The Unbecoming Hub Podcast

This is Part 2 of a two-part series on the language of trauma, the science of stress, and what it actually means to be human right now. Start with Part 1 if you haven't yet. If you’ve spent any time in the therapy or self-help world, you’ve probably heard the phrase "stuck in fight or flight." But what if that’s not actually how the nervous system works? In this follow-up episode, L...

This is Part 1 of a two-part series on the language of trauma, the science of stress, and what it actually means to be human right now. Part 2 drops next week. Are we pathologizing the normal human experience? In this episode, Lacey dives into the phenomenon of "concept creep"—the gradual expansion of harm-related terms like trauma, abuse, and toxic parenting. When every difficult childh...

Your body built itself without your help. Every nerve, every vein, every cell — complete before you did a single thing to earn it. This episode is a reflective one. Lacey sits down to record without a polished topic ready, and instead of manufacturing something, she talks about the pressure to do exactly that. What follows is an honest look at the gap between knowing wholeness is inherent and stil...

You cannot feel shame and awe at the same time. In this episode, we explore the unexpected relationship between the emotion of shame and the experience of awe. If shame is the biological mechanism that keeps us stuck in self-referencing loops—the relentless internal monologue of "not-enough"—awe is the natural medicine that breaks the cycle. We discuss how awe quiets the default mode net...

If you are exhausted from doing the "work" and still feeling like there is something fundamentally wrong with you, this episode is for you. We have been sold a narrative that if we feel lonely, tired, or unhappy, it is because we are broken. The self-help and wellness industries—a $9 trillion machine—tell us that we must have childhood trauma, that we need to regulate our nervous systems...

In this episode of The Unbecoming Hub Podcast , we explore the profound and often elusive experience of true rest. We live in a culture that treats the body and mind as projects to be managed, where even our attempts to "rest" often involve hooking our attention onto a screen, a task, or a problem to solve. But what happens when we simply unhook? Drawing from a recent personal experience...

There is a rhythm to being human that we spend a lot of time trying to outsmart: we forget, and then we remember. And then we forget again. In the self-help world, forgetting is usually framed as a failure. If you find yourself back in an old pattern, the narrative is that you have fallen off the wagon of your own healing. You are supposed to stay in the remembering. But what if forgetting isn&apo...

The self-help world has a subtle implication: if you had just had a more attuned caregiver, you wouldn't have the patterns you have today. You wouldn't struggle with connection. You wouldn't have these adaptations. But what if that's not true? What if a different environment wouldn't have produced a person without adaptations—it just would have produced a person with diffe...

If you are exhausted from trying to fix your "toxic traits," you need to hear this. The things you go to therapy to fix—the people-pleasing, the emotional shutdown, the hypervigilance—are not malfunctions. They are highly sophisticated programs that your nervous system wrote to navigate a very specific environment. And they worked. They kept you connected in the room you were in. The pro...

This episode was inspired by Lacey's latest revision of The Process of Unbecoming — and the realization that kept crystallizing through that process: we are born with everything we need to navigate life. The problem isn't that something is missing. The problem is that the frameworks we've been handed make us feel like there is. In this episode, Lacey walks through the three core hum...

After last week’s conversation about emotional maturity and emotional distance, a question came in: What do you actually do in the moment when you feel overwhelmed or about to react? In this episode, we explore why labeling experiences as “triggered” or “activated” can sometimes increase pressure and shame, and why naming overwhelm may be more helpful. We also dive deeper into the concept of inher...

Emotional maturity is often framed as staying calm, choosing the right words, and regulating yourself before you speak. But what if that version of maturity is sometimes just emotional distance? In this episode, I share a recent rupture and repair in my own relationship and explore how therapy culture can unintentionally reinforce the idea that if we just regulate enough, we can avoid messy human...

In this episode, Lacey explores the growing pressure on modern relationships to function perfectly — with fully aligned values, clearly expressed needs, and consistently respected boundaries — and how that pressure can create tension, distance, and unrealistic expectations. She reflects on how relationships can remain meaningful even when they are imperfect, limited, or shaped by long histories, e...

In this episode, Lacey reflects on the experience of internal speed — the feeling that your mind and body are still moving fast even when life has slowed down. Using personal moments from motherhood, she explores how attention, nervous system pace, and awareness shape our experience of time. The conversation connects to the phases of unbecoming, particularly the relationship between awareness (Pha...

In this episode, I explore something that keeps surfacing in my clinical work: the resistance many of us feel toward admitting that we need relationship. There’s a cultural narrative that equates needing with weakness — that if you were secure enough, whole enough, evolved enough, you wouldn’t need anyone. You would simply want them. But when we slow down, that distinction starts to feel less clea...

This episode turns to the myth of Psyche and Cupid—not as a symbolic puzzle to decode, but as a lived map of human relationship, trust, and rupture. Rather than treating the myth as a story about love rewarded or trials overcome, this reflection stays with its central tension: what happens when intimacy is organized around certainty rather than contact. Psyche’s desire to see Cupid—to know, verify...

In this episode, Lacey reflects on the modern mental health model — where it helps, where it falls short, and why many people are bringing deeply human struggles into therapeutic spaces that were never designed to hold them. This is not a critique of therapy itself. Therapy can be life-changing, stabilizing, and necessary. But the dominant framework we use to understand suffering often assumes tha...

This episode speaks to a quiet but persistent confusion many people carry: the belief that wholeness must exclude struggle, contradiction, or difficulty in order to be real. Rather than framing the human condition as something to rise above, outgrow, or heal past, this reflection places it inside wholeness itself. Fluctuation, inconsistency, emotional pain, ambivalence, and limitation are not evid...

This episode stays with one of the most difficult truths to live inside: that nothing—no state, no relationship, no sense of self—lasts forever. Rather than approaching impermanence as a concept to accept or a mindset to adopt, this reflection explores how deeply unsettling this reality can be when it’s actually felt. Much of what organizes human effort—attachment, striving, identity, hope—is buil...

Many people arrive at The Process of Unbecoming with a familiar concern lingering quietly in the background: Is this just another version of insight work? Another way of understanding myself without anything actually changing? This episode stays with that question rather than resolving it too quickly. What’s explored here is the difference between insight as management and reorientation as contact...

This episode is an introduction to Unbecoming —what it is, how it came to be, and why it exists. Rather than offering another path of self-improvement or personal optimization, Unbecoming You is an invitation to step out of the endless cycle of becoming. It’s a way of relating to yourself that emphasizes understanding over fixing, orientation over effort, and humanity over performance. I share a b...