You keep waiting to feel like yourself again before you start doing the things a person like you would do.That is the wrong order, and it is why so many people try to come home to themselves,
fail, and decide something is wrong with them. Nothing is wrong with you. You were given the wrong instructions.
→ Work with me, one on one: https://theloomlife.com/coaching (open to men and women)
Finding yourself is the wrong verb. Finding implies she is somewhere — misplaced, behind something — and that enough journaling or enough quiet will locate her. That is not how a self works. Leaving is an event; a self is a practice. You act your way back.
This episode walks the four wrong turns almost everyone takes on the way. Blowing up your life, which feels decisive and takes you with you. Getting a hobby, which treats a missing self as a scheduling problem. Finding a new person, a new group, a new community — the one that looks exactly like recovery and is the single most common way
people lose themselves twice. And waiting, which does not look like anything at all and is the most common of the four.
Then the thing that actually works. There is a principle at the heart of one of the best-studied treatments for depression: action comes before motivation. Not after. You do the thing — small, scheduled, often before you want to — and the feeling follows. Applied to a lost self, that means you stop making decisions and start running experiments, because a decision says "this is who I am now" and that pressure is
exactly what keeps people frozen.
Leslie gives a two-question test to run on anything you try: did I lose track of time, and if the person in my life disappeared tomorrow would I still want this? She works it through with golf, which she took up two years ago and which happens to be her partner's sport — and the honest question she kept asking herself about whether it was hers or his. Plus why going back to who you were at twenty-five usually disappoints,
what self-expansion research suggests instead, the four quiet signs it is working (including irritation, which everyone misreads), and the way the people around you will react when you start taking something back.
Not finding. Acting. One experiment this week, one direction, two questions afterward.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Finding yourself is the wrong verb
01:40 The four wrong turns
05:25 Action comes before motivation — and running experiments instead
08:40 The two-question test, and what golf taught me
11:55 Go new, not back: self-expansion instead of nostalgia
14:15 Four quiet signs it is working
17:00 How the people around you react, and your one experiment
THE SERIES
This is part of The Three Anchors. Start with the first episode: The You, the Me, and
the We — [URL PENDING, see A9]
MORE SUPPORT
Going through a divorce, or rebuilding after one — THROUGH:
https://theloomlife.com/sp/through-divorce-program
Ongoing support and community — Mindful Untangling Membership:
https://theloomlife.com/membership
Instagram: @the.loom.life · @loom.life.therapy
This channel is educational content and is not therapy. Watching does not create a clinician-client relationship. Leslie is a licensed therapist in Florida only; Florida residents seeking therapy can find that at loomlifetherapy.com. Everyone else, the coaching link above is the door.
