2024: The Reflection Post
Gimmickless alt title: "I need to stop thinking so much, but only after one last think on that."
It’s 2025, and my biggest goal for the next year is to not think as much.
There’s a couple asterisks at the end of that sentence, but for the most part I’m not lying; since turning 35, a lot of the work I’ve been trying to do on myself has involved awareness, but also knowing when it’s valuable to just turn it all off.
For most of my life, I’ve pretty much assumed that as long as my brain was working, it was in service of something good: if I thought long and hard enough, I’d eventually “crack” my personal issues, change to address them, and generally be happier. While there’s some good news is that I’m getting a deeper understanding of these issues, the bad news is that I have to suppress a lot of my instincts in order to address them.
I’ve always been a big fan of therapy, and have written pretty openly about my experiences with it. Recently, at the end of December, I decided to experiment with Anthropic’s Claude AI to see if I could set it up as a supplementary therapist; I had found a prompt that seemed interesting enough, giving Claude the context of a skilled therapist, and the kind of writing style that I thought might help.
Since then, I’ve really embraced it as a tool — not a replacement — for the therapeutic process, and I’ve mostly “reached the same conclusions” with it as I have with my human therapist.
Where I’m going with this is that at my core, I need to work on issues of self-validation, self-compassion and holding multiple thoughts as true at the same time. This means less framing things as a binary “it can only be this, or it can only be that” framework, and it means less trying to make thoughts, actions, and emotions into systems.
Sometimes, things just have to be as they are. To the person who thought (and thinks) that “more thinking = more processing = quicker resolution”, this is incredibly difficult; we’re making it work anyways, and I’ll tell you how it goes.
Otherwise, the main thing that’s changed in the last six months is my relationship with work; I’d say that a lot of my imposter syndrome from my current role has evaporated as I’ve gotten a little more confident, and I’ve gotten better at saying “You know what, Matt? Maybe you’re good at what you do.”
Therapy has told me that I have two major voices in my head which drive my emotions:
Child Matt, who has unresolved trauma, emotions and needs from my youth. He is usually the voice that pipes up in rebellion, resistance, frustration, and resentment.
Adult Matt, who holds both me (and Child Matt) to probably unrealistic standards, with the best of intentions. However, he is also the one that is quick with self-criticism and invalidating emotions.
There’s me, “Manager Matt”, in the middle, kind of trying to wrangle them. Child Matt rebels against Adult Matt’s structure, and Adult Matt doesn’t really want to deal with Child Matt’s unresolved issues; he just wants to be better.
My work in my next year (and probably the rest of my life) is realizing that both of these facets are damaged in their own way, and doing the best I can to validate their concerns and feelings without harsh judgment. This is the basis of simple self-compassion, but I’m also trying to resist the urge to endlessly dissect them deeply at every opportunity.
They need space to be able to heal, and turning those emotions into work that I’m actively doing to change. I’ve desired that work, but probably in a way that I couldn’t actually do.
As always, this means a lot of adjustment, introspection, and openness. We keep going.
Thanks for your support, as always.