Between you and you. Who Really Makes the Decisions in Your Life? Research on inner authorship

© Sofi Lia, 2026

ISBN 978-5-0071-3660-0

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

INTRODUCTION.

Two Voices in One Room

Half past five in the morning. The alarm hasn’t gone off yet, but the eyes are already open. And before the body manages to move, the first phrase of the day sounds in the head: «Alright, get up, you’re going to oversleep everything again.» The voice sounds demanding, almost like a stranger’s tone — but this is no stranger. This is you.

And a fraction of a second after this phrase, something happens that a person usually doesn’t notice, because it happens too fast: somewhere near this demanding voice a second one appears — quieter, calmer. It doesn’t argue with the first and doesn’t cancel it out. It simply registers: «There I go again, telling myself this. The same thing every morning.» This second voice doesn’t decide anything and isn’t in a hurry to go anywhere. It simply is present.

This is the moment where this book begins — not with a ready-made answer, but with an observation that can be repeated in one’s own life on any day of the week: inside one person, at least two processes sound simultaneously. One is reactive, automatic, often anxious: it judges, rushes, blames, defends. The second is observing: it isn’t necessarily calm, but it has distance. It sees the first process from the side.

Between these two points — between the «you» who reacts and the «you» who notices the reaction — there exists a space. Small, often unnoticeable, almost immeasurable in seconds. But it is precisely in this space, not in the reaction itself and not in the observation itself, that what can be called choice is located. The title of this book is not a metaphor, nor a pretty phrase for a cover. It is a literal description of the place where the decisions of your life are made: between you and you.

This Is Not Another Book About Mindfulness

You’ve probably already tried. Meditation apps with a soothing narrator’s voice. «Life here and now» marathons. Morning gratitude practices, breathing techniques, talk about how you just need to «be in the moment» — and if you’re already tired of these words, it’s not because something is wrong with you or you didn’t try hard enough. It’s because almost everything sold today under the word «mindfulness» promises a state — calm, ease, enlightened equanimity — and a state, by its very nature, doesn’t hold: it arrives during a meditation session and leaves with it, leaving behind the same fatigue and the same feeling that you failed again to be mindful enough.

This book is not about that. It is not about achieving a special state and holding onto it at any cost. It is about what happened in the very first second of this introduction, when a second, quieter voice appeared next to the demanding morning one — and you simply noticed it. That is real acceptance, and it doesn’t begin where it’s usually sought: not in a meditation pose, not in special breathing, not in twenty specially set-aside minutes of the day. It begins in that tiny, almost imperceptible gap between what is happening to you and what you think about what is happening — in the space between you and you, which this book will go on to discuss using the most varied material: fatigue, guilt, money, relationships, the search for mentors, attempts to escape from yourself under the guise of spiritual growth. Further in this book you will meet the stories of people very unlike you outwardly — in age, profession, life circumstances — and you will almost certainly recognize something of your own in some of them.

And here is what actually happens when this space begins to expand — something hard to call anything but a miracle, though it has nothing to do with mysticism. The storm doesn’t disappear — it may return again and again, because human life by its nature is never without storms. What disappears is the war you waged against yourself inside that storm — the need to prove, justify, feel ashamed, measure up, save yourself. And with the end of that war comes back what it had been taking for years: strength, clarity, the ability to choose rather than merely react. This is not the effect of a technique. It is what happens to a person when they finally stop being their own enemy — and that, not another way to become «more mindful,» is what this entire book is about.

Something Easy to Verify on Yourself Right Now

Ask a random person on the street: «Who makes the decisions in your life?» — and almost everyone will answer without hesitation: «I do, of course.» The answer sounds obvious. But ask them to clarify — who exactly is this «I» at the moment when a decision is made by a tired, frightened, or hurt person — and the certainty quickly disappears. Because in practice, decisions aren’t made by some single, stable «I,» but by whoever happens to be at the wheel in that particular second: the hungry version, the sleep-deprived version, the version that just heard criticism directed at them.

This is not a philosophical subtlety. It is an everyday, mundane reality that’s easy to verify on yourself. A decision to quit, written in a message at eleven at night after a hard conversation with a boss, rarely matches the decision made by the same person a week later, in a calm state, with a clear head. Words of love spoken in a moment of tenderness, and words of reproach spoken in a moment of fatigue that same evening, are formally uttered by one and the same person — but in these two moments it’s as if not one authority but different ones are steering them.

It’s important to separate one thing from another right away: the mistake is not that in the evening a desire arises at all to say something sharp or to give everything up — behind such a desire there is almost always something real and worth attention, not the invention of a tired mind. The mistake would lie elsewhere — if that desire turned into action at that very moment, bypassing the pause, bypassing that very space where the evening reaction could meet a broader, rested view. Not suppressing the evening version and not blindly trusting it, but a conversation between the evening and morning versions of the same person — that is what this book will call «choice.»

Usually one of two false conclusions is drawn from this observation. The first: «That means I’m inconsistent, I can’t be trusted.» The second: «That means the real me is only the version I like, and the rest are malfunctions.» Both conclusions close the very door where real freedom is located. This book offers a third path: not to search for the «real» version among the many states, but to learn to notice the space between a state and an action — that very «between you and you» — and gradually widen it.

Where This Journey Will Lead

You probably feel you already know yourself well — your habits, your weak points, the scenarios that repeat year after year. And perhaps that’s partly true. But there is a part of you that isn’t easy to see in a passing glance in the mirror each morning — the part that has for years hidden behind fatigue, behind the attempt to measure up to everyone, behind the voice inside that’s too easy to mistake for truth simply because it sounds louder than the rest. This book was not written to tell you something new about the world around you. It was written in the hope that somewhere on these pages you will suddenly recognize what was always nearby — the real thing in you that is capable of remaining itself even in the middle of a storm, that deserves rest without justification, that can learn to be a support without a mentor, without anyone else’s approval, without an endless search.

Along the way there will be the body, money, friendship, the search for mentors, the beloved dream of starting life from a blank page, and attempts to run from yourself under the guise of spiritual growth — not as a checklist of topics, but as recognizable scenes in which you will most likely recognize yourself more than once. This is the method of this book: not memorizing someone else’s conclusions, but an honest meeting with your own experience, which you may have avoided for years. Answers here are not handed out in advance — they grow gradually, page by page, together with this recognition.

You won’t simply read this book — you will gradually stop being a hostage to your own reactions and start becoming the author of what happens to you next. The inner war that has drained your strength for years will begin to quiet down not because life suddenly becomes simpler, but because you will learn to be present with yourself at any point in it — without passing judgment on yourself, without fleeing, without needing to one day become someone else in order to finally earn the right to live.

A Small Example Before We Begin

A thirty-four-year-old man, at one in the morning, after a particularly exhausting day, adds to his online shopping cart a motorcycle he has long dreamed of but which objectively doesn’t fit his current budget — and almost completes the purchase on credit, stopping only because the site froze for a second. In the morning, looking at the cart over a cup of coffee, he doesn’t recognize yesterday’s self: «What got into me yesterday.» The shame in that phrase sounds as familiar as in any similar story — as if the nighttime version was a shameful mistake to be forgotten as quickly as possible.

But the same structure is at work here too. At night, the decision was made by a person so worn out by the day that buying a thing that brings an instant sense of freedom seemed not like a whim but almost a necessity — and there was a real kernel in that desire: fatigue from routine, a longing for something that belongs to him alone. In the morning, the decision was reviewed simply by a more rested part of the same person, one with enough resource to weigh the desire against the budget and circumstances. Neither of these two versions was an impostor. There was one thoughtless rush — and one pause that happened just in time.

Before You Turn This Page

A few words about the language this book speaks — not for the sake of rigor, but for the sake of honesty with you. This book is not a systematic review of psychological research, nor a collection of references to other people’s experiments. Its material is careful observation of recurring human stories, accumulated over years of practical psychological work. Where the text does contain a specific historical fact — and there are few such places in the book — it has been checked and is accurate. But for the most part its conclusions rest not on a citation but on what you can verify yourself: stopping to observe yourself over the course of one ordinary day. The words «energy,» «vibration,» «multidimensionality,» and «game» will appear here not as claims about how the universe is structured, but as the most precise available way to name what you already feel inside without any words at all — fatigue, a lift, the sense that more than one version of yourself lives in you at once. This book does not promise you mysticism. It promises you sobriety — that rare kind of sobriety today which actually heals, when everything else only promises to.

You will also notice that after many sections the book stops and leaves a separate question under the word «Pause.» This is not a rhetorical device or an attention check — it is the one place in the book where it deliberately falls silent and waits instead of answering for you. You don’t need to write down an answer or dwell on it at length — it’s enough to let your gaze rest on the question for a second and let it sound before reading on. One question will resonate right away; another will stay with you for a few days and return on its own, once it becomes not a line on paper but a question about what is happening in your life right now.

And one last thing. The question posed in the book’s title — who really makes the decisions in your life — will not get a short, ready-made answer right here. Not because there is no answer, but because it doesn’t work as someone else’s formula that you can simply receive and memorize. It only works as something you gradually live through yourself, page by page, recognizing yourself in other people’s stories — and once you have lived through this whole journey, you won’t simply receive an answer. You will feel it as something that was in you all along — it was simply waiting to finally be noticed.

CHAPTER 1. You’re Not Broken. You’ve Just Been Trying to Measure Up for a Long Time

A twenty-nine-year-old woman working in marketing, every evening as she goes to bed, mentally compiles a list of everything she did wrong that day. The list is long: answered a colleague too sharply, didn’t make it to the gym, ate the wrong thing for dinner, spent an hour scrolling her phone instead of reading the book she’s «long overdue» to start. In the morning the list disappears — not because the issues are resolved, but because a new day begins, and a new list. She calls this «working on herself.» In reality this is not work on herself but work against herself — and the difference between these two formulations determines everything that follows in this chapter.

Compliance Without a Verdict

There is a great difference between the phrase «this is happening to me» and the phrase «I am this.» The first formulation leaves room for observation: what is happening is temporary, it occurs to a person rather than constituting their essence. The second formulation slams that room shut: a moment turns into a personality, a state into a verdict. Snapping at your child in the evening is a fact about one particular evening. Deciding afterward that you are a bad parent is no longer a fact but a verdict, handed down on the basis of one episode and extended to the entire personality.

The behavior that follows differs far more than the words themselves. A person who acknowledges the fact of the outburst can, a minute later, apologize to the child, work out what drove them to that flare-up — lack of sleep, accumulated irritation, a specific trigger — and think about what to do differently tomorrow. A person who passes the verdict «I am a bad parent» on themselves is no longer defending the relationship with the child but the verdict itself: either they exhaust themselves proving the opposite, or they resign themselves and start behaving as though the verdict were fair. Neither helps the child, nor does it help them.

Pause. Notice one action today dictated not by choice but by fear of someone else’s judgment.

The Invisible Condition

Freedom is not an abstract state somewhere in the future, after everything finally falls into place. It begins with a very small, almost imperceptible pause that is available right now. Not with some special enlightened state, and not with a promise to never make a mistake again, but with a simple, almost boring fact: right now I am thinking this; right now my body is tense; right now I am afraid; right now I want to give up on everything. The pause itself doesn’t solve the problem. It does something else — it restores the problem to its real size, instead of the catastrophic size it takes on in the dark, without an observer.

This can be verified with a simple everyday example. A man receives a message from his partner: «We need to talk.» Five words — and inside, an entire scenario is already unfolding: breakup, accusation, catastrophe. The body reacts before the mind manages to step in: the stomach tightens, the pulse quickens. If there is no pause at this moment, the person either lashes out in defensive aggression before the conversation even happens, or spends the whole day in anxiety, rehearsing justifications for an accusation that doesn’t exist. If there is a pause — even ten seconds — a chance appears to notice: «I’m catastrophizing right now based on five words.» The five words remain five words. Their real content will become clear in the conversation, not in panic invented in advance.

Pause. Where do I call my own personality a state?

The Moment of Automatism

One of the most persistent myths about growing up goes like this: an adult is supposed to know the answers. In practice the opposite happens: the ability to remain an adult at exactly the point where there is no answer is one of the precise markers of maturity. Uncertainty does not mean an absence of authorship over one’s own life. Sometimes it is precisely the willingness not to close a question with the first convenient version — because the convenient version calms things down fastest — that allows one to see more than one possible course of events.

Here it’s easy to confuse two different states: calm uncertainty and anxious haste that passes itself off as decisiveness. A person who panics and grabs the first explanation at hand — «he doesn’t love me anymore,» «I’m professionally unfit,» «something is simply wrong with me» — is not displaying willpower but fleeing the discomfort of not knowing. And far more often than we’d like to admit, it is precisely such a hasty explanation that we believe most strongly — to the point of conviction that leaves no room for doubt. Real stability looks far less impressive: it looks like a person who says to themselves «I don’t know yet» and doesn’t fall apart because of it.

Pause. What decision am I making out of exhaustion while telling myself it’s a conviction?

What Happens in the Body When Movement

Is Born of Shame

In this book the idea of growth is not abolished in any chapter — only the source from which that growth springs changes, and the source matters far more than it seems at first glance. If movement toward a goal is born of shame — of a deep-seated sense that one’s current self is not enough and needs to be replaced as soon as possible — then even achieved success brings no relief. The body remembers not the result but the original threat that made it necessary to run. So a person gets the promotion, the recognition, the ideal figure — and shortly afterward feels lacking again, because the lack was never about external circumstances but about an inner relationship to oneself that has stayed the same.

If the same movement is born of acceptance — «I’m curious what will come of this, and I want to try» — the goal stops being an exam for the right to exist and becomes what it actually is: creation. The difference isn’t visible from the outside: both people may be doing formally the same thing — running in the mornings, learning a language, building a business. The difference is felt from within, in the body, in whether relief comes after reaching the goal or the next bar immediately appears.

Pause. What in me is asking not to be fixed, but to be paid attention to?

What This Looks Like on an Ordinary Day

It’s easier to check your own inner contract with yourself not through grand declarations but through everyday trifles, because it’s precisely in the trifles that there is the least self-censorship. How do you talk to yourself right after a mistake — out loud or to yourself? What happens inside when you allow yourself to rest: calm, or guilt? How do you react to someone else’s displeasure — do you check the facts, or do you immediately believe you’re guilty? What goals do you set when you know for certain that no one will find out or evaluate the result?

Going through this same set of questions, a woman in her thirties noticed something simple: she never praises herself out loud, but ceaselessly criticizes herself even alone at home. «Idiot, how could you do that,» she says to herself after spilling coffee, in exactly the tone her mother used when she was a child. This observation doesn’t instantly change anything by itself. But it removes some of the guilt: it becomes visible that the tone of the criticism isn’t her own invention but an inherited habit, one that can be viewed from the outside rather than necessarily continued automatically.

Pause. What price am I paying for the need to keep becoming better all the time?

Why the Old Strategy Seems Reasonable

A person rarely changes their explanation of their own life purely out of curiosity. A new explanation is usually sought when the old one has become too tight — has stopped bringing relief, stopped explaining what’s happening. This is a natural, healthy process. But there is a trap worth naming directly: a new explanation — a new diet, a new spiritual practice, a new theory of personality — can also become a cage, if it demands that a person constantly measure up to it just as rigidly as the old one did.

The sign that a new concept has turned into a new cage isn’t hard to recognize: it starts producing not relief but a new kind of anxiety — «I don’t have enough mindfulness,» «I’m doing the practice wrong,» «real spiritual people wouldn’t react this way.» Any idea — including the ideas in this very book — should ultimately return the reader not to a more complicated theory, but to the simple ability to notice what is happening and to choose. If a book starts demanding that you be its model follower, that’s a signal to stop and return to the first question: what am I actually feeling right now?

Pause. Which of my goals has stopped being a desire and become a piece of evidence?

The Cost of the Inner Argument

Not every impulse deserves belief. But not every impulse deserves a war either. Between blind obedience to the inner voice and its total suppression there is a third, far less dramatic path: hear what exactly this impulse is trying to say; understand what function it once served; assess what consequences following it now would lead to; and only then — choose. The impulse to quit in a fit of hurt may carry a legitimate kernel («I’m not respected at this job») and at the same time be poor guidance for immediate action.

Pause. Where am I letting someone else’s displeasure decide my life?

The Difference Between Fact and Interpretation

When the pause before action becomes a habit rather than a rare heroic effort, an unnoticeable but fundamental shift occurs in the very type of question a person asks themselves. The question «what should I be?» is a question addressed to an external model, to other people’s expectations, to an imagined norm. The question «what action matches how I want to live?» is a question addressed inward, to one’s own values, which may not coincide with anyone else’s expectations. Swapping one question for the other doesn’t solve every problem at once, but it changes the very architecture in which further decisions are made.

Pause. What would change if rest didn’t require justification?

A Small Pause

Picture an ordinary morning. Nothing dramatic happened overnight. You open your eyes — and even before getting out of bed, you already hear the inner commentary: «Alright, need to pull it together, can’t be late again, can’t mess everything up again.» Life on this morning begins not with an event, but with an attitude toward a day that hasn’t happened yet. It is precisely this attitude — not the day itself — that this book proposes to examine most closely.

It’s useful to run a small thought experiment: what if that same morning began with a neutral phrase — «good morning, let’s see what today brings»? The day won’t objectively become easier because of it: the same tasks, the same deadlines. But the body will live through it differently — more calmly, without going on the defensive from the first second. The difference accumulates over months of choosing this initial tone, not over a single day.