About

I started Human Underneath because I kept noticing how we had stopped being human beings to each other. Not dramatically. In small ways. In line at the grocery store. In conversations that should have been listening. In the way we treat strangers and sometimes the people closest to us. I watched people I grew up with become strangers over politics. I watched social media turn nuance into a side to pick. I watched judgment replace encouragement in the places where encouragement used to live.

I am not a therapist. I am not a coach. I am not trying to be an authority on anything. I am someone who stepped away from social media and paid attention to my own patterns long enough to notice what was underneath them. What I noticed turned into a book and some software that might help other people do the same kind of looking.

If you are in therapy, stay in therapy. If you have a practice that works, keep it. This is not a replacement for any of that. This is the homework. The work between sessions, or instead of waiting for one. The work of looking at yourself, plainly, without the dialect of self-help getting in the way.

What got me here was a question I could not stop asking. What would happen if more of us did the inward work first, and treated each other like human beings again because of it? I do not know the answer. I am building Human Underneath to find out.

Nathan G. Echols II