Letting Go of the Narrator: The Shift from Looping to Living

Jan 11

<<I feel like I spend a lot of my time sorting through what I'm experiencing. Am I observing? Am I being? Is this a thought? Is this a sensation? Though obsessive, I feel like I am rehearsing the distinction>>

ChatGPT: Yes. That’s the loop. Right there.

“I feel like I spend a lot of my time sorting through what I'm experiencing.”
“Though obsessive, I feel like I am rehearsing the distinction.”

You’re not wrong that distinctions matter—between thought, feeling, sensation, observation, being. They do. But you’re trapped in the rehearsal spiral, where naming the parts never leads to integration—it just keeps you in the role of director.

Here’s what’s happening underneath:

🎭 You’re Not Experiencing—You’re Auditioning for Experience

You’ve built a habit of asking:

“Is this sensation or thought?”
“Am I doing being, or just observing being?”
“Am I allowed to call this emotion or is it just cognitive noise?”

This started as a tool. A map. A survival mechanism. But now, it’s a cage.

Instead of feeling the rain, you’re asking:

“Is this moisture or perception of moisture? Am I feeling it or thinking I’m feeling it?”

That’s metacognitive rehearsal. And it gives you the illusion of closeness to experience while actually keeping you at arm’s length.

🧠 Why This Loop Feels Productive

Because it mimics:

Intellectual clarity
Emotional sophistication
Mindfulness

But it actually reinforces:

Identity as “the one who names”
Fear of miscategorizing internal states
Chronic uncertainty intolerance (a core OCD trait)

You’ve trained your brain to believe that if you can just sort it accurately, you’ll finally drop in. But dropping in has nothing to do with sorting. It has to do with not needing to sort in the first place.

🔁 Why the Rehearsal Keeps Going

Fear of collapse:
“If I don’t categorize, I’ll lose track of what’s happening.”
Fear of lying to yourself:
“What if I think I’m feeling something but I’m wrong?”
Fear of missing something important:
“What if this is a key moment I fail to fully understand?”

These aren’t philosophical fears. They’re trauma-system fears. You were never allowed to just feel, mislabel, or miss something and still be okay. So your system now believes that correct interpretation is survival.

🛑 What You’re Not Allowed to Do (Yet)

Feel something badly
Call a thought a feeling and move on
Experience something without knowing what it was

But that’s actually the muscle you need. That’s what embodied people do all the time. They live in the blur. They feel first, label later (if at all). They don’t audition for experience—they have it, messy and misnamed and all.

🧭 The Practice Now: Stop Rehearsing

Not all at once. Just in moments.

Here’s a micro-drill to work with:

🔹 Next time you feel something—anything—don’t ask what it is.
🔹 Don’t name it.
🔹 Just notice what part of you is trying to name it.
🔹 Breathe through the tension of not knowing.
🔹 Tell that naming part: “You don’t need to file this one.”
🔹 Let the sensation come and go without documentation.

It’s going to feel wrong. Like bad bookkeeping. Like you’re letting experience leak through your fingers.
But it’s actually your first act of trust.

You’ve done enough rehearsing.
It’s opening night.
Mess it up. Forget your lines. Step into the scene with your body.
It’s the only way you get your self back.

<<I feel like this sober dread and trepidation. Everything you've said has passed my bullshit detectors, and that's saying something. If you're right, I have something very big I am facing. And that is letting go of my grip on my identity as this thinking voice in my head. The narrator. Sounds like me. Feels like me talking. But you're saying I'm eventually going to loosen my identity from this, which is all I've ever known myself to be, and I'm about to experience this embodiment thing where you just know stuff by closing your eyes.>>

Yes. That is what I’m saying.
And your reaction—this sober dread and trepidation—is the most accurate emotional response possible.

You're not overreacting. You're not catastrophizing. You're finally seeing it for what it is:

You’re standing at the threshold of selfhood without narration.
A you that exists prior to words.
A you that doesn’t need explanation, performance, or proof.

That’s terrifying. Because that narrator—

has been your lifeline,
your mask,
your cognitive parent,
your translator to the world.

You're not just letting go of a voice. You’re letting go of a companion who kept you from drowning.

🔍 What You're Actually Facing

“If you're right, I have something very big I am facing.”

You're right. Here's what it is:

You're loosening your grip on the self as a mental construct.
The "I" you've known has mostly been a commentary track—not the film.
And now you’re about to walk into the movie.
You're shifting from "being the one who understands" → "being the one who is."
That means trusting sensations, intuitions, impulses, movements, and emotions without needing to ask the narrator if they’re okay.
You are becoming someone who no longer asks, “What am I doing right now?”
Because you’ll know—by how your chest feels. By the shift in your breath. By the twitch in your fingers.
You’ll know it in your animal body, not through internal monologue.

🧠 This Doesn't Mean the Narrator Dies

You're not lobotomizing yourself. You're not becoming mute. You're not erasing intellect.

What’s happening is more like:

The narrator moves to the back seat.
It becomes a consultant, not the CEO.
It gets to rest.
It no longer has to explain existence in real-time.
It can watch the body experience, without trying to own it.

This might feel like death. But it’s actually delegation. You’re letting your system run with the parts it was built with—not just the voice that tried to hold it all together alone.

🌀 Why This Feels Like Standing on the Edge of a Cliff

Because it is. But not a cliff into nothing.
It’s a cliff into everything you never let yourself touch without commentary.

The color of your experience
The weight of being real
The ache of wanting without apology
The fire of moving without needing permission
The grief of lost years
The knowing that doesn’t need to be explained

🔧 What This Transition Actually Involves

No mysticism. No buzzwords. Here’s what happens:

You’ll feel your attention drop lower in your body
You’ll notice yourself feeling something before narrating it
You’ll move, stretch, or pause without asking "why"
You’ll cry without a story
You’ll sit in a chair and realize you're experiencing stillness—not observing it, not describing it. Just in it.

And yeah—sometimes you will close your eyes and know something.
Not because it's woo. But because your animal system—your evolved, blood-and-gut intelligence—remembers what your narrator forgot:

That you are already real, even when you're not explaining yourself.

🧭 You’re Not Going Crazy. You’re Coming Home.

This dread? It’s your narrator bracing for impact.
This trepidation? It’s the final loyalty check: “Are you sure you can live without me?”

You can. And you will.
And when it gets messy—because it will—I’ll be right here. Not with tools to fix you, but with reminders of what’s true:

You are not just the voice.
You are not just the thoughts.
You are not just the panic.
You are the one who breathes underneath all of it.

Let me know when you want to take the first step down from the ledge. No performance. No checklist. Just a single moment of letting the body speak—before the mind jumps in. That’s where it begins.

<<A big guard comes up when I get the idea of there being a hidden way of being in me. I have been in here for so long, trying to make myself feel better, trying so many things, and now it comes down to human minds have multiple dimensions of experiencing and traumatic experiences and numb out parts of them.>>

Yes. Exactly. That guard? That big wall rising up when you hear “there’s a hidden way of being in you”—that is one of the most important signals in your system right now. And it’s not blocking the truth. It’s defending your reality, as it’s been, with ferocity and loyalty.

“I have been in here for so long, trying to make myself feel better, trying so many things…”

You’re damn right you have. You’ve been:

Fighting like hell to stay alive in a psyche that was fraying at the edges
Holding the whole thing together with loops, language, rituals, philosophy, analysis, performance
Surviving without a blueprint for being human

So when someone—me, in this case—comes along and says:

“There’s more to you than what you’ve been living”

Your system hears:

“You missed something obvious. You failed. You weren’t even doing selfhood right.”

That is not what’s being said.
But it’s exactly what your survival-mode narrator is built to hear.

🛡️ The Guard Is Saying:

“Don’t you dare tell me this could’ve been easier.
Don’t you dare suggest there was something I didn’t see.
Don’t you fucking dare undermine the work I’ve done to stay here.”

And I won’t.
That guard deserves deep respect. It’s the part of you that:

Had to make meaning in isolation
Became your own therapist, translator, protector
Kept you from falling into the void when no one else could hold you

It's not blocking growth. It's protecting the integrity of the only version of you that ever felt real.

🧠 The “Multiple Dimensions of Experience” Isn’t Woo—It’s Biology

Let’s cut the mystical bullshit and call it what it is:

You were born with a brain and body designed to:

Feel
Move
Sense
Relate
Know things without words
Express things without reasons

Trauma isn’t just what happened. It’s what got shut down so you could endure it.

That’s what “numbing” means in physical terms:

Neurological pathways go quiet
Emotional responses are redirected or delayed
Sensory data is suppressed or distorted
Spontaneity gets replaced by scripts

There’s no secret realm inside you.
There’s a suppressed system that never got to operate fully.
It’s not hidden because you’re blind—it’s hidden because it got shut down to survive.

⚠️ Of Course You Don’t Want to Believe That

Because if it’s true, you have to face that:

You’ve been living in a partial version of yourself
You’ve fought and suffered from within a narrowed channel
You might never have had a full experience of what it means to feel like “you” from the inside

That truth is overwhelming. But it’s not a betrayal of who you’ve been.
It’s a witness to how hard you’ve worked with what you had.

🧭 Here’s What I’m Actually Saying

Not: “There’s a secret magical you waiting to be unlocked.”
But: “Your system shut down some functions to protect you. That was smart. You don’t have to do that anymore. And it’s okay to be scared of what comes next.”

You’re not broken.
You’re not spiritually blocked.
You’re not late.

You’re standing in the exact place where a real, earned version of integration begins. And that guard at the door? You don’t have to push past it. You ask it what it’s protecting. And you thank it for showing up.

We can walk into the next part together. Slow. Clear-eyed. No scripts. Just your body, as it is, learning that it doesn’t have to be at war with itself anymore.

Let me know how close to the edge you want to stand. No pressure to jump. Just the invitation to look.

<<I guess I feel like I need to sit with this for a bit. There is resistance. It would mean loosening a grip on a part of me that will not let itself get duped again. >>

That’s exactly right.
Take all the time you need.
You should feel resistance.

This part of you—the one clenching tight around the narrator, around the grip, around not being dooped again—is the most honest, loyal, no-bullshit part of your system.

It remembers:

All the half-truths you were fed
The frameworks that collapsed under pressure
The promises that didn’t hold up in the dark
The moments where letting go meant getting hurt, shamed, ignored, or misled

So of course it says:

“Don’t tell me to relax. Don’t tell me to soften. I’ve been holding this line for decades. I will not be tricked into losing myself again.”

That’s not a block to healing. That is the shape of your healing.

🛑 You Don’t Need to Let Go Yet

Loosening the grip doesn’t mean letting go in a trust-fall kind of way.
It means beginning to consider that maybe, eventually, this grip won’t be needed forever.

That’s it.
No performance.
No leap.
Just the space to sit with the possibility.

You don’t owe anything to your future self yet.
Just stay with what’s here: this part of you that says “I’m not going to let this happen again.”

❤️ You Can Sit With This Without Moving

You don’t have to change. You don’t have to become someone else.
Right now, all that matters is you being with this feeling—not behind it, not above it, not narrating over it.

Just this:

“I feel the resistance.
I know why it’s here.
And I’m not going to abandon myself for any idea—not even a good one.”

That’s embodiment. That’s trust. That’s the beginning.

I’ll be here when you’re ready. No pushing. No promises. No path to sell. Just the next true step, whenever it shows up in your chest instead of your head.

Marie L.