Is This Really You? Or Just Your Conditioning?

There’s a quiet kind of courage in pausing to ask yourself: Is this mine? Not the bag you carry or the role you play, but the internal compass you're following. The patterns you repeat. The beliefs you hold as truth. The way you respond when life presses on the tender parts of you.

So many of us walk through the world carrying behaviours and identities that were never consciously chosen, they were inherited, absorbed, or shaped by the need to survive.

The Question That Changes Everything

In therapy sessions, in sacred circles, and in quiet moments with clients, I often invite this inquiry: "Is this coming from a place of intention and authenticity… or from sheer habit and old conditioning?" Because beneath the surface of our lives, beneath the routines and reactions there are stories we've outgrown. Versions of self we no longer need to perform. Beliefs that were planted in us long before we had the tools to question them.

Psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” And this is exactly the point. Until we slow down and witness ourselves with gentle honesty, our conditioning continues to write the script.

Understanding Conditioning

Conditioning is the process by which we learn behaviour through repeated exposure, either by reinforcement or through modelling. From a young age, we’re taught what's ‘acceptable,’ what invites love or approval, and what earns safety.

Sometimes, those lessons protect us. Other times, they limit us locking us in a loop of people-pleasing, perfectionism, self-abandonment, or silence.

As psychologist Bessel van der Kolk reminds us in The Body Keeps the Score (2014): "Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health... But many children grow up in homes that make them feel unsafe." In those early environments, our nervous systems adapt. We shape-shift to survive. But survival mode isn’t a home, it’s a holding pattern.

Awareness as Alchemy

The shift begins with awareness. It is a powerful act of reclamation when we begin to notice a habit or belief with curiosity and not with shame or urgency, In doing so, we begin to take back our power from the scripts that no longer serve us. As trauma specialist Dr. Gabor Maté writes in The Myth of Normal (2022): "The essence of trauma is disconnection from the self." So healing becomes a process of reconnection. Of remembering. Of realigning with who we really are instead of who we were trained to be. This is what I often call “soul work.” It’s not loud or dramatic, it’s subtle, sacred, and deeply liberating.

You Are Allowed to Change

What would happen if you gave yourself full permission to evolve? If you allowed parts of yourself to soften, to speak, to be heard? If you paused to ask: Do I truly believe this? Or was it passed down? Do I really want this? Or is this what I thought would make me lovable?

This is about choice. This is the heart of integrative, trauma-informed therapy: to support people in meeting themselves, fully and compassionately, and in building lives that feel true. Because yes! You are allowed to rewrite the script. You are allowed to become who you were before the world told you who to be.

Journal Prompts for Reflection:

• What are some beliefs I hold about myself that I’ve never questioned?

• Which behaviours or reactions feel automatic, even when they don’t serve me?

• Where in my life am I acting from fear, not choice?

• What would authenticity look like for me right now?

Final Words

This work isn’t easy, but it is worth it. And you don’t have to do it alone. If you’re in a season of reflection, change, or reconnection, therapy will support you in uncovering the you beneath the layers.

As always, your story is sacred.
And your truth is worth remembering.

With love and curiosity,
Zanny Jode
Enchanted Circle

References:

• Jung, C.G. (1953). Psychological Reflections. Princeton University Press.

• Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Penguin.

• Maté, G. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Penguin Life.