As far as I remember, it was a cold autumn or winter day. I walked down the street and physically, through my skin, I felt my own insignificance. 2nd place. Just the second one. I'm not the first. I am nobody. I took second place at the regional Russian language Olympiad. After that I stopped writing. Absolutely. At all. From the word absolutely. My compositions at school and lyceums were works by modern authors, poets, and performers unknown to teachers. Not a single word of your own. It is too insignificant, it is worth nothing. And all these years I was jealous. I was jealous of my best friend, about whom for some reason I remembered that it was she who won that Olympics. When I saw that she entered the Literary Institute, became a writer, and began teaching literary arts, my envy only intensified. But I didn't realize it. I retrained, changed my profession, went into scientific, academic literature and almost completely forgot what the beauty of the sound of a metaphor, the living flow of words, the taste and aroma of a literary text are. I remembered this experience by chance when I was trying to deal with the perfectionism that was blocking me. When I was faced with a choice: either I still write and submit my scientific work, or I will be expelled from the university. It was no longer possible to avoid and procrastinate further. I faced that experience, resolved it, fully accepted it and let it go. Wrote and defended the work. Gradually I began to taste words again. And recently my friend and I met. And in the space of conversation, saturated with the creamy breath of cappuccino, it turned out that all these years I had been jealous of something unknown. She had fourth place. A year later than me. For me, this is a story about how the experience recorded in our memory may not correspond to reality at all. That different people remember things differently. One person may talk about the event as a coping experience—joyful and empowering. The other is like a deep trauma. Everything we remember is refracted through the prism of our perception, our personality. When a person comes to my therapy, we work not with the experience itself, but with the person’s memory of this experience, with his perception of the experience. In the present we are traumatized, blocked, paralyzed not by real experience, we are traumatized by our memory of it. And since this is our memory, since we own it, since it is in the sphere of our responsibility, we can control it, manage it. The fact of history is in the past. And memories and experiences, emotions, tears, envy, pain are in the present. If I came to therapy myself, I would figure out who I envy and why exactly. It would turn out that I feel inferior, unworthy of either love or the right to live, if I am not the first, if I am not the best. When else have I felt like this? What kind of experience was this – most often a child’s one? Often my task is to lead a person to an experience where he received knowledge that is now so disturbing to him. Where did it all start? And in what experiments is this knowledge reproduced now? Why is it so important to be the best, otherwise - collapse and shame? Where does the red light come on? What happens next? We can reduce the charge, that is, reduce the suffering. We can completely remove the emotional attachment to the past. We can create alternative neural circuits - read: behavioral scenarios - by reliving the experience in a new way, on a qualitatively different level. And not just a little, speculatively - but 100%, for real, and to the ideal (10 out of 10) option. We can satisfy that need that was not satisfied in the past, and for the satisfaction of which “someday” the psyche “reserved and hid for itself” part of our energy, we remove the state of bummer and frustration in which a person lives for years. This way, long-term tension subsides, the cycle of trauma reproduction stops, and energy is released. And the man exhales: - Let go. Friends, my main account is now on Telegram https://t.me/anastasiaaverburg (@anastasiaaverburg). New articles, reflections and notes appear there,).