Welcome to The Shit Show
I want to talk about healing.
But not the version that looks good on Instagram.
I mean the kind where you think you’ve already done a lot of work—because you have—and then something else shows up anyway. The kind where you’re tired, annoyed and honestly a little offended that the universe thinks you’re still not done.
That kind.
There’s a process called Cutting the Ties That Bind, developed by psychotherapist Phyllis Krystal. It’s a therapeutic approach that uses symbols and visualization to help release subconscious bindings—those invisible ties that keep us tethered to old wounds, outdated roles and patterns we didn’t consciously choose.
The core idea is simple, but not easy:
you stop letting your past run the show and start relying on your own Higher Consciousness as your guide.
You don’t erase your history.
You don’t vilify your parents.
You don’t pretend nothing hurt.
You just stop dragging what no longer belongs to you into the present.
Now, I’ve said this before, I’m saying it again, and I’ll say it many more times: healing is not linear.
It’s not a straight line forward.
It’s a spiral.
Round and round we go.
If you’ve been reading my posts, you know this about me—I always follow my dreams. And I mean always. My dreams don’t care how much work I think I’ve done. They don’t hand out gold stars. They just point to whatever still needs attention and shine a very unflattering spotlight on it.
I’ve done a lot of healing work.
Inner child stuff.
Grief.
Learning how to share my feelings—which I truly abhor.
Identifying wounds. Questioning my reactions. Noticing patterns. Trying to respond instead of react.
It’s a constant, daily practice.
And still.
My dreams kept calling me out.
Not gently. Not subtly.
Apparently, I was still emotionally armored to the point of being… let’s call it unapproachable. My dreams called it “cold” and were not shy about pointing it out. They were even less subtle about where that armor came from.
Mom.
sigh.
After months of being repeatedly informed—by my own subconscious and spirit team—that I was not as healed as I’d like to believe, I decided to get some help. I began to work with Michael Sheridan and the Aisling School, the same place where I’ve learned everything I trust about dream interpretation, to begin Cutting the Ties That Bind.
Here’s what this process actually is—and what it is not.
It does not mean you hate your parent.
It does not mean they were terrible.
It does not mean you want nothing to do with them.
It means you identify the traits and patterns you unconsciously absorbed and decide—consciously—which ones you’re done carrying.
You keep the good.
You release the rest.
And you do it with compassion. For them and for yourself.
There was never any question which parent I needed to work on.
I used to get really angry about how mothers get blamed for everything. I thought it was bullshit. And sometimes it is. But I’ve come to understand something that’s uncomfortable to admit.
A mother plays a foundational role in helping a child feel unconditionally loved. And when that belief isn’t fully there—I am loved without earning it—it quietly affects everything.
Relationships.
Self-worth.
How safe it feels to need anything at all.
This isn’t about blame.
It’s about impact.
Fathers matter too. They teach us something different but just as essential—that we are allowed to take up space, that we belong simply because we exist.
When either of those messages is missing or distorted, we adapt. We become hyper-independent. Expect perfection. We learn how to be strong.
And at some point, that strength turns into armor.
Healing doesn’t stay theoretical.
It gets personal.
It gets messy.
And it asks you to look at things you’d rather believe you already handled.
The first step in this process is deceptively simple.
You get a piece of paper.
You draw a line down the middle.
On the left, you list all the negative things—what your parent did, what didn’t happen, the traits you picked up and the ways they show up in your life now.
On the right, you list the positive.
That’s it.
No analysis.
No editing.
No being fair or generous or “seeing both sides.”
Just honesty.
And here’s the thing: the list isn’t fixed. It grows. As your dreams start revealing what’s underneath the surface, new patterns surface. New memories. New awareness. Things you didn’t think were connected suddenly are. The list becomes a living document of what’s ready to be seen.
So I sat down with a pen and paper and started my list.
Negative:
Anger
Shame over my body
Neglect
Judgement
Conditional in love and support
Neglected
No support
Ignored me
Made me feel alone
Didn’t show up for me after Connor died
Bury her head in the sand
Has favorite children – I am not one
Can’t just be happy for me
Not nurturing – disconnection from feminine energy
I don’t listen to my intuition because mom didn’t listen to me
I compare myself to others
I don’t see the value or worth in my gifts
Mom didn’t support me so why would my spirit team and intuition/high self
The way I was raised negatively impacts my relationship with Jason
Annoyance
Lack of patience
Didn’t protect me from my bully brother
I don’t know how to be vulnerable
I don’t know how to share my feelings
I don’t know how to ask for help or rely on others
Positive:
Love of the theater
Love of dancing
Self sufficient
Belief I could do anything I wanted
Strong woman role model – was not submissive
I stopped when I was done and just stared at the page.
I hadn’t even noticed while I was writing, but neglected and ignored showed up more than once. Same wound. Same theme. Different wording. Apparently my subconscious felt the need to really underline that one.
And that positive list… I mean—can we even call it a list?
Still, there is something important here. Something I don’t want to gloss over or minimize.
In a conservative LDS family, I was never made to feel less than because I was a girl. My mom genuinely believed I could do anything I wanted, and I believed her. And for that, I am deeply grateful. I was never repressed. I was never told to be smaller.
That matters.
And—this is where things get uncomfortable—gratitude doesn’t cancel out pain. Both can exist at the same time. They do exist at the same time.
Here’s the thing about dreams. One of the many things, actually.
They will tell you what needs to heal.
And they will tell you when what you’re working on is actually healing.
How cool is that?
It doesn’t matter what modality you’re using—talk therapy, energy work, breathwork, FootZoning, ThetaHealing, yoga, meditation, Reiki, visualization—if it’s working, it will show up in your dreams. Dreams don’t care about the method. They care about movement.
That’s why this process is guided and led by dreams.
You set the intention to let go and heal everything on the negative side of the paper. You do the visualization—twice a day—using the process outlined by Phyllis Krystal. And then you watch. You pay attention. You see what your dreams start to uncover, disrupt and rearrange.
And I cannot stress this enough:
This is not an easy process.
It’s not gentle.
It’s not tidy.
And it does not care how “far along” you think you are.
Michael and his team warn you right up front: your dreams are going to turn dark.
That’s the point.
You want them dark. You want your subconscious to drag everything you’ve buried—everything you’ve survived by stuffing down—into the light. This work isn’t about comfort. It’s about excavation.
Healing is not linear—yes, I know, I already said that. And just like I promised, here I am saying it again. There’s no guarantee you won’t have to do this work more than once. In fact, you probably will. Healing has a way of circling back, usually when you’re convinced you’re done.
As I’m writing this, I’m ten days into a process that can take anywhere from ten to twelve weeks. And let me tell you—these ten days have been a doozy.
I have this image that my spirit team is standing around like a group of very concerned teachers saying, Okay, we have to give her this absolutely terrible dream… but let’s do it right when she falls asleep so it’s the first one. Then we’ll follow it up with a few nicer ones to soften the blow.
It feels like, this hurts us as much as it hurts you.
I’ve had terrifying dreams. One where I was being held down by an invisible force—like experiencing sleep paralysis inside a dream. I’ve felt dark energies in my space that don’t belong there, and I’ve had to cast them out—forcefully. I even had a demon appear in a dream that I was actively removing from my space.
I don’t say this to scare you. But just as there are negative people in the world, there are negative energies too. What matters is remembering that you have complete sovereignty. Nothing has the authority to stay where it isn’t welcome. To me, this kind of darkness doesn’t signal danger—it signals exposure. When old material is being brought into awareness, it doesn’t always leave quietly. Darkness rarely likes being seen, and this feels like what happens when something long buried is finally being pulled into the light.
So I banish them like I’m in a battle.
And here’s the part that surprised me.
Through all of this, I remembered something I haven’t thought about in decades. When I was a little girl—around eight years old—I used to feel these dark entities around me sometimes. And somehow, even then, I knew how to push them out. I knew how to claim my space.
How did I know how to do that?
Honestly, I have no idea. It feels like something I learned somewhere else. Another lifetime, maybe. Some deep remembering that never quite left.
You may have heard the phrase that when we heal ourselves, we heal forward and we heal backward. This points straight to epigenetics—the idea that we carry the trauma of our ancestors in our bodies and nervous systems. Indigenous peoples know this. Jewish people know this. Black people know this.
The suffering doesn’t just disappear. It travels.
But here’s the amazing, glorious thing: when we do our own healing, we don’t just help ourselves. We help our ancestors. And we help future generations. This isn’t just my work. I come from a long line of motherless daughters—women who had mothers, but not the kind who could really see or hold them. My mom felt about her mother the way I’ve felt about mine. And her mother felt the same about hers. This quiet ache, this absence, this learning to mother ourselves too early—it’s been passed down for generations.
When something doesn’t get healed, it doesn’t disappear. It just keeps looking for a place to land.
This has been showing up vividly in my dreams.
Dreams of visiting ancestral land.
Dreams of uncovering things that were buried on that land.
Dreams of being inside an ancestor’s home.
Dreams of being handed a massive stack of heavy envelopes—stuffed with information about my lineage, my people, my past.
And maybe the most unexpected part of all of this: my grandma—my mom’s mom—has been showing up every single day.
She passed away a long time ago. We were never close when she was alive. And yet, somehow, I feel closer to her now than I ever did then. Proof that relationships can heal and deepen even after someone is gone.
When I first started opening up to the spiritual world—and to the possibility that our loved ones don’t actually leave—I began experiencing something called clairalience. It’s when you smell things that have absolutely no physical explanation. People often talk about smelling cigarette smoke when no one is smoking.
I experience this in different ways, with different scents. And one of those smells is menthol.
Out of nowhere, I’ll get the strongest hit of menthol. No reason. No source. The first few times it happened, I was confused. And then one day, intuitively, I wondered if it was my grandma.
So I called my mom and asked if Grandma used to use mentholatum a lot.
She laughed and said she rubbed it on everything and everyone.
Aha! Grandma.
For the last ten days, she’s been cheering me on—showing up again and again with her signature scent. A quiet, comforting reminder that I’m not doing this alone.
Thanks, Grandma.
Another rule of this process: you have to feel your feelings as you move through it.
No bypassing.
No “high vibration only” nonsense.
No yoga. No meditation. No breathwork. No energy work. No uplifting playlists.
You feel it to heal it. Fully. In your body.
If you’re angry, you stomp around the neighborhood on a walk. You scream into a pillow. You punch a punching bag. You let it move. What you don’t do is stuff it down or immediately try to elevate your mood.
At the end of my first week, I was wrecked.
I was exhausted from restless sleep, bad dreams and uninvited visitors. Emotionally drained. The anger and sadness were bubbling closer to the surface than I’m used to allowing.
Jason had been out of town, and Sunday morning I was going to pick him up from the airport. I texted him a warning:
“Forewarning. I need food. I need you to hold me while I cry. I need sex.”
Sex would likely fall into the category of regulating yourself with something pleasurable. I know this. I’m not an idiot. I just didn’t care.
He was more than happy to oblige.
I wasn’t sure if the crying would come before, during or after the sex. But I knew one thing for sure—the food had to come first.
When he opened the door and climbed into the car, I smiled and said, “Welcome to the shit show.”
After eating, phase one complete, I stood up and said I was ready for phase two. I walked over to him, fell into his arms and completely lost it. I sobbed and listed everything I was upset about. He just held me while I cried.
No fixing.
No defensiveness.
No rushing me through it.
When the tears finally dried, I felt proud of myself.
I had never—not one time—done that in my fifty years on this earth.
Turns out, I do have a heart after all. Somewhere under the armor. Somewhere past the survival strategies. Turns out the Tin Man and I both got our hearts. I didn’t even need ruby slippers—just a little courage and someone willing to hold space.
Although, if someone is offering ruby slippers, I’m not saying no.
Phase three… I’ll spare you the details.
Here’s the thing I’m really starting to learn on this healing journey:
When you actually let the people who love you show up… they do.
That may sound obvious. It wasn’t to me.
For fifty years, I kept even the people I loved most at arm’s length. Not because I didn’t want connection, but because I didn’t trust it. Somewhere along the way, I decided it was safer to need less than to risk being disappointed. I told myself I was independent, strong, capable. And I was. But I was also braced.
What I’m realizing now is that the bracing cost me something.
Letting Jason hold me while I cried wasn’t just about that moment. It cracked open a belief I’ve been carrying my whole life—that needing someone was dangerous, that asking for support would somehow break me if it wasn’t met.
Instead, it did the opposite.
Being met didn’t weaken me.
It softened me.
And that might be the most beautiful gift this work has given me so far.
I plan to keep writing about this journey through Cutting the Ties That Bind. If you’ve made it this far, I hope you’ll keep coming along for the ride.
And if anything in this encourages you, let it be this: you can show up for yourself. You’re allowed to need support. You’re allowed to let yourself be held. You’re allowed to heal. It is never too late to change how you relate to love, to healing, to yourself.
Please share this with the people you love—or with anyone you think might enjoy following the shit show.
With love,
Angie
Another thread from my heart to yours.
Continue Following This Journey
This work is still unfolding. I’m sharing the next layers of this journey on Threads of My Heart if you want to keep walking with me: