I had Part 3 ready to go.
Spent weeks crafting it. A comprehensive guide to transforming fear without psychiatry, without medication, without the mental health industrial complex. Seven phases of practical techniques. Ancient wisdom recovered. Principles to live by, teach your children, share with your community. Everything to counter the cultural narrative that you're broken and need fixing.
I had it scheduled to publish the next morning.
Then, the night before posting, something happened in my office that made everything I'd written feel like trying to describe fire to someone who's never felt heat.
I still believe in those practices. They will be included in a future post. But first I need to tell you what happened, because it might be the most important thing I've ever witnessed about how healing actually works.
5pm on Monday evening, a 90 minute extended session. My final session of the day. I knew before I opened the waiting room door that something was different. Not wrong, but charged, like the air before lightning strikes.
She sat hunched in the corner chair, her body vibrating with anxiety so intense I could feel it pressing against my chest from across the room. This woman has survived things that would break most people. Years of work together had brought her far from where she started, but these episodes still came: waves of terror that would steal her sleep for days, leaving her gaunt, shaking, unable to eat or drink water.
As I walked her to my office, her fear followed us like a third presence. My body responded immediately, my own nervous system syncing with hers.
I've carried this sensitivity my entire life, though for decades I assumed everyone experienced the world this way. As a child, I'd walk into a room and instantly know who was angry, who was grieving, who was afraid, even when everyone was smiling. I thought this was normal. It wasn't until the last 5 years that I fully realized most people don't feel others' emotions as physical sensations in their own bodies.
This "gift" made life hell for years. I'd absorb strangers' emotions in grocery stores, carry coworkers' anxiety home with me, wake up with my partner's unexpressed anger sitting like a stone in my chest. At times I drank to numb it. Isolated to escape it. Nearly destroyed relationships because I couldn't distinguish between my emotions and everyone else's.
But as a therapist, this sensitivity became a tool. I don't just observe my clients' emotions; I experience them. Sometimes I know the thought energy behind the feeling before they've articulated it. The childhood memory connected to their panic. The specific betrayal beneath their rage. Some clients joke that I'm telepathic. Others find it unsettling at first, then relieving. Finally, someone who genuinely knows what they're feeling because I'm feeling it too.
Let me be clear: there's nothing special about me. We all have this capacity. That has been made clear to me. It's been trained out of most of us, medicated when it shows up too strongly, labeled as "anxiety disorder" or "hypersensitivity." Most have just forgotten how to access it.
This particular evening, alongside her terror, I felt something else arriving. A presence. A knowing. Something vast and loving hovering just outside ordinary perception. This wasn't coming from her or from me. This was something else entirely, waiting to be invited in.
As we arrived at my office, I thought about the article waiting on my laptop. All my carefully constructed arguments about fear as energy, not pathology. My seven phases for transformation. My rallying cry against pharmaceutical dependence. But looking at her suffering, my words felt hollow. She didn't need another framework. She needed a miracle.
What happened next suggests that sometimes, when we're truly ready, miracles arrive.
We sat down and before she could speak, words appeared in my consciousness with crystal clarity:
"Fear and love cannot exist at the same time."
The words were so clear they felt audible, and I immediately recalled 1 John 4:18 -
I've spent years developing the ability to distinguish between my own thoughts and these arrivals of knowing. Daily meditation, prayer, practices that quiet the mental noise enough to hear what mystics call the still, small voice. Until recently I have had a difficult time trusting it. But this was different. This wasn't wisdom bubbling up from my subconscious. This was a clear transmission. Undeniable.
My client started explaining her sleepless nights, the anxiety that wouldn't release its grip, how she'd been white-knuckling through each day. But I barely heard her words. I was receiving something else entirely: her complete energetic history, how trauma had wired her nervous system for perpetual danger, how she'd developed terror of the terror itself.
"Stop," I said gently. "Before we talk, let's sit in silence for a moment."
She looked confused but nodded. I needed this pause. Not for her, but for me. When these transmissions come, they arrive like a radio signal, and I've learned that my mental chatter acts like static. The analytical part of my brain, the part trained in graduate school to assess and diagnose, that part needs to shut down completely for me to hear what's actually being communicated. I stopped being anything except an empty vessel, available to whatever wanted to move through me.
That's when the electricity started.
It begins in the middle of my chest always. A tingling that spreads outward like water soaking through fabric. This happens sometimes when I pray or meditate, but never like this. Energy ran through my hands with such intensity I had to resist the urge to shake them out. A buzzing filled my ears, not unpleasant but impossible to ignore, like standing next to high-voltage power lines.
My entire body became a tuning fork, vibrating at a frequency I'd only experienced in my deepest spiritual moments. Those rare times when I'd spent long periods in meditation or prayer and suddenly felt myself dissolve into something larger. But this was happening in seconds, not hours. The presence that had followed us into the room was using my body as an instrument, tuning it to the exact frequency needed for what was about to happen.
I focused on my breathing, letting each exhale drop me deeper into receptivity. The messages were already arriving, not as words but as knowing. Complete downloads of understanding that would take paragraphs to explain but arrived instantaneously. I saw her entire fear architecture, how it was built, why it persisted, and most importantly, how to dismantle it not through force but through frequency.
When I opened my eyes, I knew exactly what to say. Not from my training, not from any textbook, but from something speaking through me:
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