However, growing up in an environment marked by childhood danger repurposed this natural gift. What began as an innate sensitivity was quickly drafted into service as a psychological defense mechanism. Lacking the physical agency or power to escape her immediate circumstances, a young Briggs turned to stories to preserve her sense of hope. Narrative worlds served as crucial emotional anchors, convincing her that rescue remained possible even when safety was absent in her daily life.
Literature and films provided the emotional scaffolding necessary for survival. Works such as Cinderella and Charlotte’s Web offered compelling proof that an observer could notice a child being mistreated and use love, words, or extraordinary power to alter the course of their life. For a child trapped in a reality she could neither alter nor escape, the imagination provided a vital bridge to a viable future. Fantasy was not a flaw; it was a sophisticated self-regulating strategy that kept her psychologically intact.
Yet, as Briggs would later recognize in her therapeutic practice and personal journey, survival gifts do not automatically decommission themselves when the original danger has passed. The imaginative capacity that once rescued a vulnerable child can eventually morph into an adult liability if it continues to operate without conscious oversight.
Scanning the Shoreline
The enduring influence of this survival pattern became starkly evident in the aftermath of a painful divorce in 2010. During this period, the self-help and personal growth industries were undergoing a massive surge in popularity, heavily emphasizing visualization practices and the law of attraction. While reading a contemporary manifestation book, Briggs was instructed to detail her ideal future in writing, framing it as an absolute certainty.
Engaging with the exercise, she recorded a detailed vision in her journal: she would meet her soulmate on a beach in Florida in the year 2014. The mental image was remarkably specific. She pictured herself wearing a white sun hat while her youngest son dug in the sand nearby. In this vision, a little girl would wander over to play with him, prompting an effortless mutual recognition between Briggs and the girl’s father. According to the narrative she constructed, they would simply "just know" and transition into a life of shared happiness.
Four years later, following another painful relationship, Briggs planned a road trip to Florida with her sons. Though she had not set out explicitly to orchestrate the journal entry’s fulfillment, the arrival of 2014 and her lingering ownership of the white sun hat carried significant weight in her mind. She packed the hat.
Upon arriving at the oceanfront, the scene began to mirror her past writing with uncanny precision. Her son sat in the sand, digging exactly as she had imagined years prior. Standing on the coast, Briggs caught herself actively scanning the shoreline—watching, waiting, and searching the horizon for an approaching figure.
Reflecting on that moment, Briggs realized that her longing extended far beyond romantic companionship. Beneath the desire for a partner lay a deep-seated wish to be fully seen, chosen, and relieved of the burden of navigating life entirely on her own. It was the same imaginative mechanism that had sustained her through a harrowing childhood, operating quietly in the background to await an external savior.
Years later, when Briggs observed her mind attempting a similar retreat into romanticized expectation, she felt a complex mixture of embarrassment and grief. She mourned for the younger, vulnerable aspects of herself that had felt compelled to construct such elaborate rescue fantasies simply to endure the present moment. Across adulthood, many individuals construct private narratives of this nature; when the immediate environment feels unbearable or unsafe, an imagined future becomes an indispensable refuge.
When Magic Began Working Against Me
As Briggs carried this powerful imaginative drive into her adult relationships, its protective function began to invert. Instead of shielding her from harm, the continuous search for hidden goodness began to compromise her real-world safety and boundary-setting abilities.
The archetype of the "Dream Weaver"—the inclination to spin elaborate, hopeful narratives out of faint symbolic threads—led her to over-interpret brief gestures of care from others. She could construct a grand narrative of deep spiritual alignment around minor acts of kindness, treating her belief in a person’s underlying potential as more real than their actual behavior. By focusing intently on who someone could be, she frequently overlooked how they were currently treating her.
This dynamic kept her tethered to unhealthy relationships. Where she had once projected hope into the future to endure childhood neglect, she now projected potential onto partners who had not earned her trust. This internal magic allowed her to remain extraordinarily patient and forgiving, quietly waiting for people to evolve into the idealized figures she had imagined them to be. The ultimate shadow of the Dream Weaver lay not in her spiritual sensitivity, but in her capacity to construct stories so beautiful that they effectively masked reality.
This reliance on external validation extended beyond romantic partners to authority figures and divination systems. Just as her childhood self had sought life instructions within the pages of fairy tales, her adult self sought clarity through tarot readings, astrology charts, biblical texts, internet search engines, and the assertions of spiritual teachers. She found herself continuously auditing external signs, repeating numbers, and intuitive flashes, hoping an outside framework would provide a definitive roadmap for safety.
Over time, Briggs realized she had been treating meaning as an inherent property of external objects or authoritative commentators. In doing so, she had effectively surrendered her internal authority. While external tools and traditions could assist in reflecting internal states, they did not possess intrinsic control over her life’s meaning. The ultimate authority to assign significance resided entirely within herself.
I Am Worth Protecting
A pivotal shift in this internal paradigm occurred after ten months of repeatedly encountering the number 911. Rather than resorting to online searches or consulting external spiritual interpretations to decipher the phenomenon, Briggs paused to ask herself a fundamental question: What does 911 actually mean to me?
The answer emerged directly from her own lived experience rather than an external manual. In the everyday world, 9-1-1 is the primary emergency sequence dialed when an individual requires urgent protection or intervention. It functions as a clear declaration of crisis: a signal that something valuable is under threat, that help is required, and that the person calling is taking deliberate action to secure safety. Dialing those digits requires active participation—it is an assertion that one’s life and well-being are inherently worth defending.
As this realization took root, the song "Safe & Sound" happened to be playing in the background. The convergence felt like a profound internal alignment, as though her unconscious mind and her spiritual understanding had collaborated to deliver a long-overdue message. Crucially, no outside expert, algorithm, or spiritual system had dictated this meaning to her; she had generated the insight through her own internal reflection.
This realization marked a decisive departure from a lifetime of passive waiting. Briggs recognized that as a grown woman, she was no longer dependent on an external savior or a perfect set of spiritual instructions to remain secure. She possessed the real-world capacity to assess her circumstances, evaluate the behavior of others, and take concrete action on her own behalf.
Self-protection no longer required waiting for magic; it required exercising agency. It meant observing concrete behavior, speaking up when boundaries were crossed, exiting harmful situations, consulting legal counsel when necessary, leaning on trusted friends, or seeking immediate assistance during moments of acute danger. Having repeatedly demonstrated her ability to handle crises in her adult life, Briggs understood that the Dream Weaver’s hyper-vigilant defense strategies were no longer required for basic survival. Relieved of its emergency duties, her imagination was finally free to serve a higher purpose: enhancing the richness, beauty, and depth of her conscious life.
The Right Not to Know
This evolution in self-trust allowed Briggs to reframe her relationship with mystery, symbols, and spiritual coincidences. Rather than choosing between two extreme positions—either viewing every coincidence as a rigid divine mandate or dismissing symbolic experiences altogether—she identified a balanced middle path.
Rigid spiritual certainty often arises from an inability to tolerate ambiguity; it forces complex, open-ended experiences into rigid dogmatic categories simply to relieve anxiety. Conversely, absolute cynicism closes off awe by rejecting anything that cannot be quantitatively measured.
Briggs identified a third alternative: the willingness to acknowledge a coincidence as meaningful while simultaneously relinquishing the need to declare its absolute, objective meaning. This approach allows an experience to remain dynamic and evocative without forcing it into an inflexible claim of universal truth. Reclaiming inner authority does not require absolute certainty about every phenomenon; rather, it involves cultivating the psychological strength to coexist with uncertainty while remaining firmly grounded in observable reality.
Holding the Mystery Beautifully
In an astrology text Briggs acquired, the day of her birth is symbolically designated as the "Day of the Dream Weaver"—a fitting descriptor for someone who has spent a lifetime integrating intuition, narrative, and symbolic awareness.
Today, that integration is reflected in simple, grounded choices. When Briggs decided to bring a black cat into her home, she did not wait for an enigmatic omen to drop the animal on her doorstep. Instead, she deliberately sought out a cat to adopt, ultimately welcoming a lovable, feisty companion into her life.
Choosing the cat was a conscious honoring of her intuitive, imaginative self—the part of her nature that finds comfort in symbols and beauty in the shadow aspects of life. She no longer requires the external world to validate her internal magic, recognizing that the meaning she attributes to symbols reflects her internal identity rather than an absolute prediction of future events.
By recognizing the Dream Weaver within her, Briggs stripped the archetype of its potential to subvert her boundaries. The tendency to construct romanticized narratives becomes dangerous only when it operates unexamined. By bringing awareness to this dynamic, she retained the ability to decide when, where, and how her imagination is permitted to shape her reality. Magic, she concluded, was always an inherent part of her nature, but it was no longer burdened with the impossible task of keeping her safe.
Today, Allison Jeanette Briggs utilizes these insights in her professional work as a therapist, writer, and speaker, assisting women in healing from codependency, emotional neglect, and childhood trauma. By integrating psychological principles with spiritual awareness, she guides clients toward establishing firm boundaries, developing self-trust, and cultivating authentic relationships.
Her personal and clinical insights are explored further in her forthcoming memoir, On Being Real: Healing the Codependent Heart of a Woman, as well as through her ongoing writings on inner freedom and resilience hosted at her platform, on-being-real.com.
