Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story

Watching Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story, what stayed with me was not only the extremity of harm, but the quiet way it begins, often disguised as help.

A person seeking clarity. Relief. A way to live better with themselves and others.

Somewhere along the way, guidance shifts its shape.

What should have been support becomes substitution. Reflection becomes instruction. And slowly, the person’s own voice starts to fade.

A life coach or therapist is not meant to become your voice.

Their role is to help you see more clearly, not to decide more rigidly. Real empowerment does not come from absorbing someone else’s certainty. It comes from strengthening your capacity to notice, question, and choose for yourself.

Trying to better yourself does not mean ignoring your intuition. It means sharpening it and tuning into it.

You know your life better than anyone else ever will.

This is where idealistic influencers enter the picture. People who seem to have it all together. The language is polished. The certainty is persuasive. The life they present looks ordered, healed, resolved. For someone feeling uncertain, that kind of confidence can feel reassuring. But idealisation is also where discernment quietly switches off. When influencers appear flawless, their ideas can begin to feel unquestionable. And that is precisely the moment when guidance needs more scrutiny, not less.

Ethical support keeps inner authority intact. It respects context. It leaves room for disagreement. It encourages review, pause, and independent thinking. It does not require you to stay indefinitely to prove growth, loyalty, or readiness.

Healthy guidance has a direction. And that direction is outward.

You should be moving back into your own life with more trust in your judgement, not circling endlessly around the person who helped you. If support does not eventually make itself lighter, if it resists closure or reflection, something essential has been lost.

When insight is enforced rather than integrated, growth becomes fragile.

A good practitioner helps you deal with your life. They do not replace your relationship with it.

The measure of successful coaching is quiet and unremarkable.

You leave steadier.

More self-directed.

Less reliant.

And very clearly, with your own voice reclaimed.

P.S. The article is inspired by Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story on Netflix. The documentary includes graphic and distressing content. Viewer discretion advised.

When love stops preforming

We have become very good at showing love.

Less practiced at letting it remain quiet.

There was a time when love stayed mostly unobserved.

It lived in routines, in unremarkable consistency, in the way people adjusted to one another without needing an audience. Its strength was not measured. It was lived.

Today, relationships increasingly come with visibility.

Couples affirm their bond publicly. 

Families document closeness. 

Parents share milestones, victories, moments of pride. 

Much of this is sincere. 

Sharing joy is human. Pride in the people we love is natural. 

Expression itself is not the problem.

The shift happens quietly in what gets amplified.

What travels outward most easily are the polished moments. 

The wins. 

The proof points. 

Meanwhile the ordinary textures of growth begin to fade from view. Effort that has no headline. Days that simply hold together. The slow, uneven work of becoming.

When only the polished moments travel outward, the rest retreat inward. The awkward tries, the half-formed growth, the unremarkable days stop feeling worth displaying. 

Not because anyone forbade them, but because silence teaches as much as praise.

What remains visible starts shaping what feels valuable.

This can place an unintended weight on children and relationships alike. Not through spoken pressure, but through patterns quietly absorbed. A subtle learning forms about what earns attention and what seems to matter most.

None of this makes pride wrong. Sharing meaningful moments is part of being alive together. Joy naturally wants to be expressed.

The distortion begins when sharing starts leaning into comparison.

When the inner sentence quietly becomes, I’m doing this well. Why aren’t others able to?

Not said aloud. Sometimes not even consciously acknowledged. But present enough to shape posture, tone, and identity.

At that point, empowerment shifts into positioning. 

Love begins to double as proof. 

Connection starts carrying the weight of image.

Healthy relationships do not require continuous confirmation. They grow through steadiness, repair, humour, irritation survived, ordinary days endured well. They remain intact without needing approval stamped on them.

The strongest bonds are often the least performative. They do not announce their depth. They simply inhabit it.

Sharing, when it comes from genuine appreciation rather than quiet comparison, remains beautiful. 

Pride, when it does not become pressure, remains nourishing.

But love matures best when it is not auditioning.

When it is allowed to be private, imperfect, unremarkable, and real.

Who you are when the noise fades should resemble the image you offer the world. If not, it’s worth listening to what that gap is asking for.

In the end, a life is not only about what we build outwardly, but the inner alignment we quietly return to.

Here’s to choosing coherence over performance.

#SocialMedia #Relationships #InnerLife #Authenticity

When Memory Becomes Meaning: The Emotional Story We Don’t Realise We’re Writing

One part of psychological study that always fascinated me was how much of our work rests on understanding the architecture of the brain. Not in the dry, anatomical sense, but in the way structure influences experience — how the physical becomes emotional, how biology becomes biography.

During a conversation with a fellow psychologist recently, the topic drifted toward the hippocampus. A small structure, often spoken of in passing, yet central to something deeply human. In one line, we both acknowledged what we already know but rarely pause to feel: the hippocampus binds memory with emotion. 

Without that connection, nothing truly stays.

And that thought stayed with me longer than the conversation did.

Because once you step away from the textbooks, this is not about neuroscience anymore. It is about life — yours, mine, everyone’s. It is the quiet truth that we don’t remember events; we remember the emotions they carried.

Think of your favourite food.

You don’t recall it because of the recipe.

You recall it because of the warmth of the person who made it.

Or the loved one who sat beside you as you took the first bite.

Think of a place you return to in your mind.

It is not the building or the street.

It is the version of yourself who felt at home there.

We like to believe memory is factual, but the truth is gentler and more intimate. We remember what made us feel something. Everything else dissolves into background noise.

This emotional mapping quietly shapes our entire life.

Why certain people feel safe the moment you meet them.

Why some conversations stay with you for days.

Why a small gesture, often unnoticed by others, can soften something inside you.

It is not logic. It is emotional memory at work.

In therapy too, stories rarely arrive as timelines. People tell you what the moment did to them.

“That silence made me feel forgotten.”

“That sentence made me feel seen.”

“That day changed how I understood myself.”

It is the feeling that survives, not the sequence of events.

And this is where understanding emotional memory becomes more than theory. It becomes a way of seeing your own life with compassion.

You realise your reactions aren’t random. They are patterns etched by past emotional experiences.

You realise your longing, your resistance, your comfort, your distance — all have roots.

You realise that healing is not about erasing the memory but about rewriting the emotional meaning attached to it.

You cannot change the event.

But you can change the weight it carries.

When you recognise this, your awareness shifts. 

You begin to notice the small moments you once rushed past. The softness in someone’s tone. The safety in a presence. The quiet steadiness of a place. You pay attention to what stirs you, what calms you, what unsettles you — because you know these are the threads your inner world will later weave into memory.

You start living with a deeper attention.

A gentler pace.

A cleaner understanding of what truly stays.

And you begin to ask yourself a different kind of question — not “What happened today,” but “What from today will stay with me, and why?”

That is the real story you are writing, moment by moment.

Your emotional memory is not just a function of the brain.

It is the quiet autobiography of your life — the one you don’t even realise you’re authoring.

Here’s to the beauty of life and the way it keeps entertaining us when we simply care to observe.