Being sensitive, empathic, intuitive, or emotionally perceptive is a form of emotional power. These abilities may come naturally to you, but they still require energy. Listening, supporting, reading people, offering insight, and holding space all cost something. Learning to value your sensitivity means understanding what restores your energy, what drains it, and who gets access to it. Natural does not mean free.

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When you have a desire, the mind immediately asks how? because it wants a bridge between where you currently are and the unknown place you want to reach. “How” is not necessarily resistance or overthinking; it is the nervous system attempting to determine whether movement is survivable. The problem begins when you require a complete answer before allowing yourself to move. Sometimes the bridge cannot be fully visible from point A.

How To Let Yourself Be Supported

If you have difficulty trusting that you can be supported, one pathway toward developing a felt sense of trust and safety is taking strategic risks + making calculated moves that give your nervous system opportunities to discover it’s own strength. At the same time, intentionally developing your tolerance for risk teaches your nervous system that uncertainty has a rhythm of its own. You take a risk, something happens, you respond, you adjust, and you keep moving. Eventually, risk stops registering as a giant black hole and becomes a familiar part of movement. The byproduct is a nervous system that understands I can move without having every step ahead of me perfectly planned out.

This is also powerful work to practice with another person. Learning to tolerate risk is easier when you have a space where you can take strategic risks, notice what happens in your body, and build evidence that uncertainty is something you can move through rather than something you have to eliminate before you move. In my one-on-one sessions, we can work together to intentionally train your nervous system’s capacity for risk by expanding what you can tolerate without pushing you beyond what you can actually hold.

Resources

Go Love Yourself Book

Work With Me 1:1

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You didn’t have to be exceptional before you deserv…

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Underneath the excitement of discovering a larger world was the realization that I had trusted an institution with my perception. I had effectively allowed something outside myself to function as my eyes and ears and tell me what reality was. Discovering that I no longer trusted that account created a deeper mandate: if I could no longer outsource my perception, I had to learn to trust the skin on my own bones.

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I live in a body that has had people’s sexual desires, curiosities + fantasies projected on it since I was about five years old. My being has hosted the projections of curious little boys, grown ass men, relatives + perfectly “straight” friends. Other people’s desires for me existed prior to understanding that I was a self, that my body was mine, that I could say no, yes or anything in between.

I won’t regale you with my private horrors (at this time). But I will say, this column is part passion project, part exorcism. There will be darkness, fair warning.

My thought today is how deformed a sexual being can become when it is unable to understand and define itself with language that feels true. Instead it becomes attuned to the proclivities of it’s environment.

This is why the way we speak about sex matters. Language is code. Words transmit ideas about what is normal, desirable, shameful, masculine, feminine, loving, dirty, owed. Repeat those meanings long enough and they become beliefs; stack enough beliefs together and you’ve built yourself a mental matrix. Now you’re living inside a reality you didn’t consciously design, following rules you never consciously agreed to.

Nothing sings this song louder than the countless religious women I have seen justify their own assault in the name of wifely “duty”. Think about that word. Duty. Does that sound like it’s about pleasure? Or does that sound like it’s about sacrifice?

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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.

Survival focus is incredibly useful when there is something to survive. It narrows your attention toward what is missing, what needs fixing, and what needs to happen next. The problem is that you can become so practiced at scanning for the next problem that you keep doing it long after your circumstances require it. Responsibility becomes an identity. Seriousness becomes a lifestyle. Eventually, you can have space in your life and still experience that space as something that needs to be filled, improved, monetized, optimized, or made useful.

What happens when we treat whimsy with the same devotion we have given productivity? Not waiting for play to spontaneously appear once everything else is handled, but deciding that pleasure, curiosity, imagination, and doing shit for absolutely no productive reason deserve space in a life too.

I Dare You To... Waste Your Own Time

Grab your journal. For the next ten minutes, you are banned from being useful.

Make a list titled Things I Would Do If They Didn’t Have To Lead Anywhere.

The rules are simple. Nothing on the list needs to improve you, make money, become content, develop a skill, heal a wound, impress anybody, or become a new fucking morning routine. You are looking for things whose only justification is: that sounds fun.

Pick the idea that makes some neglected little part of you go, wait...can we actually do that? Then answer this: What does the thing I chose reveal about what I have been starving while I was busy being responsible? Tell me what you came up with in the comments.

When I first began leaving my marriage, I started asking myself who I was outside of that relationship. I wasn’t yet at the point where I knew how to look inward and recognize myself, so I looked outward for examples. I consumed femininity content and found a version of womanhood built around softness, appearance, receptivity, and behavior that would probably fall under what people now call “light feminine energy.”

At the time, trying it on made sense. I had come from a relationship where my sexuality was attacked and where assertiveness, career success, and boundaries were labeled masculine. I had been repeatedly told what kind of woman I wasn’t supposed to be. When I finally rejected that definition, I went searching for another one. The problem was that the new definition was still shaped by many of the same patriarchal assumptions. The costume changed. The underlying instruction to be easy to control did not.

What we choose to embody becomes a form of expression, just as fashion communicates something about who we are. These labels can help us explore ourselves, but it should never become another authority telling us who we’re allowed to be. Wear the archetype. Play with it. Learn from it. Just remain the person who decides what it means

I Dare You To...Freak the Archetype

Grab your journal and choose 2-3 archetypes, energies, or qualities that interest you. They don’t have to make sense together. In fact, it’s better if they don’t. Maybe you choose an angel, a femme fatale, and a farmer. Maybe it’s a seductive nun with big dick energy. Stop reaching for the same boring-ass shit we’ve already seen a thousand times. You’re not boring damnit.

Combine those qualities into one character. Describe how your character looks, thinks, speaks, moves, loves, fucks, creates, or relates to power. Give them contradictions. Make them strange. Make them specific. Make them yours. Then sit back and ask yourself, what does my creation teach me about myself?

The point isn’t to discover which archetype you are. It’s to create one that could only have come from you. Feel free to share your creation below!

Want to keep going deeper? Subscribe to my premium column Intelexual for smart conversations about sex, desire, and the nervous system →

A fantasy of mine revealed itself in a dream.

I didn’t know I had it. That might be my favorite thing about fantasies: sometimes your conscious mind is the last person invited to the party. Mine apparently decided to expose itself by way of an indoor pool, a man I’m attracted to, and a version of me willing to get into a little trouble.

The pool is empty …

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“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