I Knew Better, and I Did It Anyway

The Wheel Was Never Weak

Every decision I've made — even the ones I look back on and wish I hadn't — I made consciously. I was the one holding the wheel. On some level, I knew what I was doing.

But maybe the wheel itself was never that strong to begin with.

The Path I Knew I Shouldn't Take

There was a time I stayed on a relationship path I knew wasn't right. My intuition was telling me not to. People I trusted, people who loved me, saw the red flags and told me so directly. I saw the same flags they did.

I stayed anyway.

So where was my free will in that moment?

Twelve Years With Families, and a Few Years Finding Myself

I've spent twelve years working with families and children's nervous systems. But the last several years have been a different kind of work — my own search for who I actually am underneath everything I built myself to be, and what my soul is here to do.

Those years were pivotal. This is part of why I'm writing and speaking now — so that someone else can find themselves a little faster than I did.

I'm not speaking to you only as a nervous system specialist. I'm speaking as someone who went into the dark. Who lost everything — I mean everything. Who had to start over from close to nothing. A real collapse, before any kind of rebirth.

It was from *that* place — not from my training — that I started seeing patterns in other people I hadn't been able to see before. The clinical work gave me the hands to do this work. My own collapse gave me the understanding underneath the hands.

What Actually Happens in the Body

Here's the part that changed how I understand free will.

In a trauma state — fight, flight, freeze — something happens that isn't only emotional. It's physical. Your capacity to think clearly, to weigh your options, to access the part of you that plans ahead and sees consequences — it narrows. Sometimes it shuts down almost completely.

The part of the brain that sees clearly goes quiet. Unreachable. Meanwhile, the part of you still carrying old wounds, old suppression, old burnout — that part is running the show. Your nervous system is in distress, looping, unable to settle, even while you're doing everything you know how to do to calm it down.

If that state never gets addressed — deeply, and in a way that actually lasts — the thinking mind never really gets the chance to grow up and take the wheel back.

There are people who have written seriously about this from a purely philosophical angle — Spinoza, centuries ago, described how we become freer the more we understand *why* we feel and act the way we do, rather than just reacting to whatever's in front of us. More recently, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt argued that real freedom isn't about whether a desire was caused by something — it's about whether you actually recognize yourself in the desire you're acting on. I find both of those true as far as they go. But I don't think either one goes far enough, because both treat this as something you can think or reflect your way out of. In my own experience, that's not what got me out. The body has to come out of survival mode first. Regulation has to come before insight is even reachable.

It's Not Just the Mind That Goes Quiet

Here's what I've come to believe is the real heart of it: it isn't only the reasoning mind that gets buried under all of this. The soul does too. Your intuition, your inner knowing, whatever name feels true to you for it — it doesn't disappear. It gets covered over the exact same way the thinking mind does.

Two things get buried together: the mind that reasons, and the soul that already knows.

That's the real reason the wheel goes weak. Not just clouded thinking — but the part of you that was trying to warn you, that already knew, the way mine was trying to warn me on that relationship path, getting buried right along with everything else.

So What Does Free Will Actually Mean?

I don't think that question resolves in one sitting, for me or for anyone. But I think it starts with a much simpler one:

Where is my nervous system right now, in this season of my life? Am I holding the wheel and steering — or am I looking straight into fog?

That's not a question with a clean answer. It's an invitation — to reflection, to stillness, to actually noticing where you are instead of assuming you already know.

That's where I'm starting. I'd love for you to sit with it too.

With love and light,

Hela