Survival mode is supposed to be a phase that helps save your life. It is not meant to be how you live.

if your brain changes in response to experience, then you have the opportunity to deliberately help your brain change again based on new experiences you create.

The power we discover inside ourselves as we survive a life-threatening experience can be utilized equally well outside of crisis, too. I am, in every moment, capable of mustering the strength to survive again—or of tapping that strength in other good, productive, healthy ways.

The objective is for the past to become a very tiny part of your very large, confident, capable, and free self.

Perhaps defining a self begins with simply making the first choice, simply rising up and deciding what you desire, and then methodically, like writing, putting one word after the other until you have created a whole self and a whole life in the process.