves and separate inherited lies from lived truth. Together, we rebuild self-trust, expand nervous system capacity, and create a stronger identity rooted in reality instead of old conditioning.

My Level Up Coaching program is for people who are ready to become unapologetically who they actually are. Step into your spot now and let’s build the version of you that no longer has to shrink, chase, or prove anything.

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Here lies the goodest girl.

Beloved for her endurance.

Famous for her utility.

Undone by her innocence.

May her lifelessness rot in the souls of her tormentors

Until their lies become the truth.

Once upon a time the good daughter had bright hopeful eyes. She believed most people were good, meant well and did the “right” things. Then she woke up to reality. And she woke up again. And again. And again. As her consciousness grew she began to have questions, comments and concerns about the patriarchal nightmare she had been taught to call a dream.

Unable to survive the brutality of reality. She died. Yep. Died.

Now she is no longer the bright-eyed believer of fairy tales.

Now she is no longer self-sacrificial and seeking approval.

She wants a refund. And she will have it.

She formally resigns from earning her existence, “paying for her sins”, or any other bullshit notions that the world’s suffering is a debt she’s personally responsible for.

From now on she will eat the last wing. She will wear the dress. She will say the thing.

And she will stop pretending she was made to co-star in her own life.

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What do you want?

Not the watered down, sanitary version of what you think you can have. What do you dream about in secret? What do you want that you wouldn’t tell your mom (or whoever is responsible for judging your decisions)? What do you fantasize about?

Once upon a time, that thing for me was a divorce. I was married to someone who disrespected everything about me and our marriage. After years of infidelity and degrading treatment, I naturally became disgusted with and by him. My body felt unsafe and unhappy. But, I was inside of a religious environment that conditioned me to believe that his behavior was OUR problem, that my suffering wasn’t bad enough to have a “scriptural” divorce and if I disobeyed that would earn me hatred by god.

One fabulous day in June I admitted the truth to myself in my journal:

I’m on the beach right now. Listing to music, looking good and feeling high on life. I had a session with my therapist yesterday where I decided to be honest about what I’m feeling in my life and in my marriage.

The truth is.

I don’t want to be married. I didn’t last year and I don’t now. And I don’t think I can do this the rest of my life.

I took this picture of myself because I wanted that feeling of certainty to last. Somehow, I knew that when I returned to reality the pressure to conform would be waiting for me at home.

Many of us have settled into settling for less because it feels easier than admitting something is off with our life. Or perhaps, life hasn’t ever given you an easy opportunity to truly choose for yourself.

It is painful to admit that you are unsatisfied. It’s okay to let it be painful. But it’s also okay to let it be beautiful. Because, the fact that you want more of something means you’re alive. Life lives in you. Desire is an essential survival signal. It is your body’s way of saying “yes, that”. It is natural and human to want. It is natural and human to need.

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The Problem Is Not Your Desire

It’s the systems that benefit from your disembodiment. Patriarchy. Religion. Government. Hustle Culture. The list goes on. Society has been engineered to function like a massive machine extracting from life like an oil drill. Your attention is fuel. Your body are the parts. Your will…unwanted garbage.

I finally got the courage to divorce when I began to fear for my physical safety. I thought for sure my community would finally be understanding. They weren’t. Relationships that I thought were solid revealed their rot. When I attempted to throw my pain into volunteer work I was rejected and called “un-exemplary”.

I asked the (all male) spiritual counsel one simple question no one could answer…If I am not a good example for leaving an abusive marriage, would I have been a good example if I stayed? Crickets. And that’s when I saw it. I was inside of a system whose function was to extract while to pretending to protect.

I left. And despite the decades of lies I was fed about my life being over if you leave, that’s actually when it began.

How To Get What You Want

Deconstructing your life + reconstructing it to the tune of your desires is challenging but worth it. It starts with intention + a clear vision.

In my Brain Training Library I have a visualization exercise that can help you get back in touch with your desires called “How To Get What You Want”.

When you upgrade your subscription you get monthly access to my growing library of trainings, meditations + journal prompts. Get your subscription here.

I hope that by giving you a window into my story you can actually see more clearly into your own.

-🤘🏽 Britnei Nicole

You must be willing to disappoint, to be unliked, to be perceived negatively, to be rejected, etc. I get it, none of this sounds fun. And because it isn’t fun, most people remain in their inauthentic prisons performing social theatre alongside everyone else. It’s fine if you want that, but do you?

I like fun as much as the next heathen. But there is a time for fun and a time for discipline. Choosing to engage with your discomfort leads you to something sexier than fun…freedom to be.

🎧 Psssst want the video version of this episode…Check Out The YouTube Video

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You Don’t Feel Safe Being Disliked

The real issue isn’t just being liked vs. being disliked…it’s safety. If it doesn’t feel safe to be disliked, you will shape your behavior around being liked. If it doesn’t feel safe to express yourself, you will hesitate, soften, or silence yourself.

The throughline in all of this is that there isn’t a clean, fast way out. You don’t get to bypass discomfort. You don’t get to develop confidence without doing things that feel uncomfortable first. And you don’t get to change patterns without going through a phase where it’s messy and uncertain.

So the shift is this: stop asking how to avoid the hard parts. That question will keep you stuck. Instead, accept that you’re in a process that requires time, repetition, and discomfort—and then start participating in it more deliberately.

Is This Lesson Hitting Home? Check Out My Resources Below ⬇️

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Becoming Unfuckwithable

I used to feel good about being the “therapist friend”. It made me feel competent and appreciated being the person people came to when they needed to scratch an itch. I could calm, comfort + counsel like nobody’s business. Then, I learned a phrase that would turn my identity inside out. I was reading the book Emotional Labor by Rose Hackman with my feminist study group + getting pissed off at every page turn.

The concept of emotional labor articulated something I didn’t know that I knew. That thing being…emotional care is real, effortful + valuable. Women have been handed down a generational task list of action items that must be performed to not be considered an evil bitch. Until given that phrase, my consciousness did not have the space to see the task list for what it was. An idea about what femininity should be. Not what femininity is.

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When you wear an idea as your identity, you have no room to evaluate where it came from. The ideas of womanness I had been given required me to be self-sacrificing, self-deprecating and self-rejecting. If I didn’t comply, the evil bitch award was waiting for me.

Emotional Labor Costs You Your Body

What shifted for me was realizing the nervous system cost of being an emotional vibrator. Your vibration is actually a report on the state of your nervous system + internal world. We all receive nervous system signals from one another + perceive them at different levels of awareness. When someone came to me for comfort, what their nervous system was saying is “Hey, I can’t manage all this charge in here can you down regulate me?”

That’s a job. That’s emotional labor. And it costs you your body.

In relationships where regulation is mutually available, this can be a beautiful way to connect. In one sided dynamics, this will always lead to energetic drain.

(Check out my video below for a deeper dive on drain ⬇️)

Your Internal Power Plant

In a power plant, electricity is generated at very high voltage. So that our homes don’t literally explode, it has to go through a step-down process—traveling long distances and passing through multiple substations where transformers reduce the voltage in stages. That process isn’t free; it requires infrastructure, constant regulation, and energy is lost as heat along the way, making it an inherently expensive process just to make power usable.

Emotional labor is a costly process to the body in the same way the power plant step-down process is expensive. When you are using your emotions to regulate someone else you are going through a biological process that requires resources from your nervous system. That regulation burns real energy. The stronger the emotion, the more work your system has to do to soften, filter, and redirect it, which is why it can leave you feeling exhausted even if nothing “physical” happened.

When you understand this, you start to see that honoring your energetic limits and treating your energy like a valuable resource isn’t bitchy…it’s basic. You deserve well being, rest + to feel good in your body. Period

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How To Deal With Negative Energy