Matt's Audio Letter of the Week

Hey everyone, and welcome to this week’s FBL, or Feel Better Letter.

This is Matt—hope you’re all having a great week.

The message for today is simple: healing begins when the war ends.

Think about a war—two countries, tribes, or people in conflict. There’s no way healing can happen until the battle subsides.

The same holds true within ourselves. We can’t heal and simultaneously be at war with ourselves. We can’t heal while fighting ourselves.

And what do I mean by fighting? Fighting is resistance. It’s the constant battle to get rid of, change, or control what we’re feeling—to not accept what is. It’s everything we do to escape anxiety, push away intrusive thoughts, or analyze whether they’re still there. It’s seeing our inner experience as the enemy.

Interestingly, the battle—the resistance itself—is often the very thing preventing healing. Most people think that fighting means they’re “not giving up,” that they’re trying to heal. But paradoxically, that battle keeps the wound open.

That’s why one of the key foundational principles we talk about inside TBC (Taking Back Control) is that almost everything on this journey is a paradox.

The more you try to stop having intrusive thoughts, the more you’ll have them.
The more you try not to feel anxiety, the more you’ll feel it.
The more you try to make healing happen quickly, the longer it will take.

If you understand these paradoxes, you can reverse-engineer them to find the truth:
Don’t put a time limit on your healing.
Don’t make healing about getting rid of thoughts or feelings.

And maybe—just maybe—the very thing you thought was the disease or the problem is actually the healing process itself.

The central message I want to stress this week is that healing can only begin when the war truly ends.

As J.K. Rowling once said, “Once you truly accept something, then—and only then—can it change.”

Sometimes we’ve been at war with ourselves for so long that we don’t even realize it. The battle becomes familiar. We don’t know another way. I can totally relate to that—it’s like we’ve been fighting for so long that we can’t even imagine doing anything different.

That’s why recovery—breaking out of the loop—is not about trying harder. It’s not about willpower or grinding your way through it. Those things are glamorized in modern culture, but they don’t lead to healing.

If working harder were the answer, most of you would already be better.
Just like working multiple jobs doesn’t automatically make someone wealthy.

Healing isn’t about force—it’s about recontextualization, embodiment, and taking a completely different path than the one your mind believes is right.

It’s about shifting paradigms.

So, with that, I hope this message lands with you. It’s a simple but powerful reminder: the war has to end for the healing to begin.

If this resonates, I’d encourage you to fill out an application for TBC.

Wishing you all a great week.