165: The Trap of Trying to Fix Yourself

Maybe you're doing a lot right. You're working out, you're eating decently, and still your body feels puffy, your hair feels thinner, and your skin feels creepy. You were taught to call that aging, but I am choosing not to. I don't believe that beauty is vanity. I believe it's a hobby. it's a skill it's something that you can practice and learn at any age so i'm hosting a free beauty backroom event for midlife women who are ready to glow up and feel leaner stronger and more radiant than they have perhaps in their entire life i will be sharing exactly what i've done over the past couple of months to do just that so 2026 is your rebrand year come play with me kellybrogenmd.com forward slash BB. Hi and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan and today I want to talk about something that has been on my mind a lot, which is the trap of trying to fix yourself, to fix others, and to fix the world. And to propose the possibility that when you effort towards fixing yourself specifically, that it's possible. You just end up still being the same you, except now you're tens of thousands of dollars invested in coaching, in retreats, and in the illusion that you are now better than those who are not doing that. And you're better than the version of you who wasn't doing that. So I want to unpack some of my insights in this realm that have all led me to one specific place, which is surrender, curiosity, and humility. Humility over and over and over again. So by way of introduction, I am somebody who first started to imagine that I was in a position to fix the world, to save the world. So I spent many, many years imagining that I knew exactly what was being done wrong. Specifically in the health and medical space, I knew who the wrongdoers were. And I knew that exposing them and whistleblowing them was the first most important step to saving others who needed my specific help to be saved and rescued from the bad guys and their nefarious ways. And then, of course, it extended into other arenas where I got to be a know-it-all in all sorts of domains. So when it came to other topics like more extended applications and overreach of government, education, agriculture, finance, I mean, you name it. And the theme was very much the same. The bad guys doing the bad thing and how important it was that you got information from me and my trusted colleagues to learn about how to save yourself from them. As I began to turn towards myself more, which was inspired by my relationship at the time, and to learn more about myself, to generate more self-awareness. Let's bookmark that because I think that is a very important topic in this realm and in life in general. As I began the self-discovery journey, the individuation journey, the self-actualization journey, the integration journey, whatever you want to call it, where I became curious about my covert intentions, my undisclosed, even to myself, motives. I began to translate that impulse to fix what is wrong on the outside to myself. So a couple of years ago, I took off my angry activist hat and I started inner work, deep inner work. And I've since written a book about it, and I have huge regard for the modalities, for the teachers, for so much of what I was able to uncover. But the general theme of the yield of that work is not that I became a better person. It's that I developed a relationship with the taboo, that I specifically was able to understand my own bad and wrongness differently than I did when I started out. Because when I started out, I just wanted to feel better, first of all. And I understood that to feel better, I had to become better. I had to improve myself, really, which is another way of saying fix myself. I mean, the entire self-development world, which is made up of commercial products largely consumed by women, is predicated on the notion that there's something wrong with you that you need to fix. And then when you fix it, you will have a feeling you will feel a certain way that is fundamentally different and better than how you feel now. But here is, and be still my heart, Alan Watts talks about this a lot in his available lectures. But here is the bind inherent in the self-improvement impulse. It is, it's very meta, okay, so follow me. it is that the person who is endeavoring, the version of you that is endeavoring to improve yourself, that's making the decisions about how it is that you should improve and what it is that you should do in order to improve. That is who needs the improvement. So why would that person's It's like, have you ever heard this from voluntarists or anarchists, right? It's like, if we as a people need to be policed because we are not to be trusted, because left to our own devices and by our very nature, we are prone to all sorts of nefarious behaviors. and we are likely to be violent and selfish and reckless and corrupt, fundamentally corrupt. But we're going to just take a subset of those very people who are prone to those same vulnerabilities and we're going to put them in charge of the other ones, right? So they get to do all of the aggressive, violent, corrupt things because we trust them to do that with discernment, even though they're really fundamentally no different than we are who shouldn't be trusted to do that. Right. So when you are taking the bait of the illusion of self-improvement, you are fundamentally in that same double bind where the person in charge of the improving is the one who needs to be improved. So why do we have this notion that we should fix ourselves, we should fix the world, that there's anything that needs to be actually fixed and that that would feel better? We have this notion because of what I like to refer to as the good split because we have decided based on many factors of our early conditioning that there are aspects of ourselves and by extrapolation others and even the world that are fundamentally bad So these are the darker aspects And that means there are light aspects And the light must triumph. The light must win. The light is what feels good. It's what earns love. And so in that good-bad split, and the rejection of one dimension in favor of another, rather than the acknowledgement that they are inextricably linked, complementary, and reflective of one another, that they are interdependent, that you cannot have one without the other. And if you really want to get non-dualistically meta about it, that they are one in the same. When we're in the good-bad split, we are incentivized, and this becomes even an eroticized process that I've spoken about extensively on this podcast, to hide from ourselves and others these unsavory aspects of ourselves. and we can't ultimately escape them, which is why we end up being attracted to others who hold these qualities, not only just erotically, but even in terms of our life experiences. And that's the journey, right? Like that is the journey. And in the more immature stages of this maturational process, we tend to experience hits of our egoic self-concept, right? When we look at those who have the qualities that we have rejected in ourselves, and we blame them, we judge them, and we feel superior. This is the kind of illegitimacy that you can feel in your animal body When some sanctimonious virtue signaling truther or activist on either side of the aisle is proclaiming their certainty about their insights, about their understanding, about their way of living life, you can almost feel it in your animal body. And I often talk about that day towards the end of my activist arc where my then young, probably like pre-tween daughter said to me, I don't know what was the catalytic comment, but who knows? Maybe I said something about chemtrails or whatever. And she said to me, Mama, you're afraid of so many things. and like here I am imagining that I'm some kind of Joan of Arc, like ending cycles of abuse in my family line and all the rest and that I know about all the bad food, about all the bad pharmaceuticals, about all the bad industry, about all the bad, you know, government players and the elites and I know all of the things that, you know, the bad cosmetics and the bad companies and all she's feeling is my limbic system, right? Like all she's feeling is the fear. And that is an attractive force. It will bring you, I believe, into contact with that which you fear on the micro interpersonal level, right? So you'll end up having experiences in your real life that will bring you into the fear state that you thought you were saving yourself from, protecting yourself from. I could go on and on about the ways in which, and I do think I am a special example of this because I'm a double Gemini and I fuck around and find out just by my very nature. I love an adventure. I'm the first one in the pool. And I have enjoyed exploring the poles, right? So in my experience of exploring these poles, whether it's around nutrition and diet, whether it's around synthetic chemicals and pharmaceutical products, whether it's around, you know, the extremes of birthing. I used to be pro, you know, when I was in med school, like pro elective C-section. And then I became, you know, I still actually probably am in this camp, but, you know, radically celebrating free birth. And as I shift between these poles, I recognize a lot of the same energies in the sort of proclamation that this is the way. Not in the practice of it necessarily, but when you imagine that you've figured it out and you have improved and fixed your lack of awareness, your ignorance, so now that you know and you maybe find yourself in a position to educate the ignorant about all that you now know, the signature of that which you rejected in the one will be found in the other. At some point in the coming months, I will be spilling the tea. My escapades in the realm of sovereign lawfulness. And those of you who have been exploring how to move into the private and to exit the system and to mitigate, if not eliminate, your relationship with taxation. I've been on that journey for many years. And I will tell you, here's the spoiler, that whatever vampiric energy I might have assigned to entities like the IRS, I found that same energy, extractive, shadowy, dark energy in this other realm. Well, look at that, Right. And so what I have found is that for me coming into this neutral place, it's not necessarily like integrative medicine, like take a little of this, take a little of that. It's coming into a neutral place that is drained of the fight against, that is drained from that is wrong. This is right. And that is really guided by these other principles that I'll get into. The energetic of that is integration. And it allows me to know about, right? I know a lot about nutrition, a lot. I've studied it for many, many years. And I also come from the medical world, so I have a lot of comfort with exploring data and, of course, the biological impacts, all of that. And so it's not that I don't know about inflammatory foods, but that is not, knowing that those are bad is not what dictates what I eat anymore. And that maturation of what I call the no, the N-O, is an emotional arc. So I've come to believe that progress itself is potentially even an illusion. And in fact, all that's happening is traits, trading one priority for another. And that has helped me to resolve my sense of superiority over others and specifically over my past self, over versions of myself. and when I hosted Audacious Embodiment, the first version, I asked the women a question and I then got feedback that this was one of the most impactful moments in the weekend and it had to do with the possibility that you are not actually better than your mom, right? Because a lot of us gals are walking around the world imagining that we have it more figured out than our moms. And that in so many ways, they are damaged or ignorant or wrong or even evil or whatever And we not And so what if that was the exact human in every way that needed to birth you so that you could be in the position to imagine that you're better than that person, right? So not only are you inextricably linked with this person who gave you life, but actually the specificity of who she is and was is integral to you being who you are and valuing the things about yourself that you do, such that you're even in a position to assess her relative to you. This kind of humility can only arise from these moments that expose your inner tyrant, the moments that expose your virtue signaling know-it-all, the moments that expose that maybe you didn't have it all figured out. Or maybe there's somebody who you otherwise regard and respect who has a different perspective that you otherwise formerly would have judged. and this has been so much a part of my feminine embodiment expansion, is literally to just put my body around women who are comprised of characteristics that I would have formerly dismissed but possessed of embodied energies that I yearn for. And that scrambling of the good-bad split is the portal, right? That embrace of the taboo, and there are so many ways to do that and explore that, you know, from shadow work to BDSM to, you know, just orienting towards your judgment. I call it the villain crown practice with curiosity and holding this principle of maybe, you know, maybe I'm right about this, maybe not. And it's different than a posture of I don't know. It is more curious and it's lighter and it has a potential energy rather than a kind of defeatist energy. Okay, but here's the thing. Perhaps you are inspired by my yap so far to consider just loosening your grip on self-improvement, on fixing yourself, on figuring out how to become more feminine, on figuring out how to heal your wounds, on buying that last program or going on that last retreat so that you could finally learn the same. skills that you're missing to become enlightened, empowered, or fulfilled, right? Maybe you're inspired to start to let go of that impulse just a little bit because there isn't actually anywhere on the distant horizon a version of you that has it all figured out and that can finally relax and say, thank God I did all that self-improvement. And there may even be a version of you who does all this self-improvement, invests all this money and time and energy only to find and meet versions of your neuroses and your fears and your disconnection from God source and your own vital force on that end that you thought you were escaping from as you exited your normie matrix, unaware, unreparented, unshadow-worked, un-guru-ified life. So maybe you're inspired and you're thinking, okay, well, I should really chill on the self-improvement front. I should really think about how much better it would be to just not try to fix myself for a while and to relax my activist impulses to save the world or even make the world a better place. Well, the problem is that now you have decided that not fixing and improving yourself is a way to fix and improve yourself. So it gets very meta very quickly. So what, so what does that mean? Here's what I've concluded. There are spontaneous energies that arise from and through you. And these have a very particular quality because you can't prescribe spontaneity. You can't force spontaneity. You can't tell somebody, act natural and expect them to express naturally, right? So the paradox of prizing spontaneity is that it only ever happens spontaneously. But I like to talk to women a lot about their impulses, right? Also because I have had a lot of regrettable impulses in the course of my existence. And I have developed a relationship to my own impulses that ties into so many other dimensions of my life, including, let's say, wealth and prosperity. When I am moneyed, then there's no real obstacle built in to having, exploring, or really doing anything that I want to do. right? Because I have the money to do it. I have the money to hire a voice coach. I have the money to travel. I have the money to change my whole wardrobe overnight. So I don't have that constraint that some women may represent as being the reason they're not doing a thing, even though they want to do it. So that means that I would really benefit from a relationship to my impulses that is trusting, right? Because I don't have that constraint. It means that if I want something, I better be somebody whose wants are trustworthy. Otherwise, I could get myself into trouble, right? So when you have this kinked up relationship to your own spontaneity and your own curiosity and your own impulses, you feel that split of, I want it, but that wanting could get me in trouble. And of course, we deal with this in the romantic realm as well, right? Like if your picker is kind of like feeling off or you keep being attracted to somebody who is unavailable or that inner war is very complex, right? So when you orient towards your spontaneity, your impulsivity and your curiosity as a guiding light and you decide to make that the most valuable thing, not a decision from the outside in of what makes you a good person, a good woman, a good wife, a good spiritual practitioner. You could be led in many interesting paths, right? So even in my sort of activist you know, rejecting the system process. There are many things like lawfulness, for example, that I dedicated to researching and studying, but I wasn't natively curious. I just decided this is what a good sovereign woman does. She exits the system. It wasn't a native curiosity the way anything you'll ever see me offering or selling through my platform comes from my native curiosity. And if you've known me for a while, you've watched that take me in all sorts of interesting places, from health to relationships and marriage and mothering to business and entrepreneurship, leadership, all the way to beauty. So I follow the shiny object, which has a lot of implications from a business leadership standpoint that we could talk about in another podcast, how to create a foundational structure when you are somebody who loves the shiny object. And my curiosity ultimately is the development of myself. Because the more relaxed I am which is to say the less I am gripping and attaching to some way that I or my life should look, my path should look, the more spontaneous, curious, and natively impulse I am. So they are really pretty antithetical. And I think this is what they mean when they reference surrender, because it means that I can trust that my life is resourced, that my story is a fabulous one, and that there's an invisible hand guiding me, and that I can't possibly know what is best for me in a given moment or in the arc of my experience, right? And that's that Chinese proverb I love and so many of us know where you get delivered the thing that you think is horrible and it turns out to be fantastic. And then you are gifted the thing you want to celebrate and it turns out to be a huge burden and a liability. The only place you can rest is in the surrender of maybe. Maybe it's great. Maybe it's not. And what that confers to your system is ease and a kind of cosmic wink, like a kind of playfulness where you're like, okay, well, I wonder where this is going to lead me. I wonder what is next. And you can get to the place where maybe you already are and you already have whatever it is that you thought would arise from fixing, saving, rescuing, but you just didn't really notice it before. And so that's why I've come to prize awareness and relaxation over self-improvement, certainty, and being right. And I have been a professional know-it-all. I have the kind of mind that can litigate my correctness. And it's not it. It's just, it's not it. So if I prize awareness and relaxation, then that means that my priority in life can be accessed. And my priority is to interact with seeming adversity and situations, challenges that would otherwise have destroyed me through an inner emotional storm of I hate this. No fair. Why me? Victimhood. that I get to experience that with a kind of not only nonchalance, unbotheredness, but even a kind of playful curiosity. That to me is the swap, right? So like I got this in the trade and what I invested was whatever got me to this place where I can access self-awareness and relaxation. It wasn't so that I could become necessarily a more progressed iteration of me, because trust me, there are many aspects of my asleep sheep self that I in ways miss, right? And that I value. And I look around at so many folks who have not taken the self-development path that I have. And I'm like, they have a lot of amazing things that I don't, you know? And so it's trades. It's just, it's trades. This trade, this dividend is extremely valuable to me because it allows me to walk day by day, moment by moment with a sense of connection to the unseen, to the design and to delight in its unfoldment. And it allows me to rest in a kind of, I don't know, like what it would be like to watch a movie you're excited to see. That's what it feels like to live instead of the neurotic vigilance that really did characterize my moments, let's say, of the pendulum swing from asleep in the matrix to awake and activated again about, in my case, saving the world and then also fixing myself. I mean, I'm sure we all know, and you may identify as somebody who has invested untold hours and in your own self-improvement, and you can still touch on that nihilistic place where you're like, is this it, really? And I would see, even in the medical space, I mean, I would see people who would go from the conventional system, reject that system, go into the functional medicine system, become professional patients, invest tens of thousands of dollars on testing that would show them all the things wrong with their Krebs cycle and all the ways they were overburdened with heavy metals and all of the things and supplements that they needed to take and deal with to fix themselves. And they were fundamentally just as broken, feeling sick and dependent outside of the system, quote unquote, as they were inside of it. So as you are considering the potential double bind of trying to fix yourself and to fix the world, it could be interesting to consider that that effort, by its very nature, will lead you back to the starting point. And to begin to consider what else is interesting, what else piques your curiosity. And for me, it has been to orient towards adversity and challenges with a kind of of playfulness, with a kind of unbotheredness. And I could only get to that place, it turns out, when I prized my awareness, which was already there, didn't need to necessarily do anything, you know, to install that inside of me and my relaxation. And so that's why, obviously, I talk about relaxed women and what it is to be a relaxed woman because that's very valuable to me. And so obviously there are things that I did to train and practice relaxation in my system, but they were always guided by my curiosity. So it's not like I, at this point now, of course, am doing things because I think it's what a good, healed, integrated spiritual person does. And so I watch myself, even in speaking with my friends, about imagining that we know what is a better way to do something or a better way to be, including being relaxed. Maybe that's not necessarily better. It's just more valuable. It's just more of a priority for me now. and I've traded other things to prioritize this. So I will leave you with that because what I enjoy is when I get to be a little whisper in the background of your mindscape whenever you touch into victim territory. And touching into victim territory is always going to involve blaming, judging, proving, and finger pointing. So if I can be a little whisper in the back of your mind that says, hmm, maybe. I don't know. That feels fun to me. And I hope that this has given you, offered you a few of those whispers. All right. More later. I feel right.