“The Power of One Simple ‘No’: How Refusing the Wrong Story Can Set You Free from Decades of Pain”

When someone sits across from me for the first time, they usually carry the same quiet belief:

“I am broken in a way that can’t be fixed.”

That belief didn’t appear overnight.

It was built, brick by brick, by voices that once had real power over them: a parent who criticized, a partner who betrayed, a group that demanded absolute loyalty, a system that said “you’ll never be enough unless you perform perfectly.”

In my practice I see the same pattern again and again.

Those old voices didn’t go away.

They moved inside.

Therapists call them **introjects** or **persecutory parts**.

Clients simply call them “the voice that never shuts up.”

Modern trauma research (van der Kolk, Fisher, Porges, Ogden, and others) has shown that these internalized voices are not just bad thoughts.

They are **physiological imprints** stored in the brainstem and limbic system, wired in during moments when safety collapsed and survival demanded that the child (or adult) accept the critic’s verdict just to keep attachment alive.

The good news—and the part that still surprises me after years of doing this work—is how quickly those imprints can lose their grip when they are met with one simple, steady refusal:

**“That is not who I am.”**

In session after session I have watched people:

- speak directly to the internalized critic

- separate the lie from their true identity

- feel, often for the first time, the grief and rage that had been frozen since childhood

- and discover that the part of them that always knew the truth was still there, waiting.

The methods I use—Deep Brain Reorienting, Ego State Therapy, EMDR, clinical hypnosis, and somatic tracking—are simply reliable ways to create the neurophysiological safety required for that separation to happen.

They are not magic.

They are tools that help the brain finish what it started decades ago but never got to complete: the natural discharge of shock and the re-anchoring of the self in safety.

What consistently makes the difference is not the technique alone.

It is the moment the client, often with shaking voice and tears, says some version of:

**“No. That’s not me. That never was me.”**

In that refusal something shifts.

The old identity begins to lose its power.

A new one—quieter, truer, and far less exhausting—starts to take its place.

If you have spent years listening to a voice that says you are too much, not enough, damaged beyond repair, or only lovable when you perform,

please know this:

That voice is not the final authority on who you are.

It is an echo from a time when survival required you to believe it.

You do not have to keep believing it.

One honest, courageous “no”

can be the beginning

of the rest of your life.

If this resonates with you, I’m here when you’re ready.

You don’t have to carry the old story alone anymore.