You've been doing everything right. Journaling about your triggers. Embracing your darkness. Loving your inner demons. Yet somehow your anxiety is worse, your patterns are stronger, and you're more fragmented than when you started. The entire shadow work industry has been teaching you to feed the very parasites it claims to heal.

Medieval Jewish mystics identified a phenomenon they called the Sitra Achra (the Other Side). Parasitic distortions that emerge when we try to eliminate parts of ourselves. These ancient texts reveal why your attempts to integrate your shadow often backfire spectacularly, creating exactly the psychological chaos you're trying to resolve.

The therapeutic approaches claiming to heal you are often creating the very imbalance they promise to fix. When you learn to recognize parasitic polarities as diagnostic information rather than enemy territory, everything changes. Your chronic struggles stop being battles to win and become conversations with your inner ecosystem about what wants to be restored.

This episode reveals the actual mechanics of how consciousness organizes itself and why most spiritual practices accidentally feed the very distortions they claim to dissolve. Your problems are your system's way of showing you where the light needs to be restored.

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If you’ve spent any time on Instagram’s weird, wonderful and niche corners, chances are high that you’ve seen one of Aiden Arata’s memes. Her work moves past the usual surface-level social media irony and plunges into the intersection where humor, psychic distress, and cultural commentary meet. Aiden’s debut book You Have a New Memory has been making waves, and for good reason. It’s hard to describe exactly what it is. Part essay collection, part dream logic, but in the end it reads kind of like a portal. And in a world where all the content we see is polished, branded, and performed for the algorithmic gods, her voice cuts through all the bullshit in the best possible way.

In this conversation, Aiden and I sat down to talk about how her book came to life, the strange intimacy of online performance, and the parts of ourselves we leave behind when we grow past a digital persona. We also dive into how platforms shape our identity, how performance can end up becoming our personality, and what it takes to create something that doesn’t need to sell itself. There’s a lot here about self-loathing, humor, privacy, and art-making in the hot mess of our current attention economy. If you’ve ever tried to integrate your past self into your current work, or felt haunted by the person people think you still are, this episode will likely hit for you in a major way.

In this conversation, Aiden and I get into:

• How “Hot Mess Aiden” shaped the tone and form of her writing
• Why the book mimics memory more than narrative
• The shift from confessional content to private creative process
• The internet’s shift from Tumblr girl energy to brand identity performance
• The loneliness of constant engagement and follower analytics
• What it means to stop oversharing without disappearing entirely
• How to live online without being consumed by it entirely
• The psychic pressure of being seen only through an old self

Explore Aiden’s work

Find Aiden on Instagram: @aidenarata

Subscribe to her Substack: aidenarata.substack.com

Buy her book You Have a New Memory and explore more at: aidenarata.com

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This episode is a deep dive into the psychological, spiritual, and mythic roots of people-pleasing and why this pattern exists in the first place. We explore how early childhood conditioning teaches us that love must be earned through caretaking, emotional labor, and self-erasure. From there, we dissect the roles many of us take on - empath, gifted child, good daughter - and trace how these identities shape our nervous systems and relationships long into adulthood.

We go beyond pop psychology and talk about the less acknowledged side of people-pleasing: its deeply controlling nature. When love becomes transactional, we confuse being needed with being safe. We unpack the fantasy of managing other people’s emotions to keep chaos at bay, and how this behavior can evolve into resentment, burnout, and even serious health consequences. We also discuss the smother-mother archetype, what it looks like in relationships, and how people-pleasing patterns get passed down generationally, often with the best of intentions.

This episode offers a way out. We walk through how to interrupt the reflex to soothe, fix, and explain. If you’ve felt trapped in your role as the emotional anchor for everyone else, this conversation might give you language for something you’ve always felt but never fully understood. It’s time to finally step out of the performance and learn to live a life that’s fully yours.

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