I saw a post today that read:
“The limits of your life are the limits you choose.”
At first glance it feels inspiring, almost liberating — as if choice alone shapes destiny.
But it also got me reflecting on something important:
Nothing is relevant until it becomes relevant.
Nothing truly lands until you can apply it to yourself.
Before I say anything more about quotes and self-help books, I want to share something personal.
A friend of mine died in 2023.
We initially met when she approached me for therapy for unresolved trauma.
She was kind, thoughtful, curious, and exhausted — the kind of exhaustion that comes from a lifetime of searching for answers without ever truly finding them.
She told how she had been on every mental health course, workshop, and seminar she could access.
She had tried every kind of medication.
She had read every self-help book ever recommended to her.
She kept trying, kept learning, kept hoping.
The day we met, she had just been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.
Her wish was to finally make sense of her life, and she was determined to understand – and so, for the next twelve months together we stepped into the world of trauma — gently, compassionately, honestly.
And in that final year of her life, she learned more than she had learned in the previous fifty-nine years combined.
She learned the truth about trauma.
Not the surface-level understanding that so many books offer,
but the deep, embodied reality of how trauma shapes the nervous system, the identity, the sense of self, and the capacity to feel alive.
She learned what it meant to finally be seen.
To make sense of her inner world.
To recognise that nothing was “wrong” with her — her body was responding exactly as it had needed to survive.
When she died, she left me her entire library of over 300 self-help books.
And I often reflect on what those books meant to her.
Not because they failed, but because they were written for a mind she didn’t yet have access to — a mind that only emerges when the nervous system feels safe enough to take in new information.
That experience changed how I think about self-help.
It deepened my understanding that we don’t lack information — we lack regulation.
We don’t lack resources — we lack internal safety to apply what we learn.
She taught me that the search for healing often lives in the pages of books, but the actual healing begins inside the body.
The Search for Answers Outside Ourselves
So many people spend a fortune on the latest self-help book or training program.
We read the first chapter.
We complete the first two modules.
Then we buy another one, hoping this will finally be the answer.
Dr Wayne Dyer used to say this is like losing your keys in the house but going outside to look for them.
You’ll never find them — but you keep searching outside anyway, convinced the solution must be “out there.”
And isn’t that how so many of us live?
Especially when we’ve grown up in environments where our internal world wasn’t nurtured, recognised, or supported.
We keep looking for external fixes because internally, we don’t yet know where — or even who — we are.
A Quote That Changed My Trajectory
I remember many years ago sitting in a solicitor’s waiting room.
On the wall was a simple framed quote by Henry Ford:
“If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re probably right.”
I must have read it a dozen times before my appointment.
I’d never heard it before.
And it blew my mind.
Not because it was intellectually profound, but because no such idea had ever entered my world.
I turned the meaning over and over in my mind.
It was a complete contrast to the hopelessness I lived with — a life where nothing felt possible and the evidence of that impossibility showed up everywhere. Just has it had for my friend, Alison.
Suddenly this sentence suggested the opposite.
“If that’s what you think, you’re probably right.”
It confused me a little…
but on some deeper level, it connected.
Something in me recognised that thought alone might not change my life — but it could open a door.
When Dorsal Vagal Shutdown Defines Your Reality
It’s difficult to explain the dorsal vagal space to someone who has never experienced it.
How can you describe a world where everything feels limited?
Hopeless?
Where control is non-existent?
It’s like living in another dimension.
You can see with your physical eyes that joy, love and peace exist.
You can watch other people laughing, connecting, building lives.
But there is no comprehension of it… and absolutely no felt sense of it.
It belongs to them, not you.
It’s for other people in other lives.
When you’re in dorsal, your mind doesn’t say, “I’m limited because of my nervous system.”
It says, “I can’t. I never could. And I probably never will.”
Which is why motivational quotes — even the good ones — often feel like they’re written for someone else.
When Dorsal Vagal Shutdown Becomes Your World
Trying to describe the dorsal space to someone who hasn’t endured it is like trying to explain darkness to someone who has only ever known light – where do you begin?
People often describe nervous system states as emotional “modes,” but this one is far more than that.
Dorsal isn’t just a state — it’s a destination.
A world.
A landscape with its own rules, colours, textures, and gravity.
It is:
- dark
- dirty
- dank
- heavy
- hopeless
- frightening
- lonely
- disconnected
- isolating and distant
It is an internal world that becomes an external world.
Your entire existence — inside and outside — gets filtered through the same lens.
When you are in dorsal, you don’t simply feel limited.
Your environment becomes an expression of your internal collapse.
Your home might become disorganised, untidy, or even squalid.
Not because you don’t care — but because your life force is switched off.
Your space often mirrors your nervous system.
Your world becomes a visual map of your inner disconnection.
But the opposite can also be true — and it’s just as misunderstood.
Not everyone living in dorsal looks like they’re collapsing.
Some people have:
- money
- cars
- luxury
- a beautiful home
- impeccable grooming
- a curated lifestyle
- a polished persona
From the outside, it looks like success.
On the inside, it is chaos.
This is the height of persona — the desperate attempt to construct a perfect external world because the internal world feels unmanageable, unsafe, or in pieces.
For these individuals, the shutdown, numbness, and disconnection doesn’t show up in their environment.
It shows up in:
- their relationships
- their isolation
- their inability to feel joy
- their chronic over-functioning
- their exhaustion
- their sense of emptiness
- their collapse behind closed doors
Both experiences are expressions of the same internal landscape — the world of dorsal.
One is visible.
One is invisible.
Both are equally real.
Why this distinction matters
Professionals who have never lived in that landscape often misinterpret what they see.
If the outer world is chaotic, they judge the “mess.”
If the outer world is polished, they miss the suffering entirely.
But both are coping strategies.
Both are nervous system adaptations.
Both are attempts to survive a world that feels overwhelming or unreachable.
To understand the dorsal space is to see beyond the physical environment — whether that environment looks like collapse or looks like perfection — and into the inner world that shapes it.
It’s not laziness, dysfunction, or self-neglect.
And it’s not shallowness, vanity, or overachievement.
It’s survival.
A survival strategy expressed either through external disorder or external perfection.
And both deserve compassion, not judgment.
When Professionals Judge the Symptoms, Not the Landscape
This is where something vital gets missed — especially by professionals who have never lived in that terrain.
When someone shows up in a dorsal state, their environment often shows it too.
Not because they’re choosing it, but because their survival response has taken over.
Yet too often the external signs — the mess, the disorganisation, the shut-down — become the target of judgment.
Words like:
- “unmotivated”
- “chaotic”
- “neglectful”
- “unfit”
- “dysfunctional”
When your internal world is collapsing and professionals judge the outer expression of that collapse, it feels deeply unjust.
It feels like victim-blaming, because it is.
To understand the dorsal space is to see beyond the physical environment into the inner landscape — the one most people never see.
Dorsal creates a whole world, not just a feeling.
And when professionals misunderstand that, people already buried in collapse become buried further under shame.
Why “Choice” Isn’t the Whole Story
This is why the phrase “the limits of your life are the limits you choose” can feel both true and untrue at the same time.
It’s true in the sense that our beliefs shape our behaviour.
But it’s incomplete — and even unfair — without understanding how trauma alters the nervous system.
Your ability to “choose differently” is shaped by:
- your environment
- your internal state
- your past experiences
- your neuroception
- and your core beliefs formed in survival
Choice cannot override a dysregulated nervous system.
Thought cannot override immobilisation.
A positive affirmation cannot cancel out years of survival-based wiring.
Mindset is not the starting point — it’s the result.
This is why so many people read self-help books and feel nothing changes.
It’s not because they’re lazy or unmotivated.
It’s because they’re trying to use top-down tools to solve bottom-up conditions.
Bottom-Up Before Top-Down
We cannot think ourselves into healing.
We feel our way there.
From the bottom up.
The answers are not in the next book, the next program, or the next external teacher.
They’re inside us.
But they are buried under layers of survival strategies, protective patterns, and nervous system responses that developed for very good reasons.
When the body feels safe,
the mind becomes available.
When the nervous system is regulated,
possibility suddenly appears where hopelessness once lived.
When we are connected internally,
external wisdom finally makes sense.
This is why things only become relevant when we’re ready to receive them.
Not because the ideas weren’t valuable before…
but because we didn’t yet have access to them.
The Real Meaning Behind the Limits We “Choose”
So when I hear the phrase again — “the limits of your life are the limits you choose” — I interpret it through a trauma-informed lens.
Yes, our beliefs shape our direction.
Yes, internal narratives matter.
Yes, mindset plays a role.
But that mindset is shaped by:
- our history
- our nervous system
- our experiences
- and our capacity in the present moment
For someone in a regulated, supported state, choice feels empowering.
For someone in dorsal, it feels impossible — or worse, shaming.
And that distinction matters.
Because healing isn’t about forcing new thoughts.
It’s about creating the physiological conditions where new thoughts become available.
The Keys Were Never Outside
Dr Wayne Dyer’s metaphor stays with me.
We keep looking for our keys outside, even though we lost them inside.
Everything we’re searching for — safety, clarity, confidence, connection — is internal work.
Not the easy kind.
Not the overnight kind.
But the honest, compassionate, body-based kind.
And when the body shifts, the mind shifts.
That’s when the quotes land.
That’s when ideas resonate.
That’s when relevance appears.
That’s when possibility feels real.
Because the truth is this:
The limits of your life are not the limits you choose.
They’re the limits you’ve learned.
And learned limits can be rewired.
Not through self-help alone.
Not through positive thinking alone.
But through nervous system regulation, relational safety, truth, connection, and compassionate self-understanding.
In the end, the limits you “choose” are simply the limits you finally become free enough to see beyond.
And that freedom begins from the inside out
Alison’s Legacy Lives On
Today, in honour of her journey and her generosity, Alison’s reference library is available for our clients, students, and practitioners to borrow from. It stands as a reminder that while the answers ultimately live within us, sometimes a single sentence, a single book, or a single moment of connection can become the light that guides us home. Her library continues to support others on their path, and her legacy lives on in every person who finds comfort, insight, or curiosity within its pages.