Nobody Taught You To See.
That’s Not Your Fault.
It’s storming today. A real Pacific Northwest storm. Not a light breeze. The kind that means business, the kind that comes in sideways and doesn’t apologize. And I am sitting here with my coffee in the roaring noise of it, thinking about the word that comes up more than any other word in my peer support work.
Awareness.
One word. The whole fucking game.
The Most Underrated Win Nobody Is Celebrating
Here’s something I do every single time I am sitting with someone I support, without exception.
When they demonstrate awareness of something in their life, anything, I stop them and I call it out. Not because I am trying to be their cheerleader. Not because I am blowing smoke. Because I genuinely believe, with every fiber of my being, that awareness is not a consolation prize on the road to change. It is the entire goddamn road. Without it, you are not on the road at all. You are just in a field somewhere doing donuts in the dark.
I tell them: this is a win. Not “eventually a win.” A win right now, today, in this moment, regardless of whether anything changes tomorrow. The awareness itself is the breakthrough.
And I watch what happens. Usually it lands somewhere between surprise and a quiet kind of reckoning. They have been so focused on the thing they are not changing yet that they haven’t stopped to recognize what they are actually doing. They are seeing themselves. Sometimes for the first time. And seeing yourself, really seeing yourself without the spin and the justification and the comfortable stories, is genuinely hard. Most people don’t do it. Most people never do it. So when someone does, I’m not going to blow past it because they haven’t fixed it yet. The fixing comes from the seeing. Not the other way around.
I get people who want to quit drinking and haven’t stopped. And I tell them: okay. For now, stop trying to stop. Just watch. Observe how it makes you feel when you do it. How does your body feel in the moment? An hour after? The next morning? Notice where you are when it happens. Who you are with. What was going on emotionally in the hours before you reached for it. What dod you feel emotionally afterwards? What were you running toward? What were you running from? Build the map. Because you cannot navigate out of something you refuse to look at clearly.
As I wrote in a previous post: “If something becomes an issue for you, you’ll address it when the time is right. What matters most isn’t rushing to fix it. It’s awareness. Not ignoring it. Not avoiding or numbing it. Not pretending it will go away on its own. Just staying conscious. That awareness is what eventually leads to change when it actually works for you.”
Awareness first.
Always.
Awareness first.
Her Body Was Telling The Truth.
I Was The Only One Who Heard It.
(I wrote about this in a previous post, but it belongs here too.)
I was sitting with someone recently and I watched her body betray everything she was trying to say with words.
She was describing her job. And as she talked, her whole body changed. Shoulders climbing toward her ears. Jaw locking up. Breath going shallow and tight. Speech picking up speed. Her entire system already bracing like it was back in that building just from the act of putting it into sentences.
She had plenty of awareness about the challenges of her job. She could articulate them clearly and specifically. But she had zero awareness that her body was staging a full rebellion just from talking about it. She had disconnected the information in her head from what was happening in her chest and her shoulders and her throat.
So I said, gently: “My friend. As an outsider sitting here watching you right now, I can see so much tension moving through your body just talking about this. I want you to know that because you might not even feel it happening. If it’s doing this to you just describing it, I can only imagine what it’s like when you’re actually in the room.”
I didn’t tell her what to do. I didn’t hand her a plan. I just showed her what I could see, that she could not, and let her sit with it.
That’s the gift of awareness. You cannot unfeel it once it’s there. You cannot un-notice the shoulders. Now she knows what stress lives in her body. Now she has a new instrument. Now she can start to notice it in real time, in the room, and begin to ask herself what she wants to do with that information.
She got the map. What she does with it is hers.
That’s not fixing. That’s witnessing. And witnessing is love.
Why This Is Personal As Hell
I didn’t get good at spotting awareness in other people by accident.
I got good at it because I spent years completely without it, running my entire life on autopilot, doing serious damage to myself and everyone around me, and having no idea. Not because I was stupid. Not because I didn’t care. Because I was so thoroughly numbed and so thoroughly avoidant that the information never had a chance to reach me. My nervous system was already screaming so loud, so constantly, that I couldn’t hear one more signal in the noise. Everything just blended into the baseline chaos.
Drunk. Medicated. Performing. Running. The life of every party and the death of every relationship.
That was autopilot. That was what life looks like without awareness. You just keep doing the thing. The thing keeps hurting you and everyone you love. And the cycle continues because you have no idea the cycle is even happening.
Carl Jung said it plainly: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Fate. That’s what I was calling it. Bad luck. Wrong circumstances. Wrong people. The universe conspiring against me. It wasn’t fate. It was me, running on autopilot, crashing into the same walls over and over because I had never once stopped to actually look at them.
The first crack in that was IFS. And it cracked everything open.
Before You Read Another Word: What The Hell Is A “Part”?
(Stay with me here. This matters.)
If you’ve read anything on this blog, you’ve seen me talk about parts. But if you’re new, or if you’ve been nodding along and privately thinking “what the fuck is he talking about,” this section is for you.
Here is the simplest way I can explain it.
You are not one thing. You are a system. A whole internal family of voices, feelings, reactions, and responses that have been accumulating inside you since you were a kid. IFS, Internal Family Systems therapy, calls these parts. And every single one of them, no matter how destructive or terrifying or confusing, was created for a reason. They were built to protect you.
The part that rages? It’s protecting you from feeling powerless.
The part that people-pleases? It’s protecting you from rejection.
The part that reaches for the drink or the drug or the phone or the food? It’s protecting you from something that felt unbearable.
The part that shuts down completely and goes silent? Protecting you.
In a previous post I described it like this: “The bus is me as a human being. The passengers are my feelings, emotions, and parts. The bus driver is who I am at my core. Self.” When the parts, the passengers, don’t trust the driver, they grab the wheel. They take over. They do what they were built to do, which is survive at any cost. And the driver, your core Self, your actual calm, compassionate, curious, clear center, gets shoved to the back.
That’s not a character flaw. That’s a hijacked bus.
IFS is the work of getting back in the driver’s seat. Not by fighting the passengers or kicking them off the bus, but by actually turning around and meeting them. Getting to know them. Asking them what they need. Building enough trust that they don’t have to grab the wheel anymore because they finally believe you will keep them safe.
And here is the thing that fundamentally changed everything for me: IFS, at its core, is a self-love practice.
When you become aware of your parts, you are loving yourself. All of yourself. Every embarrassing, destructive, confusing, loud, terrified piece of you. You are saying: I see you. I am not going to pretend you don’t exist. I am not going to numb you or drink you into silence or run from you anymore. I am going to learn you. Because you are me. And to deny you is to deny my own existence.
Your parts are not your enemies. They are you. And becoming aware of them, witnessing them, working with them, unburdening them, that is what loving yourself actually looks like. Not a bubble bath. Not a motivational quote. This.
The Mentor’s Line That Changed My Life
My IFS mentor said something early in my work that I have thought about almost every day since.
He was explaining the 8 C’s of IFS: Curiosity, Compassion, Calm, Clarity, Courage, Confidence, Creativity, Connectedness.
He said: “Any time you are not in these 8 C’s you are dealing with a part.”
I later learned about the 5 P’s: Presence, Perspective, Patience, Persistence, Playfulness. Same thing, if you aren’t in them, you are dealing with a part.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. That one sentence handed me a diagnostic tool I could use on myself in any moment of any day for the rest of my life.
Before that, I had feelings. Feelings that were loud and confusing and seemed to come from nowhere and run the whole operation. Rage that showed up with no explanation. Anxiety that didn’t make sense given the situation. Withdrawal that I had no name for. Compulsions I couldn’t slow down enough to question.
After that, I had parts. Named things. Things I could turn toward instead of away from. Things that, it turned out, were not my enemies, were not trying to destroy me, were just scared and trying to keep me alive using every tool they had ever been given, which in most cases were not great tools, because the tools had been built in survival conditions.
Alan Watts understood this long before modern therapy had a framework for it. He wrote: “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” That’s what parts work is. You stop fighting the change, the feeling, the part. You join the dance. You find out what it’s actually trying to tell you.
IFS gave me awareness of my internal world that I had never had before. Things that had been driving my bus in the dark suddenly had headlights on them. I could see them. I could talk to them. I could start to understand what they needed. And over time, I could begin doing the actual work of unburdening them.
Some parts I have worked with extensively. Some I am still working with. Some I haven’t found yet. The work doesn’t end. It just deepens. And every new layer of depth is a new layer of awareness. Which is a new layer of freedom.
This is what changed my relationship with alcohol and drugs. Not willpower. Not a decision. Awareness. I finally saw what was happening inside me when I reached for those things, what part was reaching, what it was afraid of, what it was trying to protect me from. And once I saw it, really saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. I knew too much. I had to change.
When I stopped running from my parts and started loving them instead, something enormous shifted. I stopped hurting myself. I stopped hurting others. Not because I became a better person in some abstract moral sense. Because I finally had enough awareness to see what I was doing and why. And a person who loves their parts, who truly sees themselves, cannot keep inflicting what they now know is pain. It becomes impossible.
I started becoming unrecognizable.
Not in a dramatic single moment. Slowly, and then all at once.
I became aware of my parts.
The Filter I Built From A Year Of Wreckage
The awareness practice I do now is not abstract. It is extremely practical and I run it every single time I am about to make a decision, big or small.
From a previous post, this is the filter I wrote for myself out of a year of excavation and hard-won clarity:
“Will this give me stress? Anxiety? Regret? Resentment? Will it light my nervous system on fire the way I used to let things do constantly because I was too afraid to say no or speak up or tell the truth? Is it in integrity with my morals, my values, my ethics, my manifesto? Is it aligned with living my amends? Is it emotionally and chemically sober? Is it honest? Is it actually something I want to do, or am I just filling a slot on my calendar because I can’t stand to be alone with myself?”
Notice what every single question in that filter is asking. It is not asking whether the decision makes logical sense. It is not asking whether someone else would approve. It is asking whether my parts are okay with it. Whether I am about to burden them or respect them. Whether I am about to run my bus from the driver’s seat or let a scared, panicking passenger grab the wheel.
That filter is awareness in real time. It is me checking in before I act instead of paying the price after.
When the answer to any of those questions points toward a problem, I do not do the thing. Period. My conscience will remain clean. Non-negotiable. Forever.
I will do my best to remain aware of the impacts of my decisions.
I Can See It In My Photography Too.
Literally.
I have written several posts on this blog about photography. At the surface, they were about photography. Underneath, they were about awareness. Because photography, real photography, the kind where you actually give a damn about what ends up in the frame, is awareness made physical.
When I pick up my Ricoh GRIIIX and I am present, something shifts immediately. I start seeing geometry. The way the lines converge at a vanishing point. The angle of the light. The negative space. The way a shadow is doing something interesting in the lower left corner that would get cropped out if I stood two inches to the right. I am aware of everything going into that frame before I press the shutter. I am aware of what I am including and what I am excluding and why. Every single element is a choice.
When I am not present? I shoot from the hip. Crooked photos. Cluttered compositions. Frames that have no idea what they are trying to say because the person holding the camera had no idea either. The results are exactly what you’d expect from someone on autopilot: technically functional, completely soulless, and full of things that don’t belong there.
That’s the whole metaphor, honestly. That’s life without awareness versus life with it.
I’m not saying that I never go on autopilot and lose my awareness. Somedays it happens even with the best of intentions and mindfulness. I am as imperfect as anyone else is. I am definitely aware of that.
On Saturday morning, before an event that happened later that day, I was at the pier doing multiple exposure work. The kind that requires me to physically pace out distances, mark my position, shoot the first exposure, walk to the exact mirrored point, and shoot the second. Deliberate. Measured. Intentional. I took eight shots to land four doubles. Got the geometry right. I was completely in my awareness. Every decision conscious. Every frame earned.
Then later that same Saturday I sat down and ignored every question in my filter and made a compulsive decision that disrupted sixteen days of peace.
Same person. Same day. Completely different operating system.
When I am present with my camera, I am in the 8 C’s. Curious. Clear. Patient. Connected to what is in front of me. My parts are not running the show. Self is driving the bus. And the work is better for it, and I am better for it, and I come home feeling full instead of empty.
The Sunday shoot after the disruption was different. My nervous system was still humming with the aftermath. I went anyway. Picked up the camera anyway. Got outside anyway. And the awareness was still there, slower and a little tender, but there. I turned the camera completely upside down for a double exposure just to see what it would do.
Took four attempts. Eight total shots to get it right. Each one slightly wrong, each one teaching me what the next one needed. The final frame became one of my favorites from the whole weekend. That image didn’t exist before I was willing to be wrong four times, the morning after a hard night, with a nervous system that hadn’t fully settled yet. Because once you develop the capacity to see, it does not fully disappear just because you had a hard night. It’s more resilient than that. You are more resilient than that.
As I wrote in that photography post: “The pier is the same pier. The Bellingham waterfront is the same waterfront. I’m the one who’s different. I could stand in the most beautiful place in the world and not see a single frame worth keeping if I was still looking through the old lens.”
The camera is the same.
The awareness is what changes everything.
Saturday I Told Myself “It’ll Be Fine”
Sixteen days.
For sixteen days, I had been running the filter every time. Sixteen days of intentional emotional sobriety. And let me tell you what those sixteen days felt like in my body, because I want you to understand what I am about to tell you in full context.
No heart racing. No shakiness. No panic. No ambient fear or low-grade dread humming under everything. Clean conscience. Quiet. Light. Easy-going in a way I had to sit with before I trusted it, because the ease felt unfamiliar. I was napping for hours. Sleeping through the night with peaceful, almost playful dreams. Waking up and actually feeling rested. My body was doing the thing I have been working toward for over a year.
It was at rest.
Then Saturday afternoon came and my “perfect” emotional sobriety efforts went sideways.
I ran the filter. I knew what it was telling me. And the urge was too strong, and I rationalized it. It won’t be a big deal. I’ll be fine. It’s just information. I can handle it. I went looking for information about an old trigger, convinced I was past it. Convinced I could look directly at it and walk away clean.
Well, I was fucking wrong.
The nervous system dysregulation that followed was immediate and it was significant. Not dramatic, not a crisis, but deeply uncomfortable in a way that was specifically awful because of the contrast. Because I had just spent sixteen days in quiet. Because I now knew exactly what peace felt like in my body. And now I was feeling the alternative.
The most intense part lasted about 36 hours. Couldn’t nap. Night sleep was disrupted and my dreams were heavy and emotional. An ex in one dream who really hurt me and refused to acknowledge it. Getting in trouble with the law in another. The kind of dreams that leave a residue on you when you wake up. Monday, mostly better. Today, better still. But not fully back. The body keeps the score, and it is not done scoring yet.
Here’s the thing though. And this is the part I want you to really sit with.
Before I had the sixteen days of quiet, before my nervous system had learned what peace actually felt like, I would have made that same decision on Saturday and felt nothing unusual. Because I was making that decision constantly and my nervous system was already at a ten. There was no contrast. There was no lesson available because there was nothing to compare it to. It was just another handful of noise in a life full of noise.
I needed the quiet to hear the signal.
I needed the peace to feel the disruption.
I needed the awareness to get the information.
The quiet was not a reward. It was a laboratory. A controlled environment where I could finally see what things were doing to me. And Saturday handed me exactly the information I needed to never make that decision again. Not because I decided to be better. Because I cannot unknow what I now know. Because I saw it clearly, the disruption, the contrast, the cost, and I cannot unsee it.
That is how awareness works. You don’t always get the lesson in the noise. Sometimes you have to earn the silence first. And then you have to be willing to let the silence show you the truth.
And every time you do that, every time you see something and refuse to unsee it and change your course because of it, you become a little more unrecognizable to the person you used to be. That’s not a destination.
That’s the process of doing the work.
That’s the process of becoming love.
That’s the process of becoming aware.
The Five Days That Ended My Old Life
This is the part of the story that made all the other parts possible.
Several months ago, five days after the end of a relationship, something cracked open in me. I stopped being able to lie to myself. Not because I suddenly became a better person. Because I was in enough pain that the defense mechanisms finally ran out of gas. And in that exhausted, raw, wide-open state, I saw my patterns for the first time with no filter.
All of them. At once.
The avoidance. The poor communication. The codependency wearing empathy’s clothing. The anxious attachment disguising itself as devotion. The fear of abandonment driving decisions I told myself were choices. The performative personas I had been maintaining for decades. All of it. Right there.
And my reaction was not relief. My reaction was: fuck. I can’t do any of that anymore. Ever. And now I don’t know who the fuck I am if I am not doing all of those things. It’s all I’ve ever known. It’s all I’ve ever been. And now I know different, which means I can’t keep doing it, which means I am nobody.
My ego died. Not as a metaphor. As an actual experience. The identity I had built, the life of every party and death of every relationship version of me, simply could not survive what I had just seen. Because once you see it, you cannot unsee it. And once you cannot unsee it, you cannot keep doing it and stay in integrity with yourself. Not if you actually care about the people around you. Not if you actually care about yourself.
What followed was months of confusion and grief and an identity void so uncomfortable I wanted to climb out of my own skin. Who was I if I wasn’t the patterns? Who was I if the performance was gone? I had no idea.
Jung again: “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.” Yeah. He wasn’t kidding. Accepting all of myself, every part, every pattern, every wound that had been running the show in the dark, was the most terrifying and most necessary thing I have ever done.
But here is what I know now, on the other side of it: without that awareness, without that brutal, ego-killing seeing of myself, none of the rest of this exists. I would still be in the patterns. Shifting blame. Avoiding accountability. Running the same playbook and wondering why the results never changed. I would be on the path of destruction again, the same road I had been driving my whole life without ever once looking at the map.
That moment of awareness was violent. And it was the most important thing that has ever happened to me.
It was the beginning of becoming unrecognizable.
It was the beginning of I am love.
Not the arrival.
The beginning of becoming aware.
When You Finally See Someone Else Clearly Too
I want to talk about the other kind of awareness. The kind that comes not from seeing yourself, but from finally seeing another person.
For a long time, I saw someone through a lens I constructed for them. A flattering lens. A lens that explained away the behavior that didn’t fit the image I had decided to believe. I wanted the version I had in my head to be real. And so I bent the information to fit the narrative instead of letting the information build the narrative.
Then I finally saw the light. Not a dramatic moment. Just a moment where the behavior was too clear and too sustained to be explained away anymore. Where I finally stopped constructing an explanation and just looked at what was in front of me.
As I wrote about in my post “When You Finally See The Light,” “The moment I saw it for what it was, really saw it, something in my nervous system just released. The anxiety that had been living in my chest and gut for months went quiet. The hypervigilance dialed down. My body finally got the message my brain had been trying to send for a long time.”
My parts finally got the information they had been waiting for. They knew what to expect. They knew exactly who this person was and exactly how I would respond moving forward. And they knew they could trust me to keep them safe. The fight or flight dissolved because there was nothing left to fight or flee from. Just clear, clean information.
Here is how I see this person now. Through a parts lens.
The behaviors that have hurt me are not coming from the core of who they are. They are coming from burdened parts. Parts that are scared and are protecting themselves the only way they know how. Parts that are driving their bus because their core self has not yet done the work to take the wheel back. I know this to be true because I know what it looks like. I lived it for decades.
This person has no awareness of their parts. They are running their life on autopilot in ways that damage themselves and others, and they do not know it. Not because they are bad. Because awareness is not something you have until you have it. And you cannot manufacture it from the outside. Someone can hand it to you, the way I try to hand it to the people I support, but they have to be able to receive it. They have to want to see themselves. And not everyone is there yet.
I carry no hard feelings toward them. I mean that without performance and without effort. Because when I look at their behavior through a parts lens, it all makes complete sense. The hurt parts running the show. The scared parts acting out. The burdened parts doing exactly what they were built to do. I see them clearly, and from that clear seeing, I feel genuine warmth and compassion. I hope they find their way to awareness someday. I hope their parts get some rest. I hope they get to experience what it feels like to truly know themselves.
And I can feel all of that and still hold my boundary with complete firmness. I can love from a distance. I can love with no contact at all. Love and access are not the same thing. Just because their parts are burdened doesn’t mean they get to burden mine.
I see them clearly. I feel nothing but neutral and compassionate understanding. And that is what freedom actually looks like.
What Happens When You Choose To See
Here is the thing nobody tells you about awareness. It doesn’t just change you gradually, like water wearing down a rock. It breaks you open. It is not comfortable. It is not always peaceful. The first hit of real clarity, the first time you really look at yourself or someone else and refuse to look away, that shit is disorienting. It is grief. It is discomfort. It is the foundation of everything cracking so something real can be built.
But here is what happens on the other side of it.
You start making different decisions. Not because you’re trying harder. Because you know too much to keep making the old ones. The awareness becomes the compass. And the compass starts pointing you somewhere new.
You stop hurting yourself. You stop hurting others. Not from willpower. From seeing. From loving your parts enough to stop feeding them things that are poisonous. From loving other people enough to stop dragging your burdened parts into their lives uninvited.
And slowly, and then all at once, you become someone you don’t recognize. Someone quieter and more deliberate. Someone who asks questions before acting. Someone who can sit in discomfort without drowning in it. Someone who can be triggered and stay in the driver’s seat anyway. Someone who can love people clearly, warmly, and with boundaries intact, because love and chaos are not the same thing and you finally know the difference.
You become unrecognizable to the version of yourself that ran on autopilot.
You become unrecognizable to the people who needed you to stay asleep.
You become unrecognizable in the best possible way, to yourself, to the people you love, to the life you are building out of everything you have finally been willing to see.
That is what awareness does.
That is what it costs.
That is what it gives back.
You Cannot Change What You Cannot See
That is the whole post, honestly. That sentence right there.
You cannot change what you cannot see.
Not because change requires willpower or discipline or the right program or the right moment. But because you cannot aim at a target you cannot locate. You cannot work with a part you do not know exists. You cannot regulate a nervous system response you have never been quiet enough to notice. You cannot break a pattern you have been defending as a personality trait.
Awareness is not a step on the way to the real work. It is the real work. Everything that comes after it is just awareness in action.
When I sit across from someone in my peer support work and they show me a glimpse of their own seeing, I call it out. Because I know what it cost. I know what it takes to look at yourself honestly and stay in the room with what you find. I know that the difference between the person who eventually changes and the person who doesn’t is not ability or worthiness or resources. It’s whether they can stand to keep looking.
The people I support who are doing the work? They look. They might not like what they see. They might sit with it for a while before they know what to do with it. But they look. And from that looking, they begin, slowly, to become love. To themselves. For themselves. Through themselves. They begin to become unrecognizable.
The wind is blowing harder now. And I am sitting here thinking about sixteen days of quiet that got disrupted on Saturday. Thinking about a decision I cannot unmake but also cannot un-learn from. Thinking about a person I finally saw clearly and the peace that came with that seeing. Thinking about five days after a breakup when I looked at myself honestly for the first time and my old life ended and my real one began.
All roads lead back to the same word.
Awareness.
Not the destination. The entire road. The whole damn map.
And I am walking it. Eyes wide open. Parts loved. Conscience clean.
I am Tukayote.
I am unrecognizable.
