Something lands. A comment, a silence, a slight that might not have been a slight at all. And before it has reached you at its real weight, an explanation has already arrived to carry it back out of the room. You did not decide to do this. It happened faster than deciding, which is exactly why it has never once felt like something you were doing.
That reflex has a name, and it has a cost, and the cost is not limited to whatever it is currently protecting. The same instrument that turns one person down turns down the rest of your life along with them, quietly, a little at a time, until flat has started to feel like peace.
This course is twenty-eight lessons on what that reflex is, why you built it, and what it actually takes to turn it back up, one mechanism at a time.