She Called It the Process of Unbecoming — And It Changed How I See Everything

Lacey Kelly is a licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and author of three books — The Process of Unbecoming: A Different Relationship to Being Human, Already Human: Why the Culture of Self-Improvement Is Making Us Feel Broken, and God Is a Dirty Word: A Cultural Reckoning with the God We Left Behind. All three are available on Amazon.

I went into this conversation a little uncertain. I told Lacey — and my listeners — exactly that: “I was tentative... what am I going to say today? I’m not sure if I’m ready for this.” By the time we wrapped, my shoulders had literally dropped. A weight I’d been carrying for a long time quietly lifted.

The Premise That Changes Everything

The process of unbecoming is not another self-help system. It’s a response to what Lacey kept seeing in her therapy practice — people arriving with the underlying belief that something was fundamentally wrong with them and then finding that all the effort they put into fixing themselves only reinforced that belief.

“The core that I see in this is the premise that people go into self-help or therapy with is that it makes sense, it’s this way, but there’s something wrong with them, they’re not good enough, or that they’re somehow broken,” she said. “And until we address that premise the work itself can become rather fruitless because it tends to set up a pattern of effort that often reinforces that premise they came in with.”

The starting point — the base of her entire framework — is this: wholeness is not something you earn. It is inherent to every human being. You were born with it. No experience takes it away. You will die with it.

“When we operate from that place,” she said, “everything starts to change on its own.”

Six Principles That Reframe the Whole Picture

Lacey built the process of unbecoming around six core principles. She was careful to call them philosophical, grounded in what she considers fundamental truths about human beings. Here’s what we covered:

1. Wholeness is inherent

Worth and dignity are not conditions to be earned. They are built into every human being. “When we believe that we are whole and complete as we are,” Lacey explained, “and within that wholeness holds our worth and our dignity as human beings, it holds the vulnerability that reaches and can feel and connect with other people.”

2. Identity is adaptive.

Human beings are exceptional at adapting to their environment. The problem is that during childhood, identity is forming at the same time we are adapting. The patterns and behaviors we developed to get our needs met — in whatever environment we were raised in, functional or not — later get labeled as personality flaws or pathology. “Adaptation isn’t necessarily who we are,” Lacey said. “It’s just what we needed to do in that environment.”

She also pushed back against putting too much weight on the family unit alone. Biologically, she pointed out, we are designed to be raised in groups of 25 to 150 people. Today, we’re lucky to have two parents in the house. That mismatch puts enormous pressure on parents — and on children.

I grew up in the 1960s with relatives up and down the block. I told Lacey about my cousin who took me under his wing when I was a heavy, uncoordinated kid who couldn’t pay attention in school. He put me to work alongside him, bought me lunch, took pictures of me holding a tool in front of a car. That relationship built something in me. I think back and wonder: without that kind of community support, where would I have ended up?

3. Capacity is inherent.

This principle challenges the common therapy-world idea that capacity — the ability to tolerate and meet experience — is something you build or develop through work. Lacey disagrees. “Capacity is always within us,” she said. The issue is not that it doesn’t exist. The issue is access. When we don’t have enough co-regulation — the steadying presence of other nervous systems around us — we lose the ability to reach our own capacity. The goal in her work is not to develop something new. It is to reconnect with what is already there.

4. Protection precedes pathology.

This gave me a long pause. The behaviors and patterns we most hate about ourselves — the walls we put up, the ways we push people away, the cycles we feel trapped in — are not evidence of brokenness. They are protection. “We are born vulnerable,” Lacey explained, “and humans have the instinct to protect what’s vulnerable.” When that vulnerability felt threatened, protection came online. What we often call personality problems or disorders are adaptive protections that got locked in.

“When we relate to them as protective rather than something wrong with us, the intervention changes, and the protection tends to soften through the relationship that we build with it.”

5. Change happens through relationship.

Study after study shows that the primary driver of change in therapy is the relationship between the therapist and the client — not the method. And yet, Lacey pointed out, self-improvement culture has largely flipped this idea on its head. It tells us we have to do all the inner work first, get ourselves regulated and healed, and then we can engage with other people. “I’ve seen it taken to a different kind of extreme where all the healing work feels like it needs to be done in isolation,” she said, “which reinforces the protection that’s there in the first place.”

6. The human condition is complete.

We are complete beings living in an imperfect reality. The dysfunction is part of the package — not evidence that something has gone wrong. “The human condition is complete,” Lacey said, “is to renew that sense of everything we need is here. And that includes the muck.” When we land on the difficult side of the human spectrum, it doesn’t mean we are broken. It means we are human. I mentioned the Buddhist expression that came to mind as she spoke: pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

Where the Books Come From

I asked Lacey about her background. She is a licensed clinical social worker with extensive training in complex trauma and attachment. But she was clear that her credentials had less to do with this work than her own experience.

She started yoga when she was 12. She described herself as someone who always had “a temperament towards questioning what we’re doing here.” When she found out Santa Claus wasn’t real, her next question was: Am I real? Is anything real? She spent years trying everything the self-help world had to offer — and kept finding that she was just getting more tense, not less.

“I’m trying everything they’re telling me to do to help with this,” she said, “and it seems like I’m just getting more tense.”

That experience is the driver behind all three of her books.

Already Human — The Industry That Sells You the Problem

Already Human takes on the self-improvement industry directly. It’s a massive industry built around the premise that you are not enough and need to be fixed.

“These answers that they sell to you often reinforce the premise,” she said, “because they just produce more effort, more checklists, more morning routines, more ways you have to regulate yourself, more data you have to track.” The result: you end up exhausted, still feeling inadequate, and now with even more evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with you.

I told her I had a vagus nerve stimulator behind me. And an emWave2 that clips to my earlobe for meditation. I’ve gone to psychiatrists who had the prescription pad out before I’d finished my second sentence. I have been searching my entire adult life for the solution. Lacey’s response was one of the most validating things I’d heard in years: “A lot of us are really struggling to accept the fa...