Sometimes Accepting Reality Just Sucks

On Soviet ghosts, exiled parts, and the lifelong work of becoming whole.

I was about twelve years old when I took my first personality test.

It was the nineties, I lived in Siberia, and I had found a book in a bookstore that promised to explain why people were the way they were. I read it cover to cover, did all the tests, and then made my friend Nadia sit through the questions so I could test her too. On the surface, my obsessive personality testing was driven by curiosity. But underneath, I think I was looking for something more specific: I wanted science to tell me that I was allowed to be me.

I remember feeling shame quite a bit throughout my childhood. For not getting good enough grades, for wanting to rest when I was supposed to be productive, for being "too much" in some ways and not enough in others. Underneath all that, I desperately wanted to be someone who didn't do things just because other people expected them, someone who could trust her own sense of what was true, even when it didn't match what others wanted her to feel.

I grew up in a place and a time where standing out carried consequences. My grandparents and great-grandparents lived through Stalin’s purges, a time when getting on someone’s bad side could have deadly consequences. You could disappear. A neighbor, a coworker, anyone could report you, and you would simply be gone.

This level of threat doesn’t require anyone to consciously pass it on to be felt through generations. Nobody in my family talked about emotions, not my parents, not my grandparents, not my great-grandparents, as far as I know. There was no emotional processing of any kind. Instead, those feelings went into the body, into the nervous system, into the way adults held their faces when someone in power walked into the room, and into the way children learned to read the mood before they learned to read words. Research by Dr. Rachel Yehuda at Mount Sinai suggests these experiences may leave measurable epigenetic traces in our genes, carried forward even before we’re born. Whether or not the science fully settles that question, it certainly feels like I inherited a nervous system that treats disapproval like a threat to survival.

I didn’t know any of this consciously at twelve. I just knew that displeasing people felt like a threat my body took seriously, even when my mind knew better.

When I moved to California at nineteen and went to live in Santa Cruz, I understood logically that I was free. I was shocked by the level of freedom of expression my fellow students at UCSC possessed. I knew I wouldn’t be erased from the face of Earth for having a different opinion or taking up too much space; in fact, it was encouraged. And yet my nervous system was still treating someone’s disappointment in me like an emergency that needed to be managed before it would be too late.

So I kept reading: books about personality became books about relationships became books about attachment became books about trauma. I got a degree in molecular biology and then set it aside and spent twenty years in Silicon Valley being very good at managing everyone's feelings in rooms where that wasn't officially my job. In 2013, I started coaching on the side while still showing up as a marketer full-time, keeping both lives running in parallel for eleven years. Then in 2024, I left tech, applied to graduate school, got certified in divorce coaching, completed a year-long coach training, and got my mediation certification, all at once. A master's degree in conflict resolution followed. I have a book coming out, for goodness’ sake!

I told myself it was a calling. But, in hindsight, it was partially a subconscious move to prevent that level of pain after yet another relationship rupture. I wanted to protect myself, and I wanted to teach others to do the same.

And after all that, here I am, still in therapy. I’ve been in therapy since my early twenties.

I’ve tried CBT and DBT and EMDR and brainspotting and Hakomi and psychosynthesis and IFS. I’ve done somatic work, Reiki, and psychedelic-assisted therapy. I’ve fed my demons (a Buddhist approach) and tried Ho’oponopono (a Hawaiian healing technique), in search of something that talking hadn’t reached. I’ve read more books than I can count (I tried at some point, and Newsweek published an article about me) and sat across from more practitioners than I can easily recall.

Here’s why I keep going: we all have parts of ourselves that got exiled early, pushed into the shadows because they were too much, too inconvenient, or too dangerous to show. Those parts go underground and keep running us from underneath our awareness, driving our reactions and defining our patterns on autopilot. All of this therapy, all of this work, is an attempt to find those parts, bring them back, and become whole enough that my choices actually come from me rather than from a frightened twelve-year-old in Novosibirsk who learned that being authentic had consequences.

Integrity, to me, means living as one coherent piece, while showing up from my values and my truth, fully present and available to myself, making choices from awareness instead of fear-based autopilot.

I’m not there yet, and honestly, I haven’t met anyone who is. Uncovering all the exiled parts accumulated across a lifetime, across generations, might genuinely take a lifetime. Every layer I work through reveals the next one. For a long time, this felt discouraging. Now it mostly feels like the nature of the work. Each broken-off piece of me that I discover and integrate gives me more access to my actual self, more ability to choose my response instead of reacting from the pattern.

And then there’s the part I still find really difficult:

Some things in life are ours to change, and some things aren’t. How we show up, what we choose, what we do with what happens to us, those belong to us. What other people think, what stories they carry about us, whether they’re ever open to hearing our truth, those do not. The work of truly accepting that distinction, beyond intellectual understanding, but feeling it settle in the body, is where I struggle most.

I have still not fully accepted the fact that I can’t reach everyone. Some people will carry resentment or a version of me I know is wrong, and there is nothing I can do about it, and the most dignified option available is to let it be. My nervous system fights this every single time.

So I breathe. I walk. I go to therapy. I hand responsibility to something larger than me, not fully believing it in the moment, but doing it anyway because it’s the best available option.

I’ve done so much work on this. It is easier than it was. I understand now why my body responds the way it does, where the wiring came from, how far back it goes, and understanding creates just enough space between the trigger and the reaction to make a different choice sometimes.

Sometimes, though, accepting reality just sucks.

So I continue going to therapy and trying different approaches to feel whole. Because the alternative, living on autopilot, driven by inherited fear, performing safety instead of choosing integrity, feels worse than the discomfort of the work. Every exiled part I find and bring home makes me a little more me, a little more capable of living the way I actually want to live.

I work with people who are carrying versions of the same experience. They might be going through challenging life transitions like divorce, or having to deal with a high-conflict co-parent, or going through relational ruptures that they can’t seem to recover from. Or maybe they can’t reach someone they need to reach, or they are sitting with a story about themselves that they know is wrong and can’t correct, or trying to figure out how to let go of something that still feels dangerous to release.

Having spent years as a client across so many modalities, I draw from my experiences when I coach. I know what EMDR feels like from the inside. I know what it’s like to do IFS work and suddenly find a part of yourself you didn’t know was running you. I know what the body feels like when somatic work actually lands, and I know the particular frustration of when it doesn’t.

I'm not the coach who made it to the other side and is waving you over. I'm right there on the path, and some days I start drowning too. But I've gone under enough times by now to know how to find the surface again.