Collapsing and Dismantling Internalized Hierarchical and Extractive Shapes, Structures, Containers, and Dynamics, Encounter by Encounter™ — Permission Claimed, Not Sought™

Raven LeFebvre, LCSW, LCSW-C, LICSW, CCTP-II

10 hours ago

23 min read

— Using Outer-World Encounters as Inoculation to Optimize the Internal Collapsing and Dismantling of Hierarchical and Extractive Frames As One Climbs Up and Out: An Intrapsychic Homeopathy of Sorts™

Raven LeFebvre, LCSW, LCSW-C, LICSW, MAC

Certified Clinical Trauma Professional Level 2 (CCTP-II)

PDA North America Level 1 Certified Clinician

Owner and Founder, Silhouette Psychotherapy PLLC

In clinical practice for 22 years under independent licensure

Serving NC, MD, VT, MA, MN, PA, VA, FL, SC, DE, ID and UT

The Hierarchy That Is Still Operating After You Leave
How hierarchical and extractive systems can continue operating internally long after the external structure, relationship, institution, or ideology is gone.
The Tallest Poppy, the Bucket, and the Machinery of Staying Small
Why systems organized around belonging often teach people to experience visibility, ambition, differentiation, and selfhood as threats to the whole.
What Is a Soft Hierarchy?
The covert architecture of power that operates through morality, virtue, care, spirituality, family obligation, and plausible deniability rather than overt command.
When Care Becomes a Vehicle for Control
How boundary invasion, enmeshment, and covert control can disguise power as love, concern, protection, guidance, or spiritual principle.
The Four Mechanisms of Soft Control™
Moralization, virtue signaling, enmeshment, and covert control—and how each recruits a person into maintaining the system from the inside.
Moralization: When Obedience Becomes Goodness and Selfhood Becomes Wrong
How labeling desire, ambition, visibility, differentiation, and self-trust as selfish, prideful, diseased, or immoral turns external control into internal surveillance.
Virtue Signaling as a Technology of Self-Erasure
How performing humility, gratitude, compliance, service, anonymity, or being “fine” can produce a false self while the authentic self is pushed out of view.
Enmeshment: When You Can No Longer Tell Whose Thought It Is
What happens when another person’s needs, interpretations, emotions, ideology, or authority become difficult to distinguish from your own perceptions and desires.
Covert Control: The Power You Cannot Quite Name
Why control becomes especially difficult to resist when it arrives dressed as concern, love, protection, spirituality, healing, or your own supposed wellbeing.
The Violation of Selfhood What changes when a person is systematically taught that their own thoughts, perceptions, desires, voice, and agency cannot be trusted without external authorization.
When Your Own Mind Becomes the Enforcer
How internalized hierarchy recruits you to police, cross-examine, moralize, surveil, and extract from yourself on behalf of a system that may no longer be physically present.
The Smoke Alarm and the Carbon Monoxide
Why conditioned guilt can become so loud that it draws attention away from the quieter and more consequential danger of losing access to Self.
The Courtroom Inside the Self
How an authentic primary experience can suddenly become an internal prosecution in which desire, perception, and agency are placed on trial.
Perceptual Colonization and the Loss of Interpretive Authority
What happens when your lived experience is repeatedly subjected to arbitration, correction, authorization, denial, or reinterpretation by an external system.
The Autistic and ADHD Collision With Hierarchical Machinery
How masking, neurotypical conformity, compliance-coded selfhood, and the suppression of autistic or ADHD ways of being can become entangled with larger systems of hierarchy and extraction.
When Dismantling the Container Becomes Survival
Why breaking rigid gendered, relational, institutional, social, or psychological containers can become necessary to preserve access to a livable and recognizable Self.
Collapsing the Hierarchy Encounter by Encounter™
How encounters with hierarchical and extractive dynamics can become opportunities to recognize the machinery faster, remain uncaptured, and strengthen internal sovereignty.
An Intrapsychic Homeopathy of Sorts™
How small encounters with the thing you are dismantling may become material for transforming your internal relationship to it rather than evidence that you must submit to it.
Cauterizing the Entry, Leakage, and Transmission Points of Hierarchical Posturing™
The work of identifying where external hierarchy enters the psyche, where it leaks into relationships, and where it gets transmitted through your own behavior toward yourself.
The Work of Collapsing Hierarchical Machinery™
Naming the hierarchy, grieving what it cost, recognizing its internalized voice, and refusing to continue organizing your life around its premises.
Permission Claimed, Not Sought™
What changes when permission to exist, want, reach, retreat, be visible, claim your work, and speak your truth is no longer something you wait for another person or system to grant.
Reclaiming Intact Access to the Unconfused Self™
The movement from outsourced authority toward self-trust, perceptual autonomy, agency, boundaries, visibility, desire, and an embodied sense of being your own person.
Epistemic Emancipation™ and Internally-Sourced Interpretive Authority™
Rebuilding the capacity to treat your own lived experience as testimony rather than evidence awaiting external authorization, arbitration, or appeal.
The Self Is Not the Problem
If having a Self is being defined as the problem you might be in Alice In Wonderland.
A Jungian and IFS-informed exploration of Self as source, organizing principle, wisdom, agency, and the ground from which individuation becomes possible.
Individuation Instead of Compliance
Moving from becoming who the hierarchy requires you to be toward becoming who you are as your own Self unfolds.
Building After the Collapse
Creating new structures for life, work, relationships, boundaries, proximity, visibility, and desire that support the Self rather than recruit it into its own containment.
The Work Is Not to Become Invulnerable
The aim is not to eliminate guilt, fear, doubt, or activation, but to become increasingly able to experience them without surrendering authorship of your life.
The Right to Exist as a Person
What becomes possible when you can feel what you feel, think what you think, want what you want, need what you need, and remain intact without internal surveillance or character assassination.

Copyright & Attribution Notice

Should you wish to share, reproduce, reference, adapt, or otherwise make use of any material or ideas contained herein, please ensure that appropriate attribution is given to the original source and © 2024–2026 Raven LeFebvre. All rights reserved is duly credited.

For permissions, licensing inquiries, or questions regarding the use of any material from this publication, please contact Silhouette Psychotherapy PLLC prior to publication or distribution. We appreciate your respect for the authorship, integrity, and intellectual property represented in this original creative work.

Collapsing and Dismantling Internalized Hierarchical and Extractive Shapes, Structures, Containers, and Dynamics, Encounter by Encounter — Permission Claimed, Not Sought™

Using Outer-World Encounters as Inoculation, an Antidote, in the work of Internally Collapsing and Dismantling of Hierarchical and Extractive Frames As One Climbs Up and Out: An Intrapsychic Homeopathy of Sorts™

Cauterizing the Entry, Leakage and Transmission Points of Hierarchical Posturing™

The Tallest Poppy / Crabs In A Bucket: Homeopathy and inoculation both are based on the idea that small encounters with the thing become material for transforming one's internal relationship to the thing. How, in regard to internal systems, might exposure to hierarchical and extractive systems, structures, shapes and dynamics be used to sharpen and hone clarity, speed of recognition, and the ability to remain uncaptured and sovereign regardless of how overt or covert the encounter.

Dismantling Hierarchical Shapes, Structures, Containers, and Dynamics™ can be an act of suicide prevention for oppressed groups. The following is a feminist and neurodivergent critique of the structures that make certain ways of being feel impossible. When the psyche is forced into rigid containers—gendered, social, institutional, relational, or psychological—breaking the container can become a way of preserving the self. Planting doubt in someone about the credibility of their own perceptions or experience as the subject of their life can do damage of a sort that reverberates through echo chambers for 60, 80, even 100 years.

The Work of Collapsing and Dismantling Hierarchichal and Extractive Machinery and Code™ upon encounter, can be the work that allows a person to actually experientially reclaim disowned parts of the psyche rather than forcing themselves to remain compliance-coded within prescribed role/s upon fear for their psychological and relational life.

For autistic and ADHD people, this can also intersect with the pressure to conform to neurotypical structures, expectations, and modes of relating. In that sense, making more livable forms of selfhood possible may be understood as a form of suicide prevention.

On Collapsing Hierarchies: Soft Control, Covert Messaging, and Restoring Intact Access to the Unconfused Self™

Hierarchical structures exist everywhere in human systems - both visible and hidden - and they shape our sense of self-ownership, sovereignty, voice, and right to exist as free and autonomous agents. Some are obvious: explicit chains of command, clear power differentials, overt rules and consequences. But many of the most damaging hierarchies operate in subtler ways—through morality, through virtue signaling, through the invasion of boundaries under the guise of care or spiritual principle.

This written publication is a clinical reflection and exploration of "soft hierarchies"—power structures that operate through covert messaging, enmeshment, and the systematic undermining of a person's capacity to trust themselves. The goal is not to blame anyone for internalizing these structures, but to recognize them for what they are, and to understand how they shape our sense of self and our capacity to give ourselves permission to exist as full people.

These are the systems, structures, shapes and dynamics that many late identified/diagnosed Autistic/ADHD adults discover have often shaped their sense of permission, their voice, and their right to exist as a person. For many late identified 2E, Autistic, ADHD adults, a variety of hierarchical structures—both obvious and hidden—have systematically undermined the capacity to trust oneself, to claim one's own truth and work, and to give oneself permission to have a self at all.

There are explicit, cultic hierarchies such as Alcoholics Anonymous, but it often extends beyond that and includes the softer, more insidious hierarchies that operate through morality, through virtue signaling, through the invasion of Autistic Selfhood boundaries under the guise of "care" or "spiritual principle" or "family."

This document is an invitation to explore these structures, should you find any across your internal landscape—not to blame yourself for internalizing them, but to recognize them for what they are, and to begin the work of collapsing and dismantling them.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF SOFT HIERARCHIES™

What Are Soft Hierarchies?

A soft hierarchy is a power structure that operates not through explicit force or obvious domination, but through moralization (the framing of obedience as virtue and resistance as sin, disease, or selfishness), virtue signaling (the performance of "goodness" as a way to maintain status and belonging within the system); boundary invasion (the systematic crossing of your boundaries under the guise of care, love, spiritual principle, or family obligation); enmeshment: The blurring of where "you" end and "they" begin, so that your thoughts, desires, and perceptions are experienced as belonging to the system rather than to yourself; covert control: The exercise of power in ways that are deniable, that can be reframed as love or spirituality or concern.

Unlike explicit hierarchies (which say, "I am in charge and you must obey"), soft hierarchies weaponize and hijack the human attachment system, "I am concerned about your wellbeing, and therefore I must control your thoughts, your desires, and your sense of self."

The Difference Between Explicit and Soft Hierarchies

Explicit hierarchies are easier to recognize and resist because the power structure is visible and they are not packaged in plausible deniability. It is easier to notice when someone says: you must do this because I said so; if you disobey, you will be punished. In cases such as these, the power differential is clear, visible and can be named.

Soft hierarchies are insidious because they hide the power struggle behind mythology costuming or a front face (person or purpose). Their language my sound like: I'm telling you this because I love you; If you do this, you will be punished by God/the universe/your own disease; This is for your own good; This is a spiritual principle." The power structure is invisible, and resistance feels like ingratitude or selfishness and is located in the person's own character and not as an external assailant. In soft hierarchies, the person being controlled often doesn't realize they are being controlled. They believe they are choosing to comply because it is the right thing to do, the moral thing to do, the spiritual thing to do.

The title I've chosen for article is intentionally all encompassing, including systems which operate with some explicit control, and also with softer, more covert messaging about morality, ambition, desire, selfhood, and the dangers of wanting things or having a self. Within family systems, schools, workplaces, governments, there is often a systematizing of the soft hierarchy structure. Many covert coercive structures operate and sustain themselves at the level of systems machinery by teaching the disavowal of selfhood and embedding an entire ideology and/or theology around the idea while vocalizing being anti-ideology or anti-theology. Family systems do this in endless variances, as do churches. Coercive religious control, and in particular the most insidious versions which are soft, subtle and covert, are often indiscernible in their framing that one's own self is the problem and that surrending one's self is the solution. If you follow the loop you can see the connect back to human attachment systems. In return, you are granted belonging.

PART II: THE MECHANISMS OF SOFT CONTROL

Mechanism 1: Moralization

Moralization is the process of framing obedience as virtue and resistance as moral failure. When a system teaches that compliance is morally good and resistance is morally bad, it becomes very difficult to question or resist. This might look like the idea that anonymity is a spiritual principle and you must not be visible or claim self-credit. This might look like you must surrender your Self to survive because your Self and character defects are the greatest threat to you and the group or ideology is your salvation. This may look like indoctrination - covert/implicit or overt/explicit that your own perceptual system is not trustworthy; only the group consensus, hierarchical/extractive system or coercive control ideology has thoughts and ideas that are trustworthy. In a family system, this might look like: Good children don't want things for themselves; Ambition is selfish; You should be grateful for what you have; People who want more are never satisfied (diseased/sinful/immoral); Your desires or even your subjective experiences are a burden to others.

In religious or spiritual systems, moralization might look like: Humility is a virtue; wanting things for yourself is pride; Service to others is the highest good; wanting things for yourself is self-centeredness; Surrender is spiritual; having a self is spiritual disease; Anonymity is a spiritual principle; visibility is ego. The effect of moralization is to make resistance feel like moral failure. When a person wants something for themselves, they immediately hear the internalized moral voice: That's selfish. That's pride. That's disease. That's not spiritual. The person begins to police themselves. They don't need external punishment because they have internalized the moral framework and now punish themselves for any thought or desire that contradicts it. In enmeshed family or relational systems, differentiation is a threat and may also be tagged with similar descriptors to the above described.

Moralization is a control mechanism and the effect is to make resistance (aka individuation or Selfhood) feel like moral failure. Many late identified autistic, ADHD, AuDHD adults have spent decades ensuring they are adequately severed from Self (masking), ensuring they are safe from visibility (masking), ensuring they are not claiming any of their truth or reality or experience in ways that destabilizes others (masking). Moralizing that has become internally embedded facilitates this by internal conceptualizations of self as selfish, harmful, etc. At that point, one is not hearing these things from outside oneself anymore. One has internalized them. They are now the persons’ one’s own inner voice, attacking them for wanting to be a person and have a distinct Self.

Mechanism 2: Virtue Signaling / Virtue Signaling as Bullying

Virtue signaling is the performance of “goodness” as a way to maintain status and belonging within the system. In soft hierarchies, people learn to perform the role that the system wants them to play. In ideological coercive control systems, virtue signaling might look like: performative and false humility as a cover and front for unconscious affect, performing anonymity and self-effacement; performing the idea that credit for any positive outcome belongs to the system and not to you, performing humility and the idea that you are flawed and defective; performing service to the program as evidence of spiritual growth. In a family system this may look like: performing gratitude and contentment even when you are not grateful or content; performing compliance and obedience even when you disagree; performing concern for others’ needs above your own even when your needs are unmet; performing the idea that you are “fine” even when you are struggling. The effect of virtue signaling is to create a false self—a self that performs what the system wants to see, while your authentic self is hidden, suppressed, or attacked. Over time, the person may lose touch with their authentic self entirely. They may not know what they actually think or want; they only know what they are supposed to think and want.

Many high-masking late-identified neurodivergent adults have learned, and practiced for decades, to perform “the role” (fill in the blank) flawlessly while their authentic self is elsewhere. One effect of hierarchical structures, shapes, containers and dynamics is the experiential teaching that this split is necessary for survival. Which brings full circle the critical need to collapse and dismantle in order to have the chance to do the work of Deconstructing Neurotypicality and Restoring Intact Access to the Unconfused Self.

Mechanism 3: Boundary Invasion Through Enmeshment

Enmeshment is the blurring of boundaries between self and other, so that your thoughts, desires, and perceptions are experienced as belonging to the system rather than to yourself.

In AA, this looks like the idea that if you are trusting your own thinking you are in danger of relapsing. This may look like the idea that your sponsor’s guidance is more trustworthy than your own knowing, or the idea that the program’s interpretation of your experience is more accurate than your own “they’re in their disease, the disease is talking.” In essence, it’s the relentless and systematic undermining of your capacity to trust your own mind. In enmeshed systems, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between your own thoughts and the system's thoughts.

In family systems this may look like the parents’ needs, emotions, and desires taking precedence, the thoughts and feelings of a dependent minor being interpreted through the parents’ lens rather than being honored as entirely and exclusively sourced and housed within the dependent minor. This may look like the expectation that the child would be responsible for managing the parents’ emotions without consent, or the blurring of where responsibility ends and begins between the adult and the child – and for what.

The effect of enmeshment is that one loses the capacity to distinguish between their own thoughts and the system’s thoughts, between their own desires and the system’s desires. They become a vessel for the system’s will, rather than a person with their own will.

Mechanism 4: Covert Control

Covert control is the exercise of power in ways that are deniable, that can be reframed as love or spirituality or concern. In AA, this looks like: “We’re just concerned about your wellbeing.” “We’re just trying to help you.” “We’re just following spiritual principles.” “If you don’t do this, you will die.” In family systems this may look like, “We’re just trying to protect you.” “We’re just trying to help you be a better person.” “We’re just concerned about your future.” In both cases, there is the implicit threat: “If you don’t comply, you will be abandoned/punished/unloved or un-belonged.”

The effect of covert control is that you cannot name it as control.

You cannot say this is abuse without being painted as confused and in need of perceptual assistance, because it is framed as care or love.

You can only experience it as confusion, as the sense that something is wrong but you cannot quite name what.

PART III: THE IMPACT ON YOUR SENSE OF SELF

The Violation of Selfhood

When a person has experienced systematic violation of their your sense of self they may begin to operate on the unconscious premise that their self is dangerous, is not trustworthy, or is harmful to others. They may have come to equate trusting themself or being in deep and resonant attunement with Self as threatening to others or as destabilizing to a precarious, wobbly or enmeshed system in a way that threatens their attachment needs. Once one has become an adherent to the idea, via any number of ideologies or pathways, that Self is dangerous and trusting Self is dangerous, they are ensealed within Hierarchical and Extractive Systems, Structures, Shapes and Dynamics. This often remains the case until the cost of climbing up and out becomes the only affordable choice, however excruciating it may at the attachment infrastructure level.

AA teaches that being in self and self-trust are life threatening. Religious organizations, schools, and families may teach that if you want things for yourself you are selfish and morally impaired. In both cases, the thesis is that the Self is not trustworthy and is a source of grave danger to (ironically) self and others. AA teaches that one’s own thoughts are the disease talking. Churches, family systems, may teach that ones’ own perceptions and experiences are wrong and desires are selfish.

In both cases, the message is that the Self is not yours, it is communal. Another primary message is that Self requires surveillance and needs to be vouched for rather than received and held. Perceptions are communal. Individual experiences and perceptions are to be reviewed and inspected for authorization, arbitation, appeal or denial, rather than received as testimony from an independent subject who speaks for oneself and is recognized as bearing intimate self-knowledge which is sourced from the inside of their life and Self. In hierarchical, such unshakeability in the use of a persons’ own voice, will often elicit a skepticism or questioning. Ones’ life and work belongs to the family or belongs to AA. Ones’ voice belongs to the system.

Therefore, at its foundation, this is not an exchange/interaction, but an enactment/re-enactment, by definition. An individuated, differentiated, autonomous and agentic self is not permitted to exist, much less to be visible or outspoken. This is what is meant by the violation of selfhood. It is that the very capacity to be a self—to have thoughts, desires, perceptions, and agency—has been systematically undermined.

The Cost of This Violation

The cost of this violation is visible in daily current life. Rules that have been internalized in order to appease hierarchical structures become inner dictates that persist unexamined in the same way that most do not examine the dictate to refrain from doing things that could trigger the smoke alarm, but rather, they simply serve it. Understandable, but in the meantime, one is ruled.

There are things that are scarier and more insidious than the smoke alarm going off, such as carbon monoxide poisoning. There are things that are scarier and more insidious than being told that your reality isn’t real and you shouldn’t trust yourself, such as actually falling prey to wondering such things yourself. One of the effects of the impact on the attachment system in all of this, is that the attention catcher is the risk of the smoke-alarm going off, rather than the slower, less discernible, and much more life-threatening risks of treading water, when it comes to matters such as the life and vitality of Self. The breaching of internal security systems when outside noise that belongs outside becomes ingested and impacts self-trust at its core, internally, is arguably a top security threat and the smoke alarm has been deactivated beforehand, all too often.

Epistemic Emancipation™, Internally-Sourced Interpretive Authority™, Perceptual Autonomy™ and sovereign knowing may be the basis to an embodied existence for late identified autistic, ADHD, AuDHD and 2E adults. Becoming acclimated to the smoke alarm (letting conditioned guilt be vexingly loud in your system but not allowing it to impact your choices) can accelerate deconstruction and may be the ticket to a new freedom and a new happiness. Extinguishing conditioned and programmed guilt and excising it, while hard to stomach experientially, may actually be the ingredient.

If one cannot make free choice because of an internalized rule that satiates and stabilizes a system, one is not free. If one cannot claim their own reality or testimony enough to speak it, much less to inhabit or embody it, because of deep-seeded indoctrination about what to do so would mean about their nature, character or morality, then one is not free but is caught in a bind between their authentic truth and internalized messages. These are among the costs of the violation of selfhood. It is not just that one has bene hurt. It is that one has become outsourced as opposed to insourced, prevented from becoming one is meant to become, recruited instead to stabilize hierarchical and extractive systems, structures, shapes and dynamics.

The Reclamation of Intact Access to the Unconfused Self

Reclamation is the process of taking back what has been taken from you. It involves recognizing the violation—naming what has been done to you as a violation rather than as love, care, spirituality, or concern. It requires grieving the loss: the self that was not permitted to develop, the voice that was not permitted to speak, the work that was not permitted to reach. Reclamation means rebuilding your relationship with your own thoughts, desires, perceptions, and agency. It is about reclaiming your right to be a person—asserting that you have the right to have a self, to want things, to be visible, to claim yourself. Finally, it involves building new structures: creating a life and work organized around your own values and desires rather than around compliance with external systems.

A vibrant selfhood is characterized by self-trust—the capacity to trust your own thoughts, desires, perceptions, and agency. It includes authenticity: the capacity to be yourself rather than performing a false self for the system. It encompasses agency: the capacity to make choices aligned with your own values and desires. Visibility matters—the capacity to be seen and heard, to claim your work, to have a voice. Boundaries are essential: the capacity to distinguish between your own thoughts and others' thoughts, your own desires and others' desires, your own responsibility and others' responsibility. And permission: the capacity to give yourself permission to want things, to be ambitious, to reach for more, to be a person. This is not a self that is perfect or without doubts or fears, but a self that is alive, that is yours, that is permitted to exist.

The Work of Collapsing Hierarchies

To collapse a hierarchy is to refuse to participate in it. It is to say: "I no longer accept the premise that you are above me and I am below you. I no longer accept the premise that your thoughts are more trustworthy than mine. I no longer accept the premise that my self is dangerous, diseased, or not permitted." This is not about being disrespectful or ungrateful; it is about recognizing that the hierarchy was never legitimate in the first place.

Collapsing a hierarchy begins with naming it. The first step is to name the hierarchy for what it is—not as love, spirituality, or concern, but as a power structure designed to control you. This includes naming the cultic hierarchy that systematically undermined your self-trust and capacity to be a person, naming the messaging about morality and ambition as a soft hierarchy designed to keep you small and compliant, and naming the internalized voices that attack you for wanting visibility as the voices of these hierarchies rather than as your own voice.

The second step is to grieve what was taken from you. Grieve the self that was not permitted to develop, the voice that was not permitted to speak, the work that was not permitted to reach. This is not about blame or anger, though those may be present. It is about acknowledging the loss and allowing yourself to feel it.

The third step is to reclaim your capacity to trust yourself by rebuilding your relationship with your own thoughts, desires, perceptions, and agency. This means noticing when you are hearing the internalized voices of the hierarchy and asking yourself: "Is this my thought, or is this the hierarchy's thought?" Soft hierarchies make this harder because the infiltration is subtle. Practice trusting your own knowing even when it contradicts the hierarchy's teaching. Unsubscribing from conditioning can create unpleasant experiences, and they will pass. Notice when you are right, when your perceptions are accurate, when your desires are legitimate. In particular, notice when you hear cross-examination kick in alongside your authentic primary experience and recognize it as indoctrination—as perceptual colonization—not as your own voice.

Reclaiming your right to be a person means asserting that you have the right to have a self, to want things, to be visible, to claim your Self, Truth, and Life. This involves giving yourself permission to reach as feels right and to retreat as feels right. Give yourself permission to claim your voice as your own, to be seen and held in relationships and systems of your choosing, to prioritize meeting your needs in ways that feel right, and to reduce your load. Notice where you are arbitrating your reality rather than experiencing it—this is the work of reclaiming your right to be a person.

Finally, collapse old structures and build new structures. Collapse new structures. Keep old structures. Be thoughtful. Seek internal discernment instead of external authorization or denial. Stop outsourcing your internal authority. Dismiss interpretive authority and external narratives cast around you in favor of standing firmly within your own lived experience. Create a life and work organized around your own values and desires rather than around compliance with external systems. This means building a presence that is authentically yours, not a performance of what you think you should be. Create a lifestyle that is sustainable and honors your body's needs and limitations. Organize your life, work, and relationships in ways that allow you to reach more of the things you seek, with the people and animals you want nearby, at the proximity that feels best, while maintaining your integrity. Create boundaries that protect your time, energy, and capacity. Recognize the internalized voices of hierarchies rather than your own voice.

One of the most important pieces of this work is learning to recognize when you are hearing internalized voices of hierarchies rather than your own voice. The biggest tell is when you have a primary experience and then suddenly it flips to an encounter with the police or to courtroom arbitration. That is a tell. Notice what happened there. You had an authentic thought or feeling, became aware of an authentic want or need, and then immediately the internalized voice attacked with moralization or character assassination, and suddenly there was a courtroom arbitration or police encounter energy surrounding what had been your primary experience. This is the hierarchy speaking, not you. This is internalized hierarchy, and you have been covertly recruited to run extractive postures against yourself internally. The work is to notice this happening, to name it, and to practice trusting your authentic thought instead of the hierarchy's attack.

You possess wisdom you can trust. Your body and your Self will help you know and learn what you need. The work is to trust this wisdom, to give yourself permission to act on it, and to build a life that honors your body's needs and limitations.

The central work right now is giving yourself permission to feel what you feel, think what you think, want what you want, need what you need, and experience your primary experiences without internal surveillance and character assassination. This is reclaiming your right to exist as a person with your own thoughts, desires, perceptions, and agency.

A Jungian & IFS Perspective on Self

In both Jungian depth psychology and Internal Family Systems, the Self is understood as sacred—not as disease, not as something to be relieved of, not a block to life, but the path to life, as source, and as sacred. In Jungian terms, the Self is the center of the psyche, the organizing principle around which all other parts organize. It is the seat of wisdom, knowing, and guidance that transcends the individual ego. It is the source of authentic desire, authentic choice, and authentic agency. The Self is sacred, worthy of respect, and not to be violated or surrendered. In IFS terms, the Self is the “leader” of the internal system, the part that has access to wisdom and compassion. It is the part that can help the other parts heal, the part that knows what is true and what is right for you. Like the Jungian Self, it is sacred, worthy of respect, and not to be violated or surrendered. Any teaching that the self is a disease, is bondage, or is something to be relieved of is a direct violation of this understanding. It is a violation of the sacred. Without access to Self, humans become hungry zombies.

In Jungian terms, individuation is the process of becoming who you are meant to become. It involves integrating the shadow and the unconscious, developing a relationship with the Self, and becoming more fully yourself.

Self is the vital signs, the heartbeat, pulse and life force — for individuation and surrendering access to Self, framing self-trust as hazardous, is antithetical to individuation. Individuation is the work of becoming who are you are meant to become as you unfold. It is the work of reclaiming your Self, of developing a relationship with your own wisdom and agency, of becoming more fully yourself, of meeting your Self.

One of the most important aspects of the Self is that it is the source of authentic truth, sovereign knowingness and desire—not the desire that the hierarchical and extractive frames would prefer that you have, but the desire that comes from deep within you, from your own knowing. That which is unaffected by externals and can neither be bestowed nor withheld. The work is to trust this desire, to honor it, and to build a life organized around it.

Written by: Raven LeFebvre, LCSW, LCSW-C, LICSW, MAC, Owner and Founder, Silhouette Psychotherapy

Certified Clinical Trauma Professional Level 2 (CCTP-II)

PDA North America Level 1 Certified Clinician

This article is intended for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional assessment, diagnosis, or medical advice. Feel free to reach out to learn about our services.

All ideas, concepts, perspectives, and creative direction are entirely my own. All concepts are concepts I have been working with clients in regard to, for years, behind closed doors in sessions. AI was used only as a supplementary tool for minor edits, flow and fomat final touches, and polishing.

Kirsten Johnson / Sobriety Bestie

Readers interested in learning more about 12-step recovery, neurodivergence, and critical and autonomous thinking may wish to explore the extensive body of work created by Kirsten Johnson through Sobriety Bestie. Kirsten Johnson is an independent creator who has developed a prolific body of educational and experiential content on these subjects. Her work represents her own perspectives, experiences, and resources and is separate and independent from this website and from any clinical services offered through this practice. This reference is provided solely as an opportunity for readers to locate additional information and perspectives. Its inclusion does not constitute a clinical recommendation, referral, treatment recommendation, endorsement, or statement that any particular approach or resource is appropriate for any individual.

Important Disclaimer

This blog post is provided for general educational and informational purposes only. It is not a clinical service and does not constitute medical or mental-health advice, diagnosis, treatment, or an individualized clinical recommendation. Nothing in this post establishes a clinician-patient relationship or substitutes for individualized care from a qualified professional. Any decision to explore or use resources referenced in this post is the reader’s own. Readers should independently evaluate outside information and, when appropriate, discuss questions about their individual circumstances with a qualified healthcare or mental-health professional. Kirsten Johnson and Sobriety Bestie are independent of this practice. The practice does not represent or speak on behalf of Kirsten Johnson or Sobriety Bestie, and readers should direct questions about their content, services, or materials to them directly.

This article is intended for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional assessment, diagnosis, or medical advice. Feel free to reach out to learn about our services.

All ideas, concepts, perspectives, and creative direction are entirely my own.

Written by: Raven LeFebvre, LCSW, LCSW-C, LICSW, MAC

Owner and Founder, Silhouette Psychotherapy

Certified Clinical Trauma Professional Level 2 (CCTP-II)

PDA North America Level 1 Certified Clinician