On the lens you inherited, the beliefs you never chose, and the clarity that has always been waiting for you.

There is a moment working with patients that I remember most.

The exam room is dim. I would adjust the phoropter, that soft mechanical click,  and ask the patient to look through the oculars. We work through the lenses slowly, carefully. And then, after some trial and error, the right one drops into place.

Sometimes the person would lean forward slightly. Or maybe they’d laugh, a little surprised at themselves. Sometimes they would go completely quiet, and then say something like: “Oh. I didn’t know it could look like that.”

Every time, it was exciting.

They weren’t just experiencing clearer vision. They seemed to feel relief. And a sudden, visceral understanding.

“They hadn’t been failing to see. They’d just been given the wrong prescription.”

I’ve been thinking about that moment a lot lately and how it exists far beyond the exam room. Because I believe the same shift is possible in how we see ourselves, our relationships, our sense of self-worth, and the endless possibilities our futures hold.

Today’s episode, and this post, begin with a question:

What if the lens you’ve been using to see yourself was never actually yours?

The Prescription You Were Handed Instead

In optometry, a prescription is precise. It’s carefully tested individually against the specific anatomy of your eyes. Nobody hands a child a pair of glasses and says, “These were mine — they should work for you too.”

And yet, emotionally and psychologically, that is exactly what happens.

Before we have words for who we are, we are already being shaped. The emotional climate of the household we grew up in. What the adults around us modelled about women, self-worth, and what they believed they deserved.

These messages don’t arrive as lessons. They arrive as atmosphere. And over time, they become the glass through which we learn to see everything, including ourselves.

Most of us are still living by a prescription written for us before we were old enough to read it. And because we’ve worn it for so long, we’ve stopped noticing the lens is there. We don’t think: I’m seeing through a filter. We think: this is just how things are. This is just who I am.

Here is what I want to gently offer: those two things are not the same.

“We don’t decide what to believe about ourselves. We absorb it.”

My Prescription: The Lens I Inherited

I want to tell you about one of the lenses I was handed because I think it might feel familiar.

For a long time, one of my deepest operating beliefs was: I am responsible for making things okay for the people around me. My worth lives in how well I can hold things together.

This belief came to be as a way to survive. Learning early that certain feelings were too much for the room. And learning to be capable because that’s what I believed was needed at the time.

“I’m someone who copes. I’m practical. I don’t need much.”

Looking back, I wasn’t describing myself as I truly was. I was reciting the prescription I’d been given.

Then came a time when everything I’d held together fell apart. I went through a gut-wrenching divorce at age 30 that forced me to take a look at all of the beliefs that were holding me back.

The turning point wasn’t dramatic. It was a quiet question likely in a therapy session, or even possibly alone on a morning I’d rather forget:

Who told you that your worth depends on your capability?

I remember sitting with that for a long time. Because the honest answer was that nobody told me directly. It had just been in the air of my early life. And once I could see it as a prescription, something received, the grip of it began to loosen.

There was grief in that recognition. I felt waves of sadness for the strain of seeing through the wrong lens. But there was also, unexpectedly, relief. If I didn’t write this, I don’t have to keep living by it.

What the Wrong Prescription Does to You

In optometry, the cost of the wrong prescription isn’t just blur, it’s exhaustion. The eyes work harder to compensate. People sometimes get headaches, fatigue, and a grinding effort just to function. Living by a prescription that wasn’t made for you works exactly the same way.

The wrong inner prescription has the power to produce:

Chronic self-doubt.  Because you were taught your judgment wasn’t trustworthy.

People-pleasing and over-giving.  Not generosity, but a belief that your worth must be earned in every interaction.

Fear of visibility.  If you learned that being seen led to criticism or rejection, being seen still feels like danger.

The imposter experience.  Achievement that never quite lands, because the internal lens filters out the evidence that you are capable.

I want to tell you about a client. I’ll call her Claire.

Claire arrived accomplished, organized, and completely exhausted. By every external measure, she was succeeding. But internally, she described a constant, low hum of anxiety, a voice that narrated her life.

She said something to me early in our work together that I’ve thought about often.

“I think I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to tell me I’m deserving to have what I truly want.”

It was as though permission needed to come from somewhere outside herself. Because the prescription she’d been given had never included the chapter on inherent worth. Nobody had given her that lens. So she kept straining and compensating.

The Exam Nobody Offered — The New Lens Method™

When a patient came to see me and sat down, I didn’t hand them a prescription and tell them to get on with it. We did an examination. We’d test what’s working. We adjust in small increments until things come into focus.

That is what most of us have never had: a careful, patient examination of the lens we’ve been using to see ourselves. What I’d like to offer you now is a version of that exam — applied inward. This is The New Lens Method™.

Step One: Sit in the Chair

Before anything can change, you have to be willing to look at what you are actually seeing. Not what you wish you saw. What you genuinely experience.

The beliefs that quietly govern your decisions. The stories that run in the background:

“I can’t trust my own instincts.”

“I have to be perfect to be acceptable.”

“It’s safer not to want too much.”

Name them. Write them down if that helps. Say them aloud. Naming is the beginning of examination.

Step Two: Identify the Prescription

Ask the most important question: where did I get this lens?

Not as blame, but more as archaeology. With curiosity, not accusation. Was it a parent’s fear? A culture’s expectation? An early heartbreak that taught you something about your worth? A survival pattern that once protected you – being invisible, being indispensable, being perfect – that has now outgrown its purpose?

Research Note — The Adaptive Self Physician and trauma researcher Dr. Gabor Maté writes that our deepest coping patterns do not develop by accident. They form in response to environments that made them necessary. The prescription made sense once. The question is whether it still does. Source: Maté, G. — The Myth of Normal (2022)

Step Three: Test the Lens

In the exam chair, the question is: Is this helping you see? The inner version is: is this belief helping me live the life I want, or is it costing me something?

This is the step most people skip because questioning the prescription can feel like groundlessness. If I’m not the person this lens says I am, who am I?

That question is not a threat. It’s an opening.

Step Four: Receive the New Prescription

Not affirmations or performance of positivity. A truer view. One built on evidence, on values, on the reality of who you actually are — not who you were told to be.

Ask: What would I believe about myself if I had been given a different early prescription? Then, what do I actually know to be true when the old lens isn’t in the way?

Research Note — Narrative Therapy Therapists Michael White and David Epston developed the idea that we are not our problems — we are the authors of our stories. The goal of narrative therapy isn’t to deny the old story. It’s to develop a richer one, with more evidence, more complexity, and more truth. Source: White, M. & Epston, D. — Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1990)

Claire didn’t transform overnight. But she began to do something quietly radical: she started questioning the verdict before accepting it. Am I really not allowed to move in the direction of what I want? Or is that just an old prescription talking?

The last time I spoke with her, she said something I’ll remember.

“I think I’ve stopped waiting for permission. I think I’m starting to give it to myself.”

Your Inner Exam

I’d like to leave you with five questions to think about:

REFLECTION QUESTIONS 1.  What do you currently believe about your own worth — not what you know intellectually, but what you feel in your body when things get hard? 2.  Where did that belief come from? Not you — but the world that shaped you before you had a choice. 3.  What has believing this cost you? In energy, in opportunity, in the version of yourself you’ve held back? 4.  Is this prescription still working for the woman you are now — or is it written for someone you’ve already outgrown? 5.  If you were given the right prescription today — one that saw you accurately, generously, truly — what would it say?

You don’t have to believe it yet. Just let it exist as a possibility. That last question is the beginning of the new lens.

The Prescription Has Always Been Available

This week, I want to invite you to notice one moment when the old lens is speaking. And try not to fight it or analyze it. Just try saying, quietly, to yourself:

“That’s an old prescription. It wasn’t written for who I am now.”

That one small act of recognition is where the new lens begins.