Authenticity is the root. Abundance is the ripple.

The hidden costs of dimming your truth.

Let’s pause the platitudes about ‘moving on’ and ‘letting go'.

The belief that positive thinking alone can heal trauma is comforting—but it’s also misleading.
Trauma doesn’t get erased just because your mind decides it’s inconvenient.

I’ve lived inside that lie.

I’ve smiled at the right time. Nodded through the checklists. Breathed deep through the panic.

Meanwhile, my body was staging a quiet riot.

I could be sitting in a sun-drenched room, incense curling through the air, affirmations written neatly in my journal—on paper, everything says safe.

But my shoulders are up around my ears like they’re bracing for impact. My breath’s shallow like I’m about to run. And my stomach? Twisted like it just overheard a threat no one else can hear.

That’s the disconnect no one wants to talk about.

You can know you’re not in danger. You can say the worst is over. But your body? It’s still holding the line like it’s all about to collapse.

Because the body doesn’t clock out when the therapist signs off. It keeps the score. It keeps the rhythm. And if you're not listening, it’ll start shouting.

And it doesn’t stop at the body.

Lately, I’ve felt it in my wallet, too. Like I’ve hit some invisible ceiling on how much I’m allowed to earn, receive, even want—because some old version of me still believes abundance isn’t safe.

It shows up in love, too. That moment when your heart wants to open… but your nervous system slams the door. You get close to someone and suddenly you’re cold, busy, suspicious, withdrawn. Not because you don’t want intimacy—but because part of you still thinks closeness costs you everything.

That’s trauma talking. Not in screams, but in patterns. In hesitations. In missed calls and money fears and staying just small enough not to be noticed.

I saw this on Facebook the other day and it hit hard:

“You’re not healing to handle trauma. You already know how to do that.
You’re healing to handle joy—and to let happiness back into your life.”

Exactly.

And here’s the lightning:

Shadow work isn’t just about pain or trauma.
Sometimes it’s about how we’ve been trained to dim.
To trade truth for safety.
To shrink so others feel more comfortable.

For many of us, the questions of expression, survival, worth, and abundance are front and center right now. But the answers?
They’re not in a to-do list.
They live in the shadow.

In those whispers that say:

“I can’t ask for that.”
“If I show up fully, I’ll be rejected.”
“Who am I to want more?”

So I asked Kerrie:

Can we go there?

Can we do a journey into the real stuff—love, money, worth, survival?

She said no.

And I was confused. A little frustrated.

Working with Kerrie Basha during Women of Wisdom, whose intuitive precision borders on supernatural, I didn’t just heal—I remembered. I unraveled. I met long-buried parts of myself. I traced old stories still shaping my life from behind the scenes. She is a revelation!

So I was BUMMED when she said NO!!!

But then she said:

“Love and money are just symptoms.

The root is always the same: you’ve been hiding who you are.

If we chase outcomes, we’re still negotiating with the shadow.

But if we meet it in truth, everything changes.”

I need that.