How to Know What Your Suffering Was For

Your pain was writing something in you that nothing else could. Here is how to read it.

**Note: This piece draws from my original ideas, research, hooks, and metaphors. For editing and some wording, I’ve used AI tools trained on my own books and style, always blending technology with my hands-on curation and oversight. Thank you for being here—Jade.

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Imagine you want to do something. Something simple, like buy a car.

You’re pumping gas and this beautiful car pulls up. You don’t normally notice cars, but for some reason, on this day, you do. A red BMW. The person driving it has that right combination of comfortable, cool, and charismatic. The car just seems like the perfect match. You start considering it.

Here is where identity comes in.

You don’t just get to choose the car you drive. Your identity... most specifically the identity that concerns itself with self-image... checks it first. It asks: am I the kind of person who drives a BMW? Is red my color? Another identity, the one concerned with money and safety, jumps in: can I afford this car? Right here, the dream of the red BMW can get shut down immediately. Or maybe another identity peeks through and says we should spoil ourselves... or let’s become someone new.

All of this is going on behind the scenes. Very little of it is conscious to you. It runs in the default mode network of the brain (the DMN)... the network that holds your self-concept and self-referential thinking.

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The spotlight comes on

If the red BMW makes it through the identity layer, the salience network kicks in. Suddenly, as if by magic, BMWs start showing up everywhere. A surprising number of them are red. You may even notice your next-door neighbor has one. You did not magically make these appear. Your identity structures passed the car along and told the brain: this may be part of who we are... pay attention to it. A spotlight effect.

From there it gets handed to your attention networks, and now you’re really thinking about this car. You imagine yourself driving it. You spec it out on the internet. You mention it to your spouse. Finally the executive control network gets passed the baton, and it starts pushing you into action. You plan your finances. You call the dealership. You take a test drive. Next thing you know, you’re driving the car.

Simple, right?

Not so fast. It always seems simple after the fact. But that first step... the identity check... controls absolutely everything. If your identity structures can’t see it, can’t believe it, can’t feel it, you are dead in the water. No car.

(Quick honesty note: the brain-network story I just told you is a simplification... the brain is messier than any diagram. The sequence holds up as a teaching model, and the method below works either way.)

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Why the diet fails

If you understand that example, you now understand why the person trying to eat better and get in shape fails. The food and the exercise are the red BMW, and the identity underneath says NOPE. That is not us.

Now you can learn all you want about diet and exercise. You can read every book and watch every documentary. You may even know more than your doctor. But knowing is not doing, and doing is definitely not being. Same goes for changing your anxious attachment style, altering your money mindset, getting over your father wound. And all the rest.

Information, habits, and behaviors are downstream of identity. They live in other areas of the brain. Identity lives in the DMN and is locked in by the amygdala (the emotional center) and the habenula (the failure center). You have a story about who you are and how the world works, and that story is seared into your nervous system like a hot brand.

If you want to transform any part of your life, trying to use learning and habits to do it is a little like trying to change a car tire with a pencil. Wrong tool for the job.

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Wet cement and steel rebar

So you might think it’s pointless. It is not. Stories can be rewritten. You just never learned how... and if you’re a coach or practitioner, you never learned it in your training either. You were trained to teach information, deliver accountability, hand out tips and tricks and tools and habits. But if those don’t match the identity of the person you’re working with, they bounce right off... like a golf ball on pavement.

Here is how the story gets written in the first place. The story that drives identity was created a long time ago. We call these MUD... misguided unconscious decisions. Misguided, because when you wrote the story you did not have the maturity, know-how, wisdom, skills, or understanding to make sense of what was happening. You were a child, a teen, a young adult. Or maybe it was a health crisis, a betrayal, a financial collapse... there are things in life even adults are not equipped to understand. Unconscious, because you don’t realize the story is there. Decisions, because even though you don’t remember it, you did choose to see yourself and the world this way.

MUD mostly gets written during sudden or severe emotional events. Some people carry heavy trauma, some lesser. Either way it sticks. It also gets written during subtle, continuous emotional events... the parent who constantly tells you you’re lazy, the sibling who constantly undermines you. The emotions that come with these events amplify the story.

And this is where identity forms. A story plus an emotion becomes a belief. A set of beliefs becomes an identity. A set of identities (yes, you have more than one... the goofy self, the disciplined self, the jealous self, the industrious self, the introverted self) becomes a personality. And a personality creates a holding pattern... a perceptual filter about how safe the world is, whether you are worthy or not, whether you get to exercise freedom and autonomy. All of it seeps into the mindset and the metabolism. If you can’t rewrite the story, you can’t change.

Now think of the story... the MUD... as wet cement that set long ago. Think of the emotional charge attached to it as steel rebar running through the slab. That cement and that rebar form the belief structure that must be moved if you hope to change. If you want the red BMW, you have to believe it fits, believe you can afford it, believe you look good in red. All your identities have to agree. If they don’t, you won’t.

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How you rewrite a story

The way we do this at Next Level Human starts with a pattern. We find a pattern in the person and trace it back to a memory, an emotion, a bodily sensation, a historical time (childhood, the teenage years, right after the betrayal)... we can even use a body part or an illness. All of these are subconscious entry points. Think of them as different doorways into the same room. We train practitioners to spot the pattern, the problem attached to it, and the story-emotion complex feeding both.

Then you learn how to heat the structure... to make the cement mud again so the whole mental-emotional shape can move. The method involves stimulating the sympathetic nervous system while engaging the emotion, then treating that material like a friend... something you can engage with, talk to, and learn from. The technique looks a lot like things you may have heard of. Parts work? A bit. Hypnosis? A dash. Coherence therapy? Yes, some. Somatic work? A little. It is all of these and something more, and what makes it unique is the way we stimulate the nervous system and deliberately heat the emotion.

We don’t want the client to feel good at first. We want to put them in the fire of the story... to reignite the pain, the emotion, the hurt... and look at it differently. That “looking at it differently” is set up before the process is triggered. The goal is genuine prediction error in the mental-emotional body: “This usually wrecks me. Instead, I am disconnected from it in a way I never imagined I could be.”

That is the rewrite... the first step of the three-step process we call rewrite, rewire, retrain.

Once the old story is up and being held in that contradictory way, we calm the body and bring in counter-emotions... appreciation, surrender, trust, gratitude, love. This creates another prediction error: “I am not supposed to feel this way when I think about this.” At this stage we drop into theta brain-wave states... the hypnagogic state... and let the new story marinate in the new emotion. The cement-and-rebar structure bends and takes a new shape. And the physical mechanism here is not the slow Hebbian grind of practice, not neurons-that-fire-together-wire-together. It is protein-based: the synaptic proteins holding the old memory are stripped off and rebuilt... what the science calls a reconsolidation event. Doing the rewriting and rewiring in this specific way makes the change more assured and more reliable.

Finally... retrain. We ask the client to go do something indicative of the new belief within the next several hours, while the window of change is still open.

And what happens? What do you hear? “Oh my gosh, I just don’t see food the same... the cravings are gone.” “My jealousy is just... gone. I’m not anxious.” “My habit of spending when I’m stressed has completely changed. I can’t explain it.”

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Watch it happen

Don’t take my word for any of this. I published a real session... a real client, his face and voice changed to protect him, working on the belief “I’m not good enough.” You can watch the story surface, get contradicted, and start to rewrite. On camera, in minutes.

As you watch, notice what I am NOT doing. No information. No habit plan. No calming him down and sending him home. The change happens in the story he is living inside, and you can see the moment it moves.

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The wrong tool was never your fault

If you have failed at change over and over, it was never a discipline problem. You were handed information and habits... a pencil... and told to change a tire with it. The story underneath was never touched, so it kept winning. It always will, until it’s rewritten.

This is what a Next Level Human Architect learns to do... in large group classes, in group coaching, and one on one. It is not information coaching. It is not habit coaching. It is identity coaching.

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What your suffering was for

Now I need to tell you the part that matters more than the technique. The rewrite is not what makes our best practitioners the best. What makes them the best is this: they take the thing that broke them… the thing they still wrestle with… their earned wisdom… and they bring it into the room.

Because for this rewrite to happen in the person across from you, it has to have happened in you. You have already written a story like theirs. You have confronted it, or you are in the middle of confronting it right now. And that is exactly what makes you the one who can prime another person to not just see their story but hold it, mine it, and look at it differently. You hold the charge of that understanding. That resonance, paired with the technique, is what changes people. Only you can change people in the way you can change them.

So if you have ever asked what your suffering was for… this is the answer I can offer. It was writing the half of this work that cannot be taught. No training on earth can put lived pain into a person, and lived pain that has been faced is the most valuable thing anyone in this work carries. You have that half already. The other half… the technique, the method, the craft of the rewrite… that half we teach.

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I’m looking for the next Next Level Human coaches

Now I want to invite you. I am looking for the next batch of coaches for Next Level Human. We take ten people into The Architect each month, because I work closely with every cohort... and this month is now open.

If you read this piece and something in you said “this is the work I am supposed to be doing”... I want to talk to you. It does not matter whether you have never coached a single person, or whether you are already a clinician, a coach, a counselor, a nurse, a trainer with a full practice. The training meets you where you are. What cannot be trained is the thing you already have: your life. There has never been another you. There never will be. The wounds you have carried, the work you have done on them, the strange specific road you have walked... those prepared you to reach people no one else can reach. Including me. That is the entire reason this program exists, and it is why we need you doing this work.

To apply, answer three questions and send them straight to me:

1. What are you working on within yourself?

2. What do you want to help the world cure?

3. Why is coaching work calling to you now?

There are no right answers. I read every application myself. Email your answers to support@nextlevelhuman.com, or text or WhatsApp them to me at 520-504-0001. If it feels like a fit, we will talk, and I will send you everything.