A client of mine digs at her insecurities like a child picking at a fresh scab. Picking on one’s wounds, like nail biting, and pimple popping—I watch so many of my clients do this. I watch myself do this, for it is an evil compulsion, with a dark pull.
The wound I pick is always tied to my insecurities, specifically when I compare my career or motherhood to others. I am getting too old for this melodrama; it is a bad habit I have to kill.
But how do I go about doing this? I had a hunch that it has something to do with re-orienting myself with my “Be Goals.” As in: What do I want to be when I grow up? Because, indeed, I need to grow up.
I want to be emotionally mature. As a child of an emotionally immature dominant parent, what do I want to be when I grow up is: emotionally mature.
So, what will it take to get there? What do I need to pick up, and what do I need to cast aside?
Working on a normal sense of entitlement
I pondered this question recently while observing my spouse. He has a normal sense of entitlement.
When he wants something, he buys it (especially Lego). When he feels the urge to eat, he eats. When he needs to go for a run, he puts on his shoes and steps out the door. He exudes effortless self-respect, confidence. He answers his own needs and comforts without excessively infringing on or harming others.
In short, he just takes it “like a man”. This is something I would like to emulate.
Observing him this weekend, spending on things he loves, I came to the realization once again that we are both human beings with equally valid needs. Yet, for many years—too many, in fact—my default setting has been restricted entitlement. Deprivation, inhibition: my habit has been to constantly check the emotional temperature of the people in the house before “indulging” or “splurging” on myself. The quotation marks on those words are intentional. If my husband spends, I perceive it as simply answering a need. But if I do it, I call it a sin. This is what restricted entitlement looks like.
All the more, I find myself asking: “Am I safe right now? Am I safe enough to just exist, eat, sleep, read, and relax?”
Why am I this way?
The anatomy of a trauma habit loop
My safety-seeking behavior originates from Complex PTSD. To survive the trauma of my emotionally abusive childhood, I had to stay on my toes. The logic back then was simple: “If I keep checking, I can prevent the danger.” It is an exhausting, hypervigilant loop that bypasses logic. Performing these checks is much like the psychological wound-picking I described earlier: my anxiety temporarily drops the moment I engage in these safety behaviors—the moment I check on others, and then turn inward to self-interrogate.
In neuropsychology, Hebb’s Law states that neurons that fire together wire together. That means if I keep running this erroneous loop for twenty, thirty, or forty years, it will be to my detriment. Do I seriously want to check up on others every single time before I feel safe enough to simply “do my thing”?
No. Something has to change.
In my quandary, I turned to what I usually do as an autodidact—books. In Atomic Habits, James Clear outlines a four-stage loop: Cue, Craving, Response, and Reward. Mapping this behavioral framework onto my trauma, I see it clearly:
- The Cue is the external environment (a door opening, my name being mentioned by a family member, etc.)
- The Craving is my desperate need for emotional safety.
- The Response is comprised of my safety behaviors.
- The Reward is an immediate but temporary feeling of relief.
To break a destructive habit, Clear argues you must master the Entry Point—the decisive, two-minute window where the trajectory of your behavior is decided. For me, the entry point is that exact moment I want to open my bedroom door to check if my son is home, or to scan for external signs that the people in the house are “safe” or doing what they should be doing.
Mastering the entry point means doing absolutely nothing. It means telling my thoughts to “stay,” like training a dog. “Don’t bite,” I add.
And they don’t.
Coddling the bad habit results in a nervous system conditioned to a steady diet of compulsion. Living this way, I’d be a control freak for life—something I certainly don’t want. My family wouldn’t appreciate it either. If I keep the bad habit, I fail to model the emotional maturity I want my own children to inherit.
The cycle is clear: distress leads to safety behaviors, performing those behaviors grants brief relief, and that relief reinforces the loop—now it’s stuck on repeat.
To quit this sick, sad, monkey dance, I have to step outside the loop entirely and become the witness to my own anxiety. Buddhism introduced the concept of the “monkey mind,” which reminds me: “Become the master of your mind rather than let your mind master you.”
Raising my upper limits for the good things in life
Mastering the entry points, as James Clear calls it, is beneficial. At the same time, I must remember the bigger goal behind what I am doing. I first realized how much work I needed to do in developing my own sense of normal entitlement while observing my husband with his Lego, his running, and his ability to just “take it like a man.” I want to adopt the same attitude.
To achieve this, I have to build normal entitlement by raising my upper limit of comfort—a concept I picked up while reading Gay Hendricks’ book The Big Leap.
In his book, the author describes a psychological thermostat—an internal threshold for how much happiness and comfort we allow ourselves to feel before we pull ourselves back down. Raising that upper limit means expanding my capacity to receive good things. “Kailangan ko nang matutong tumanggap ng grasya,” as we say in Tagalog.
(Granted, I was jolted wide awake an hour later. The old panic flared, prompting me to slip out of bed and check if he was safely in his room. But hey—growing pains. I am a work in progress. And I can genuinely say to myself, “I am proud of you!”)
My scenario illustrates exactly why mastering the entry point is so powerful. In James Clear’s terms, the Cue was the same, and the Craving was the same, but this time, I changed the Response. Instead of outsourcing my sense of safety to my son, I checked in on myself. I emotionally regulated. I utilized my tools—deep breathing, a secular seven-syllable chant, earplugs, acupressure, and white noise.
Epektib! I was able to calm my nervous system down enough to return to sleep. And even after waking up to ensure my son was home in one piece, I reapplied those techniques and was delighted to find my internal arsenal completely up to snuff.
The Black Box of becoming works in mysterious ways
Looking closely at that breakthrough night, I can see two distinct layers to what occurred.
The first layer is mechanical: my somatic regulation techniques have finally become effective. The second, far more consequential layer is psychological: my unconscious has internalized safety.
This second layer is far more meaningful because it indicates some deep work has been accomplished. Who did the deep work? What are the mechanics? I don’t know. It happened—and is still happening—within the black box of the unconscious, where the god in me works in mysterious ways.
What I do know is that the body keeps the score, as Bessel van der Kolk famously observed in his book of the same title. My body spoke last night; it encoded a cryptic message from the abyss.
Well, message received!
Yet, even as I receive the message, I am still trying very hard to process it. I struggle with the change. My deeply ingrained beliefs as a mother include the central concept of sacrifice. So, what needs to be done now is an amendment of maternal sacrifice.
When my child was young, I sacrificed time and energy—lots of it—just to be sure my son was safe in his crib. Now he is grown up, fully stretched out in his bed, and standing almost six feet tall. My sacrifice has to be something else now, right?
I will have to sacrifice surety.
It is a sacrifice necessary for my own development as a human being.
To be a human being—to “Be”—means allowing room for growth, not just for myself, but for my family. As my son is becoming, so am I becoming.
This realization gave me the answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this essay: “How can I achieve my Be Goals if I do not Be first?”
Last night proved I don’t have to live like a war veteran who brought the battlefield home. Logically, neurologically, and somatically, I can keep on living with a sense of safety under my own skin. I am safe in my own home.
Home sweet home—in me.
