So today we're going to talk about the seven things that 24 years of experience and thousands of people have taught me and why almost all of them were living some version of the same life.
You've said sorry when it was not your fault.
You have felt responsible for how everyone else feels.
You've looked fine on the outside while inside you were tired,
You were overwhelmed,
And you felt powerless.
Now,
If any of that is you,
Stick with me.
Hi,
I'm Lisa A.
Romano,
The Breakthrough Life Coach,
And for over 24 years,
I've helped thousands of adult children of dysfunction learn to self-heal from codependency and break free from narcissistic abuse.
One question before we start,
And I will come back to it at the end.
Who are you when nobody needs anything from you?
Hold on to that.
Number one,
It was never you.
It was just your programming.
Now,
The thing no one tells you about growing up in a dysfunctional home is that it fundamentally alters how you view yourself at a neurological level.
How you view yourself becomes what I refer to as your operating system.
This operating system is quietly running in the background of your life at the subconscious level.
Now,
Think of it like being dropped inside a video game.
You never chose the main character.
You were giving default stats you did not ask for,
Codes that you had to play out.
Levels that you had to achieve,
And you were forced to play the game anyway.
If this clicks for you,
A lifetime of shame can begin to melt away.
Think of this.
By the time you were born,
The system was already operational.
Your parents and your environment,
They had rules in place,
And you were plunked right into them.
Here is how that programming actually gets installed in your brain.
As a child,
Your nervous system learns through repetition and observation.
These are things that happen over and over and over.
What you observe,
Consistently wires your neural pathways.
Now when a thought or emotional state repeats day after day,
Your brain builds a dedicated neural network for that experience.
Over time that network becomes part of your default mode network.
Don't believe me?
Look it up.
That is the brain circuit active when you are not consciously focusing on a task.
Eventually,
The thoughts you used to think start thinking you.
They're automatic now.
I saw this firsthand in my own home.
My mother was harsh and extremely critical,
But I watched her instantly shift her mood the moment my father walked in the door or a neighbor stopped by or the phone rang.
In an instant,
The tension vanished and a pleasant mask went on.
And as a child,
My brain took notes.
I learned that safety meant pretending.
It meant stuffing.
I learned that my true feelings were dangerous,
That performance was required for survival,
And that I had to live in fear of being my authentic self.
Something about emotions was bad and her hyper-vigilance about public perception became like an internal code.
I was programmed to worry constantly about what other people thought of me by watching her.
And that is how it shows up in your adult life today.
This is one of the reasons that we shape-shift our personality depending on who is entering the room.
Or this is why we monitor everyone else's mood to help us decide whether or not we are safe.
Or it might be why we over-function because showing up as our true self feels like a threat.
It took me a long time to realize this was not a character flaw,
It was survival wiring.
Now here is one small shift that you can make today to start breaking this program and this pattern.
Practice the five second pause before you react.
So when the phone rings,
When someone knocks at the door,
Or a person enters the room,
Just deliberately take a deep breath and pause for five seconds.
Check in with your body before you adjust your face,
Before you change your voice,
Or you fix your posture.
Notice the impulse to perform.
Take a deep breath and stay in your own body.
And remember,
You're no longer a little child who needs to pretend just to stay safe.
Here's number two.
You did not choose your role.
You were handed one.
Now let us go back to the video game analogy.
My son and daughter-in-law recently had a beautiful baby girl.
Now,
What we want to understand is that she inherited their genes and right now her brain is being programmed for their way of life.
What she eats,
When she sleeps,
How her parents handle stress,
How they value money,
How they feel about change,
All of it is being coded into her system right in front of my eyes and their eyes.
They just don't know it yet.
My baby granddaughter is currently learning about trust versus mistrust.
Can she trust that when she cries my son and his wife will tend to her?
Can she trust that when she is hungry she's going to be fed?
Does she feel utterly connected to her environment,
To the people caring for her?
Does she feel safe?
When a child's needs are met consistently,
The brain's neurological pathways wire for safety,
Connection,
And trust.
From a neuropsychological perspective,
Early caregiving shapes the developing nervous system.
When a child feels seen and valued,
The brain builds strong neural pathways for secure attachment and self-regulation.
If her parents instill in her the foundational truth that she is enough,
She will not grow up looking to others to validate her or complete her existence.
Having felt seen and worthy of nurturing,
She will not internally collapse at the threat of a loss of a friendship or a breakup with the loss of a job.
She will roll through life taking the ups with the downs as a natural ebb and flow.
Oceans are calm and still one day and they are raging and dangerous oceans another day.
That is just the rhythm of life.
The role my granddaughter will play is one of self-love,
Marked by self-respect,
Reliance,
And self-efficacy.
However,
For a child raised to feel unworthy of nurturing,
The brain wires for a very different reality,
And that is not anyone's fault.
When emotional neglect or unpredictable caregiving occurs,
The nervous system stays locked in survival mode.
The brain's alarm center,
The amygdala,
Fires repeatedly swimming in stress hormones.
Now,
Instead of wiring for trust,
The neural pathways wire for hypervigilance and self-preservation.
The role that child is handed results in self-loathing,
Self-sabotage,
Lack,
And scarcity.
Look at the most common roles handed to children in dysfunctional homes.
The peacekeeper and the over-functioner.
If this is you,
You manage everyone else's feelings,
You fix every problem,
And you abandon your own needs because your childhood brain learned that keeping the peace was the only way to stay safe.
If this is you,
You carry the blame for the family's stress,
Internalizing the belief that you are fundamentally broken or you are the cause of everyone else's distress.
The invisible one.
If this is you,
You minimize yourself.
You hide your feelings and stay under the radar because drawing attention felt dangerous.
As a child,
I was hypervigilant.
I feared making friends because I worried that if they got too close,
They would see whatever my mother saw in me,
Even though I wasn't sure what she saw.
And they would eventually punish me or neglect me.
That was a program.
And I learned that it felt safer to stay alone.
That was a program.
Now,
Here's the truth you need to hear.
You did not choose that role.
It was installed in you.
You absorbed it.
Because your brain possesses neuroplasticity,
The ability to prune old pathways and build new ones,
You are not stuck in that forever.
That's what I eventually learned.
One small way out is to begin practicing micro-validation.
The moment you feel that old hypervigilance flare up,
When you feel the urge to isolate or perform or keep the peace at your own expense,
Simply pause,
Put your hand over your heart,
Take a slow deep breath and whisper to yourself,
I see you feeling scared right now.
You are safe with me and we do not have to hide anymore.
In that single second you step out of the character you were handed and you take back the steering wheel.
Number three,
What you assume is your personality you built to stay safe.
When people carry unhealed childhood trauma,
They often fiercely defend the very behavior that were once tied to their survival.
What you have believed to be your core personality traits are often not your true nature at all,
But an adaptive survival mechanism.
Because these traits developed as coping strategies to protect you from emotional danger,
Rejection,
Neglect,
Your nervous system perceives giving them up as an absolute threat to your safety.
Look at the traits people defend the hardest.
This is what I've noticed.
First,
It's the hyper-independence.
You say you do not need anyone else's help and that you do everything for yourself because no one else can do it right.
But as a child,
Depending on caregivers meant being let down,
Neglected,
Hurt,
Or being labeled a burden.
From a neuropsychological perspective,
This is a deep attachment defense.
When early caregivers are unreliable,
Your brain's threat network,
Driven by the amygdala,
Associates vulnerability with physical danger.
Hyperindependence is your nervous system keeping you locked in a perpetual fight-or-flight state where safety only exists when you maintain absolute control.
Second,
Taking care of abusive or dysfunctional others.
You stay to help them,
To fix them,
Or shield them because you are compassionate and you see their potential.
You can't let go.
But in childhood,
Taking care of an unstable,
Abusive,
Or addictive parent was how you managed to threaten your environment.
Now,
Neuropsychologically,
This is known as the fawn response.
When a child cannot fight or run away from an abusive caregiver,
The brain releases bonding hormones to force alignment with the aggressor.
This is you buffering potential punishment.
You learn to appease and manage their mood because your brain registered their emotional state as your personal safety.
So you defend taking care of toxic adults today because your brain still believes that abandoning them will lead to your own destruction.
Over-functioning and people-pleasing.
You consider yourself just a good,
Caring person,
Or you see yourself as an empath who loves helping others and putting everyone else first.
But in childhood,
Managing a parent's emotions or keeping the peace was the key to avoiding conflict,
Rage,
Or emotional abandonment.
Neuropsychologically,
Your mirror neuron system became hyper-tuned to read subtle shifts in other people's micro-expressions,
Their posture,
And even their tone of voice.
Your brain learned that anticipating their needs was the fastest way to down-regulate their distress before it turned on you.
Now defending this trait keeps you from having to look at the underlying fear that if you stop serving others,
You will not be loved or valued.
Fourth,
Perfectionism.
You say you just have high standards,
That details matter,
And that excellence is absolutely important to you,
But perfectionism is often a mask for profound shame.
In dysfunctional homes,
Being perfect or achieving high results was the only way to earn the breadcrumbs of approval or avoid harsh criticism.
Neurobiologically,
Perfectionism is driven by dopamine-seeking reward loops mixed with fear conditioning.
Your brain learned that flawless performance temporarily quieted the threat response triggered by toxic shame.
Now you giving up perfectionism feels like opening the door to being exposed as broken.
Fifth,
Cynicism and hypervigilance.
So you say you are not negative,
You're just realistic,
Preparing for the worst case scenario so that you're not surprised.
But staying on high alert was a necessary survival tool in a chaotic environment.
Neuropsychologically,
This is chronic hypervigilance kept alive by an overactive default mode network and an enlarged amygdala that continuously scans for potential danger.
Expecting the worst creates a neurochemical illusion of control.
If you expect disappointment,
It will not crush you when it happens.
Sixth,
Aggressive boundaries or reactivity.
You see yourself as just a direct honest person who tells it like it is and that people are just too sensitive.
But a sharp exterior is often defensive armor built to keep people at a distance before they can get close enough to inflict any type of emotional pain.
Now,
From a brain science perspective,
This is a dominant fight response.
Your sympathetic nervous system floods your body with adrenaline at the first sign of a perceived threat,
Striking first to prevent you from being emotionally overwhelmed.
We don't do this on purpose.
Seventh,
Conflict avoidance.
You claim that you're just easygoing,
That nothing bothers you,
And that you just go with the flow because you do not like drama.
But this is often a freeze response in disguise.
When conflict arises,
Your vagus nerve triggers a dorsal vagal shutdown,
Causing your energy to drop,
Your body to go numb,
And your throat to lock up.
As a child,
Expressing anger,
Disappointment,
Or personal preference led to punishment or emotional withdrawal.
Being easygoing was a way to remain invisible and safe.
People defend these traits so fiercely because they confuse who they are with how they survived.
They confuse who they are with their programming.
And until the brain learns that the original threat is over,
These traits feel less like habits and more like a protective fortress.
Letting them go feels like taking off armor in the middle of a battlefield.
And how this shows up in today,
In your adult life today.
Is interesting.
You find yourself exhausted by the very traits that you claim to love about yourself,
The ones that you defend.
So you overcommit,
Shut down when people get too close,
React with irritation when you feel misunderstood,
Or carry an underlying hum of anxiety that never fully turns off.
Or you stay stuck in painful relationship patterns because your brain continues to choose familiar discomfort over unfamiliar safety.
One small shift that you can start making today,
If any of this resonates with you,
Is this.
The moment you catch yourself fiercely defending one of these traits,
Just pause.
So do this with me right now.
Drop your shoulders away from your ears,
Unclench your jaw and put one hand over your heart and take a slow deep breath in and out.
Now just ask yourself this one simple question.
Am I doing what I'm doing right now out of love and choice,
Or am I doing this out of fear and protection?
By bringing conscious awareness and physical grounding to the automatic response,
You interrupt the default mode network.
You move out of automatic survival mode.
You begin to down regulate your nervous system and then you activate your prefrontal cortex,
Giving yourself the power to choose how you respond.
Number four,
You moved out,
But your programming came with you.
So many adult children promise themselves that they will never do what was done to them.
But without deliberate neural retraining,
That promise is neurologically impossible to keep.
Physical distance changes your environment,
But it does not change your brain's default settings.
You bring it with you.
So people expect that moving away is going to fix their problems,
But distance only stops the incoming active external fire.
It does not erase the internal survival software that was coded into your nervous system during the most formative years of your life.
So long after you've left the house or your parents' home,
Or you've moved out of the city or the state,
That programming begins to show up in your marriage,
Or in your parenting,
Or in your career,
And the way you even speak to yourself behind closed doors.
Take my client George,
For example.
George left home at the age of 16 to escape his narcissistic mother.
He leaned on friends until he was old enough to rent his own apartment at 18.
Whenever George had tried to speak up as a child about the toxic,
Belligerent men his mother brought into their home,
She weaponized fear,
Obligation,
And guilt against her son.
She defended herself.
Told George he was over-exaggerating and insisted that he should be thankful she was trying so hard to find him a father figure.
After every single conversation,
George was left feeling confused,
Guilty,
And even crazy.
From a neuropsychological perspective,
What was happening to George as a child was severe cognitive dissonance mixed with nervous system threat conditioning.
When a child's accurate perception of reality is repeatedly denied by a primary caregiver,
Experiences a profound conflict.
To preserve the bond with the parent,
Which the primal brain views as necessary for survival,
The child's brain prunes away trust in its own perception.
The amygdala registers the parent's emotional withdrawal or rage as a life or death threat,
Flooding the body with cortisol and adrenaline.
So the child then learns to adopt gaslighting and deflection as a desperate survival mechanism to neutralize the threat and restore safety.
Let's fast forward years later.
George got married.
He had physically moved out,
But the neural pathways forged in his childhood remained fully intact.
When his wife confronted him about a vape pen she found on the bathroom sink.
George did not react as a secure adult.
His brain interpreted her confrontation not as a simple conversation,
But as an existential threat to his safety.
His implicit memory kicked in,
Firing the exact defensive script that was installed in his childhood.
He just didn't know it was happening.
Before he even processed what he was doing,
Fear,
Obligation,
And guilt came pouring out of his mouth toward his wife.
First,
He denied the vape pen was his.
Then he flipped the script and accused his wife of sneaking around his things,
Even though it was sitting right there in plain sight.
Then he defended himself,
Telling her what a great husband he was and that she had no right to complain about anything.
George had unconsciously adopted the exact defensive behaviors of the mother he ran away from,
The behaviors he swore that he would never use on anyone.
When George and I first met,
The patterns became crystal clear within our very first session.
George believed he was just protecting himself,
But his brain was running on an old survival loop.
It wasn't thinking.
His wife was not his wife.
His wife was his mother.
In moments of conflict,
His prefrontal cortex,
The rational conscious part of his brain,
Was being hijacked by his amygdala,
By his memories.
And his nervous system perceived that vulnerability as dangerous.
So it instantly defaulted to the only conflict resolution strategy it had ever witnessed,
Which was denial,
Deflection,
And guilt.
And this is where so many people see themselves in George's story.
You can change your zip code,
Block phone numbers,
And build a completely new life,
But your nervous system carries the unhealed wiring wherever you go until you consciously become aware of them.
Until you consciously bring those automatic responses into your awareness and retrain your brain's reaction to stress,
You will continue to reenact the very dynamics you swore you would escape.
But most people don't even know that they're doing that.
Codependency and discovering the root cause was emotional neglect and being raised by two unrecovered adult children of alcoholics,
I was still operating from faulty programming,
Even though I knew I had faulty programming.
I had what I call a false awakening.
I assumed that because I knew I was codependent and because I realized I had manifested my first husband,
Because he was so much like my mother,
Simply being aware of this pattern was not enough.
It had devastating consequences.
I was 1,
000% wrong.
Every relationship after my first husband was worse than the one before,
Until the one last tango with a psychopath brought me to my knees and forced me to admit a terrifying truth.
Out of all these men,
I was the common denominator.
For years,
I spent understanding and not changing.
So many of the people that finally come into my ecosystem tell me that they read the books,
That they learned the terms,
And they could analyze their past with clinical precision.
But intellectual understanding sits entirely in the prefrontal cortex,
Your conscious,
Logical mind.
The problem is that your relational patterns,
Your fear of confrontation,
Codependency,
The habit ignoring red flags,
That's stored far deeper in the subconscious brain and the autonomic nervous system.
Neuropsychologically,
Insight alone does not rewrite implicit memory or down-regulate a trauma-wired amygdala.
When a red flag appeared,
My logical brain saw it,
But my conditioned nervous system still interpreted,
Ignoring my instincts and keeping the piece as familiar.
Safe.
That was the only safe option I had.
But insight does not prune neural pathways.
Action,
And repetition do.
When I was brought to my knees,
I had to ask myself,
What was I still missing?
And the answer was clear.
I was still ignoring red flags.
I was still ignoring myself.
The codependency,
The distrust of my own intuition and the terror of confrontation were still running the show despite everything that I knew.
What finally moved the needle was not acquiring more knowledge,
But radical self-honesty and physical behavioral change.
What moved was recognizing the pattern,
Accepting full ownership of being the common denominator,
And making a non-negotiable decision that I had to listen and trust myself deeply if I was ever going to break the cycle of self-erasure and self-abandonment.
I stopped using insight as a substitute for taking action.
Time an intuitive red flag popped up,
Instead of rationalizing it away or overriding my gut to stay comfortable,
I honored that instinct.
I set the boundary.
I faced the confrontation.
By repeatedly honoring my internal truth over external approval,
I gave my nervous system a brand new experience of safety.
And it took time,
But I taught my brain that trusting myself was safe,
Laying down entirely new neural pathways of self-efficacy and self-respect.
The last painful relationship was the final one I ever had to survive.
Hallelujah!
A few years later,
Operating from a pre-wired brain and an aligned spirit,
I attracted,
Met,
And married my current husband,
Anthony.
Dear one,
You cannot think your way out of a pattern you lived your way into.
True transformation only happens when your insight becomes action oriented.
That changes everything.
Now,
Number six,
Nobody is coming to say they're sorry.
One of the greatest subconscious programs running my life was installed by the time I was three.
If I'm good,
My mother will love me.
And if I'm good,
People will treat me fairly.
As a child,
I genuinely believed that if I was good enough,
That if I was compliant enough,
And if I was easy enough,
My mother would finally give me the love and the validation I craved.
Somehow the heavens would open.
And as I grew up,
That evolved into the belief that if I was kind,
Others would be kind in return.
But when you operate from brokenness and lack boundaries,
The opposite happens.
The more you give,
The more takers you attract.
This was the core of my fawning response,
A subconscious survival mechanism where I abandoned my own truth,
I appeased others,
And I sought approval to buffer their rage and alleviate the guilt I felt whenever I tried to have needs of my own.
Fawning became my primary buffer against his unpredictable anger,
Tricking my nervous system into believing that if I stayed small,
Helpful,
Submissive,
Then I could keep the peace,
That I could stay safe.
It was that deep.
Conditioning,
That deep unhealthy conditioning that made me feel like I needed my ex-husband's permission just to save my own life and get a divorce.
Like he had to agree with me that I needed a divorce.
And I wish I could say that I ended my marriage purely on my own terms,
But it was actually fear of death that moved me.
I was so sick with asthma that I thought I would die.
And leaving my three kids with my ex and his family terrified me to my core.
I did not want to leave them behind.
It felt like divorce him or die.
And what shook me was that the nicer I was,
The meaner he became.
I sorted the dishes in half.
So he had half of them.
I divided our photo albums and framed photos of our kids for his new apartment.
While separated,
I only spent what was necessary until he asked for the checkbook,
Promising to pay the bills,
Only to let the mortgage go for three months.
And then he actually stopped paying the credit cards.
And then one day with the camera,
And then one day with the cabinets in our home almost empty,
I called to ask if I could use the credit card to buy groceries.
And he said,
Yes.
So I took the kids to Target.
I filled my cart.
Only to have every single card denied right in front of my children.
It was humiliating and it was devastating.
And here they were in the middle of a separation,
Watching their parents' lives crumble and their lives crumble.
But something clicked in me that day when I saw my children's faces drop.
I was enraged.
I drove to his job,
I jumped out of the van,
And I let the rage pour out of me without caring who heard me.
And I told him plainly,
You are hurting and embarrassing the kids just to punish me,
And all you did was prove that I'm right for needing a divorce.
How could you do this to them?
Now when you deal with an immature partner who views you as property,
Thinking that your fairness will make them fair is a kindergarten fantasy.
Now,
Neuropsychologically,
My anger at Target,
The rage that I felt,
Was the moment my nervous system finally snapped out of that lifelong fawn response.
For decades,
My brain survival network used appeasement as a protective shield to keep him and anybody's anger at bay.
But when my children's survival was threatened,
My neural reception instantly reevaluated the situation and something shifted.
My amygdala shifted my body from freeze and appease straight into protective fight response and adrenaline did,
It flooded my system,
Off-lining my need for his approval,
My parents approval,
And it broke the illusion that he would ever be fair and it forced me to stop waiting for permission.
It forced me to put down the fantasy and step fully into my own power.
This is what I needed and this is the direction I was moving my life.
Now number seven,
You cannot fix any of this from below the veil of consciousness.
For the first part of my life,
I was playing a video game character that was handed to me before I was even born.
The rules,
Defaults,
And emotional climate of my family's system were set in motion long before I arrived,
Becoming the precise levels I had to navigate.
For a long time,
I was stuck on those entry levels,
Replaying the same painful boss fights over and over again until the sheer weight of the pain finally woke me up.
And,
Like a video game character,
Building up power,
I began collecting tools to level up my mental and emotional skills.
Wisdom from books,
Therapy,
Guided meditations,
And the unique frameworks I had to build from scratch just to stay afloat.
But that's when I realized the single most important distinction in healing.
The difference between living below the veil of consciousness,
From your programs and your patterns,
And living above the veil of consciousness.
Below the veil is where you live,
Where your childhood programming is running you on autopilot and you think you're conscious.
Below the veil,
You're trapped in reacting.
You're hyper-focused on their words,
Their moods,
And trying to decode their underlying intentions while taking every attack personally and spending all your energy trying to fix,
To appease,
Or defend yourself.
Above the veil of consciousness is where you live when you step into the role of the conscious observer.
Above the veil,
You stop obsessing over their words and start observing the overarching patterns and behaviors.
Behaviors in them as well as yourself.
You move from asking,
Why are they doing this to me,
To what pattern is playing out right now,
And how do I want to respond?
Look at what the exact same conversation looks like from both sides.
Below the veil,
When a dysfunctional or immature partner accuses you of,
For example,
Being selfish,
Your default survival program instantly hijacks your nervous system.
Your amygdala fires,
Your body floods with adrenaline,
And you drop straight into the fawn or fight response to defend yourself,
To overexplain,
Bring up receipts from three years ago,
Or you begin to apologize for things you did not do just to make the tension stop.
You're completely absorbed in the game,
Letting their words and their insinuations dictate your internal reality and the way that you react.
Now,
Above the veil,
When that same person calls you selfish,
You do not collapse and you do not counterattack because your prefrontal cortex stays online.
You can see the game.
You pause,
You observe their dysregulation and recognize it as a pattern of deflection without taking it personally.
From above the veil,
You can look at them calmly and say,
I see it differently.
And that's okay,
Or I'm not going to discuss this while being spoken to this way.
You step off the chessboard entirely.
Neuropsychologically,
Moving from below the veil of consciousness to above the veil of consciousness is the shift from automatic amygdala-driven survival loops to high-level prefrontal cortex self-regulation.
It requires learning,
Growing,
And applying new responses repeatedly and consistently because that is the exact repetition the brain demands to prune old neural pathways and build new ones through neuroplasticity.
Now today,
Because of that continuous practice,
I'm living above the veil and I get to write my own programs every day.
Living above the veil does not mean I never feel anxiety or that uncomfortable triggers completely disappear,
But it means that old programs no longer run my life.
When anxiety creeps in,
I can look at it with curiosity and say,
That's just an old program.
When I feel the subtle urge to fawn or fix or rescue or blame myself,
I can catch it in real time.
This is metacognition.
If I notice myself hesitating to trust my intuition,
I can consciously take a risk and speak my truth.
And if that risk does not turn out as planned,
I no longer collapse into toxic shame.
Because I hold myself in self-love,
Knowing that a negative outcome is just feedback,
Not a reflection of my worth.
My worth is given.
You cannot fix a broken program while you're caught below the valve,
Playing by its rules.
But the moment you rise above it,
You realize the controller has been in your hands all along,
Just like Dorothy's red ruby slippers were with her all along.
And that question I asked you at the very beginning,
Who are you when nobody needs anything from you?
There is an answer.
There always was.
And it's been sitting underneath your programming,
Everything that you were trained to believe you were and had to be for others,
Right?
And it's just been waiting for you to go and get it and to recognize it.
You can unleash the authentic you.
It's the most noblest work you'll ever do.
You were just never meant to do it alone.
Alone in the dark is how the programming was written in the first place.
It cannot also be how you undo it.
So dear one,
Bring it to the light.
