Dear Gentle Souls,
Imagine a New Year's resolution to trust yourself in 2025. How does it look and feel?
My hope is that, as you practice trusting your emotions and taking care of yourself, you steer away from agitation, confusion, and exhaustion, and towards:
Calmness
Clarity
Energy
Emotional, cognitive, and psychological discomfort are smoke signals—warning signs. You feel rattled or conflicted because something is wrong, not because something is wrong with you.
Abusive people and systems are wired to shut down your instinctive knowledge. Those who pathologize healthy, inconvenient, and pesky personal emotions do so because personal feelings impede their self-serving mission. Anger, for example, questions intent, demands boundaries, and comes from self-respect. Emotionally abusive tactics like gaslighting wear down your self-respect by inculcating uncertainty. The longer you are exposed, the more confusion becomes the norm. False dependency on the gaslighter replaces authentic self. When cognitive dissonance is your baseline, you mistrust yourself. Then life is exponentially harder—and exhausting.
But when you recognize that confusion and uncertainty are warning signs, you can reverse-engineer the damage. Step by step, you start to rely on your inner signals. Practice trusting yourself by heeding them. Recalibrating self-blame into self-trust takes practice and time. You must catch the feeling, pump the brakes, step away from the source of agitation, and start steering towards calmness. These are the first steps. Those efforts will serve you well for the rest of your life and in every situation.
The more that you address and calm the inner rumblings, clearing confusion, the more mental clarity you recover. Right decisions increase energy. While agitation, confusion, and exhaustion are your smoke signals, calmness, clarity, and energy are your guideposts. No external source can dictate your inner peace. You are your own source and influencer. Every time you consult yourself, you build more self-trust, agency, and authority over your life. That is the reclamation.
As your nervous system calms, your prefrontal cortex functioning improves, and life becomes exponentially easier to manage. Your "spidey sense" will be on target most of the time. Sometimes, like a human, you'll make mistakes. You will learn something, course-correct, and move forward.
Gentle Souls, life is short. When I stopped letting a nefarious overlord micromanage me—no more secrets and hidden agendas—step by step, day by day, I took back my life. Unnecessary burdens fell away. Less really is more.
Life is also hard enough without having to manage someone else's selfish agenda. Your time and energy are precious. You can't change the past, but the past can inform how you own your present and build your future.
In 2024, I toast to us all choosing the calmness, clarity, and energy needed for authentic selfhood and life.
Cheers,
~Esther
Esther Friedman
Author of The Gentle Souls Revolution
Website: gentlesoulsrevolution.com
Buy the book: https://a.co/d/4fLuoa0
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