ISSUE

Jan-Willem Dikkers

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SOCIETY & CULTURE

ISSUE explores awareness, emotion, and integrity — how we stay connected to what’s real in a culture built on distraction. The episodes grow from themes that surface in therapy, dialogue, and reading, through the use of emerging creative technologies.

12/26/2025

When Empathy Triggers Flashbacks

We explores the delicate transition where healthy compassion degrades into enmeshment, a state where a person loses their own identity within another’s suffering. When an individual lacks a grounded container, they may experience an emotional flashback, mistakenly perceiving someone else’s trauma as their own unresolved internal wounds. To prevent this collapse of the witness position, one must prioritize nervous system re-regulation over logical analysis to distinguish between shared resonance and personal absorption. Ultimately, it's practiced awareness that allows someone to remain present and supportive without disappearing into a vortex of shared pain.

10 min
12/24/2025

What’s Blocking Your Aliveness

We explore how social pressure often forces individuals to trade their authentic passion for cultural approval, leading to a life lived through the lens of external expectations. By recognizing that most advice is merely a reflection of the giver's own unconscious programming, one can stop seeking validation and instead begin listening inwardly to find true alignment. We discuss how pursuing what genuinely "lights you up" creates an energetic clarity that naturally distinguishes you from others, effectively eliminating competition by placing you on a singular, uncrowded path. Ultimately, the work serves as a call to prioritize personal resonance over status, suggesting that returning to oneself is the only way to achieve a success that feels meaningful.

10 min
12/17/2025

Weekly Update 12/17

This week, a recurring theme is how easily anxiety and overwhelm escalate when the body is already stretched thin. Sleep disruption, health stress, and performance pressure amplify emotional reactions before anyone realizes what’s happening. Across sessions, there’s a growing recognition that insight alone doesn’t regulate the nervous system. Pushing for clarity, resolution, or productivity often increases distress rather than relieving it. Practical tools like slowing the pace, naming internal states, and tending to basic physiological needs come into sharper focus. Emotions such as anger, anxiety, and grief are being reconsidered—not as problems to eliminate, but signals to understand. Several breakthroughs emerge when limits are acknowledged without self-blame, and when everyday moments unexpectedly reveal deeper patterns. Which of these themes speaks to you most right now? Share your thoughts below.

15 min
12/13/2025

The Man in the Sky

We explore the exhaustion inherent in clinging to traditional, flawed concepts of God—such as the punitive judge or the cosmic vending machine—which fail to align with observable reality and ultimately intensify suffering. Many coping mechanisms, from addiction to people-pleasing, follow a destructive Pattern where the thing used for relief becomes the new source of anxiety. We propose redefining God not as an anthropomorphic being, but as the fundamental nature of existence itself and the lawful structure of reality. True faith is then redefined as the capacity for acceptance—the willingness to remain present with reality as it is, even in the face of pain, which ultimately frees individuals from the exhausting resistance that differentiates pain from self-inflicted suffering.

40 min
12/13/2025

The Man in the Sky: Addendum

As an addendum to "The Man in the Sky", we offer practical triage for readers struggling with concepts like acceptance in the face of suffering. Individuals facing hardship are "actively on fire," attempting to evaluate life's value while overwhelmed by pain and destructive coping mechanisms. True suffering arises from unavoidable pain plus resistance, and the exhaustion felt by many comes from "fighting life," not life itself. We outline three states—crisis, the "Good Enough" trap of functional numbing, and preference—and describe the ten-second pause as a core practice for those in the trap, emphasizing that effective change requires seeing what one is avoiding before making a true assessment of life's worth.

12 min
12/12/2025

How Overwhelm Can Guide

We challenge the common view of emotional overwhelm as purely a sign of dysfunction or instability. Instead, we propose that intense feelings, particularly those related to mortality, grief, or loss, often serve as profound indicators of personal values and care. Allowing the body to experience this "flood" of emotion—which may manifest as crying or trembling—is not a sign of pathology but rather a functional, necessary response that provides clarity about what truly matters. By honoring this sensitivity instead of immediately shutting it down for the sake of functionality, individuals can gain deeper self-understanding and reconnect with essential human experiences. Managing strong feelings means engaging with them to learn the truth they hold, rather than just attempting to control or eliminate them.

11 min
12/06/2025

Weekly Update 12/06

This week’s sessions echoed a deep tension: the fear that our needs might push others away. Clients shared how quickly self-doubt or shame can take over, especially when trying to navigate closeness without losing themselves. But again and again, we saw how slowing down created room for clarity. Shame softened. Breath returned. And the voice that says “you’'re too much” was met with something quieter: “you’re here.” Just that. Body awareness, internal dialogues, and visual imagery helped surface truths that had been buried under urgency. And many discovered that wanting closeness doesn’t have to mean collapse. Which of these themes speaks to you most right now? Share your thoughts below.

16 min
12/03/2025

People-Pleasing Survival Strategy

We explore how compulsive generosity originates as a survival strategy learned early in life, often in dysfunctional families, where giving was transactional and required to gain safety or validation. This deeply ingrained pattern becomes a "template" in adulthood, leading the individual to attract relationships and partners with insatiable needs, resulting in sustained emotional exploitation and self-erasure rather than true connection. We identify this compulsive giving as acting like an addiction, offering a temporary sense of control and relief while relentlessly depleting the individual and preventing them from being genuinely seen or valued. The ultimate therapeutic insight is the recognition that external giving cannot fill an internal void or fix another person’s dysregulation, making the pattern the very thing that costs the individual the peace and connection it promises.

11 min

ISSUE explores awareness, emotion, and integrity — how we stay connected to what’s real in a culture built on distraction. The episodes grow from themes that surface in therapy, dialogue, and reading, through the use of emerging creative technologies.

Creator

Jan-Willem Dikkers
Years Active

2K
Episodes

34
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© 2025 ISSUE INC.
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