You were six or seven. Something happened that hurt. Maybe a fall. Maybe a fight at school. Maybe nothing dramatic - just a sting. You started to cry. Someone, probably someone who loved you, said: don’t be a sook.
You stopped crying. Maybe not that exact second. But the instruction landed. And it kept landing, in slightly different versions, for the next decade or so. Toughen up. Pull your head in. Settle down. Don’t make a meal of it. You’re alright.
At some point - and you couldn’t tell anyone the year, because it wasn’t a year, it was a process - the instruction stopped being external. You started saying it to yourself. Quietly. Automatically. Before the feeling had a chance to get all the way out.
Today, as an adult who’s largely doing fine, you don’t think about this. You don’t walk around remembering the moments. You just have a particular way of handling things, and the way is: don’t make it a thing. You’ll be right.
The instruction did its job. It made you durable. It made you the kind of adult who can be relied on.
It also costs something, and the cost is the subject of this article.
What “Don’t Be a Sook” Was Actually Doing
“Don’t be a sook” wasn’t malicious. Most of the time it was said by someone who’d had it said to them, and was passing on what they understood to be the way you raise a child to function in this country. The instruction has been in Australian cultural circulation for generations. It came out of a particular Australian history - the bush, the war, the depression, the migration, the long droughts - and it produced a particular Australian shape of person who could keep going.
That shape works. It’s why the country runs.
What it doesn’t do is give the person who wears the shape a way to acknowledge what’s still happening on the inside while they keep going. The shape is built for output. It isn’t built for input. It doesn’t have a process for the part where you might, occasionally, need to be a person who lets a feeling land.
So the feeling doesn’t get to land. It gets logged somewhere internal and shelved. Most of the feelings on that shelf are still there. They were never resolved. They were just successfully not-said-out-loud.
After enough years, the shelf gets full. The body starts running maintenance for what’s on it. The mood goes a notch lower than it used to be. The sleep gets thinner. The reflex to say “I’m alright” gets stronger.
Don’t-be-a-sook produced you. It also produced a backlog of unprocessed feeling that you didn’t put on the shelf - someone told you to put it there, and you obeyed because you were six.
What the Conscious-Level Corrections Don’t Touch
You’ll have done some work on this, probably. Most Australians who get to this point have. The reading. The “I’m going to feel my feelings more.” The deciding to be more honest with the people you trust. Some of it has helped. None of it has fully reached the part of you that’s still six and still being told not to be a sook.
That’s not a failure of the corrections. They’re working the conscious level - about five per cent of what’s running in your head at any given moment. The other ninety-five per cent is the subconscious. And the subconscious in your case has had the don’t-be-a-sook instruction installed at a depth that conscious corrections don’t reach.
For a lot of Australians, that subconscious script runs something like: Don’t make it a thing. Other people have it worse. You’re fine. Get up.
It runs automatically. By the time you’ve decided you’d like to feel something instead of suppressing it, the suppressing has already happened. The script is faster than the deciding.
The script isn’t bad. It’s not your enemy. It was installed for reasons that made sense to the person who installed it. It’s just stopped serving the adult you’ve become, and it needs an updated instruction at the same depth the original instruction was installed at.
What the Method Reaches
Try the therapy stint. Try the reading. Try the resolution to be more in touch with yourself. The durability still gets there before any of them, because the durability is a six-year-old’s response to an instruction, and the six-year-old wasn’t operating at therapy-stint altitude. The instruction got filed somewhere underneath everything you later learned about being in touch with yourself, and the filing is what fires the reflex, and the filing has never received a different message.
Inner Influencing is the work of sending the filing a different message in a form it will read. Not a conscious correction. A specifically structured request the subconscious treats as an instruction rather than as commentary from the adult upstairs.
The request is signalled by a trigger phrase: “Purple Cow.” Strange so that the strangeness flags it as not-noise. One statement. Said once. No repetition.
Try It For Yourself
Read each statement below slowly - out loud if you can. Say it once, then stop. Let a moment of quiet follow before the next one.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the automatic reflex to suppress a feeling the moment it starts to form, the running ’don’t be a sook’ instruction that’s still firing the way it fired when I was six, and the gap between when something hurts and when I’m willing to admit it does, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then pause and notice.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the belief that feeling something means I’m being soft, that other people having it worse cancels out what I’m carrying, that the durable version of me is the only acceptable version, and the old instruction installed when I was small that I’ve been carrying ever since, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Take a breath. Let it settle.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will make it easy for me to know what I’m feeling when I’m feeling it, to acknowledge things that hurt without immediately overriding them, and to be both durable and honest with myself at the same time, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then simply rest for a moment.
What Just Updated
You may have felt something small. A breath that went somewhere it hadn’t been reaching. A faint sense of permission you don’t normally give yourself. A slight loosening of the grip that’s been there a long time. Whatever happened, even if it was barely a thing, the subconscious received the signal at the layer where the old instruction has been running.
This kind of shift doesn’t arrive with drama. It tends to arrive as less of something - less of the immediate override, a slight pause where the suppression used to be instant.
What you just did is the entry-level move of Inner Influencing. There are deeper layers underneath - the original moment the instruction was installed, the long inheritance of Australian toughness, the family-line passing-down of the same three words. The free Inner Influencing Discovery Kit takes you further into this work and explains why it reaches what other methods don’t.
A lot of Australians have been carrying the don’t-be-a-sook instruction longer than they’ve been carrying their own name. They’ve never been told that the instruction is updateable.
It is.
The subconscious doesn’t need an argument. It needs the right signal at the right level. You’ve just sent one.