You Don't Need More 'Fixing'

The Goal Was Never to Stop Feeling It

I want to talk about something that I think gets quietly, persistently misunderstood — even by people who have done a lot of work on themselves, who have read the books and taken the courses and sat with the discomfort. Maybe especially by those people.

There’s an idea that tends to sneak in through the back door of every healing narrative, and it goes something like this: if I do enough work on myself, rejection won’t hurt anymore. That one day, I’ll be regulated enough, grounded enough, healed enough that the sting just... won’t land. That the goal is some version of emotional Teflon. Nothing sticks.

I understand why that idea is seductive. When you’ve spent years being floored by a look, a silence, a tone of voice — when a perfectly innocuous email can send you into a shame spiral that costs you the rest of your day — you fantasise about a version of yourself who is simply... impervious. Who reads the difficult message and thinks hm, interesting, and moves on with their life.

I want to be honest with you about something: that version doesn’t exist. And more than that — I don’t think we should want it to.

Rejection is Supposed to Hurt

There’s a concept I come back to constantly in my work, and it’s this: rejection is supposed to hurt. It always will. The human nervous system is wired for belonging, and belonging is survival — not metaphorically, but in the oldest, most animal part of our brains. When we sense we might be losing our place in the group, that’s a real alarm going off for a real reason. The people who feel nothing in response to rejection aren’t regulated. They’re disconnected from something important.

So when I talk about changing RSD, I am never, ever talking about becoming someone who doesn’t feel rejection. That was never the point.

The point — the whole point — is to stop being governed by it.

And those two things are so different that I think it’s worth sitting with the distinction for a while.

It is Absolutely Exhausting

Being governed by rejection looks like making the call — or not making it — because of what someone might think. It looks like lying awake at 2am replaying a conversation from Tuesday, building an airtight case for why you were right, or a devastating case for why you were terrible. It looks like the six drafts before you send the text. The post you deleted. The opportunity you didn’t take because the thought of it not working out felt unsurvivable.

It looks like a life that has quietly, incrementally, organised itself around avoiding the feeling. Around keeping the threat at bay.

And here’s what I’ve come to understand — not just professionally, but from the inside, because I lived this — it is absolutely exhausting. Not in the dramatic, obvious way. In the slow, grinding, background way that you don’t even notice until one day you realise how small your world has become. How many decisions were made by your threat response, not by you. How much energy went to managing and anticipating, instead of actually living.

The Person Who is Supposed to Know Better Still Falling Apart

I need to tell you something about my own experience here, because I think it matters.

For years, I worked on myself every single day. I mean that literally. I was a therapist. I had trained in change work, in hypnotherapy, in getting to the root cause of things and altering the trajectory. I knew the tools. I used the tools. I was, by anyone’s measure, someone who took their inner life seriously.

And yet. There it still was.

I remember the shame of that — and I mean real shame, layered shame, the shame of the person who is supposed to know better still falling apart over a perceived slight. I had moments of genuine self-actualisation. Real clarity, real expansion, real joy. And they would be twinned — sometimes within the same day — with moments of deep despair. A look. A silence. A message that didn’t come. And I’d be floored all over again.

I kept thinking: if I can’t change this — me, with all of this training, with all of this commitment — then what does that say? And the answer my nervous system kept handing me was: there must be more to excavate. More shadow to integrate.

I’ll be honest. That particular phrase used to make me want to scream. Not because shadow work is wrong. But because it kept repositioning me as the problem. As someone who hadn’t yet done enough. As permanently unfinished.

And at some point I got tired. Tired of seeing myself as the problem. Tired of the whack-a-mole quality of it — fix one thing, find another. I began to wonder whether the model itself was wrong. Not the work, but the assumption underneath it: that if you worked hard enough, long enough, bravely enough, the sensitivity would eventually dissolve.

It Was Such a Relief That I Nearly Cried

The answer arrived, as it often does, sideways. A few years ago I went through post-viral syndrome. It was brutal in the way these things are — the kind of depletion that strips everything back to what’s actually happening in the body. And something unexpected happened. As I began to recover, as my nervous system slowly came back online, I noticed that the RSD episodes were less frequent. Less severe. Not gone — but genuinely different.

It was such a relief that I nearly cried.

Not because I had finally found the shadow. Not because I had processed something correctly. But because my nervous system, for the first time in a long time, had some resources. Some capacity. Some room to respond rather than react.

That was when it became undeniable to me: this was never a flaw in my personality. It was never weakness, or ego, or immaturity, or unfinished business. It was a nervous system that had learned — really, really well — to treat certain signals as life-threatening. A nervous system that I had, without meaning to, allowed to run the show.

You Cannot Retrain a Nervous System That is in Survival Mode

Here’s where I want to push back against something, plainly and with care.

There’s a strand of thinking in a lot of therapeutic and coaching spaces that treats RSD as a wound to be excavated. And there’s real value in understanding your history — I’m not dismissing that. But the excavation framing implies there’s a version of you, underneath all of it, who wouldn’t have RSD. A pre-wound self. An original factory setting that was neurotypical and would have responded to rejection in a perfectly measured, contained, rational way.

And for most of the people I work with — and for me — that version never existed.

There’s also something I need to say plainly, because I don’t think it gets said enough: approaching RSD as primarily a trauma issue — leading with excavation, with going back in, with processing the root — doesn’t just fail to help. In the wrong sequence, it can actively make things worse.

I say this as someone who trained as a hypnotherapist. I am not anti-therapy. But here’s what I’ve seen, and what I’ve experienced: when your nervous system is already running on empty, when the threat response is already hair-trigger and your capacity for regulation is already stretched thin — asking it to go deeper into the wound is like asking someone who is drowning to analyse the water.

The nervous system needs to feel safe before it can learn anything new. That’s not a preference. That’s neurobiology. And a lot of therapeutic approaches — however skilled, however well-intentioned — can inadvertently communicate to an already dysregulated system that there is more danger to be found inside. More to uncover. More that is broken. And the limbic system, which is always listening for confirmation that a threat is real, takes that information and runs with it.

I’ve worked with people who came to me having spent years in good therapy, with skilled practitioners, and were more destabilised than when they started. Not because the therapy was wrong in itself. But because the sequence was wrong. Because nobody had first helped them build the physiological safety to withstand the excavation. So instead of processing, they were just re-flooding.

This is one of the reasons I’m so deliberate about where we start. You cannot retrain a nervous system that is in survival mode. You have to earn its trust first. Everything else comes after that.

We’re Learning to Regulate

So what are we actually doing, if not excavating?

We’re learning to regulate. We’re learning to accommodate. We’re learning to work with the nervous system you actually have, rather than punishing it for not being a different one.

This shift — from fixing to regulating — changes everything. Because when you stop treating your own neurology as a problem to be solved, something in you genuinely relaxes. The shame that was wrapped around the shame starts to lift. And in that space, the actual work becomes possible.

Not the work of transformation into something other. The work of becoming more fully yourself — with a nervous system regulated enough to let you take risks, make connections, put things out into the world, have difficult conversations, be seen — without the constant threat of being laid flat by it.

Your Nervous System is Not a Flaw in Your Character

What I want you to hear — really hear — is this.

The capacity to be affected by rejection isn’t the failure. It was never the enemy. The enemy was being governed by it. Being at its mercy. Having no resource, no anchor, no way back to yourself once it landed.

That is what changes. Not the feeling itself. The relationship to the feeling.

What most people discover, once they get there, is that the goal of feeling less was never really what they wanted. What they wanted was to feel the thing and still be able to function. To feel the thing and not have it swallow the whole day. To feel the thing and know, with some confidence, that they will come back to themselves. That it will pass. That they are not the feeling.

That’s a completely different kind of freedom than not feeling. And it’s the only kind I’ve found that’s actually available.

Your nervous system is not a flaw in your character. It is not a wound that hasn’t healed properly. It is not evidence that you haven’t worked hard enough, or dug deep enough, or been brave enough.

It is a nervous system that was sensitised over time, doing exactly what nervous systems do — learning, pattern-matching, trying to protect you from the thing that hurt. And it can be retrained. The spiral can be reversed. Not into numbness. Not into indifference. Into something more like freedom.

Into a life that isn’t small.

If any of this resonates, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. And if you want to understand more about what that retraining actually looks like — the practical, none-of-this-is-your-fault version — I have a low-cost self-led course, RSD Free, and you can find out more HERE