Nothing essential is missing.
On wholeness and the cost of becoming.
Order The Process of UnbecomingThe Process of Unbecoming
The Process of Unbecoming is an orientation to being human.
It begins with the understanding that what changes across a life is not our essential nature, but how experience is organized around vulnerability, protection, and connection in response to the conditions we live in. Patterns form as adaptations. Identity develops in relationship. Access to capacity widens and narrows over time. Wholeness itself remains intact, even when it feels distant.
This work starts from that ground. It assumes nothing essential is missing and approaches human experience as something to remain in relationship with as it unfolds.
Rather than offering techniques or steps, the book stays close to the movements already shaping a human life — how identity organizes, how protection takes form, how meaning develops, how access returns, and how experience continues to reorganize over time.
Unbecoming refers to the gradual loosening of effort organized around fixing, managing, or transcending ourselves. As that effort softens, experience no longer needs to be corrected in order to belong. What emerges is not a new self, but a different relationship with being human.
Nothing here asks you to arrive at a final state. The process is not linear and does not resolve. It moves as life does — through contact, fluctuation, relationship, and return.
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The Process of Unbecoming
“This book felt like a deep exhale I didn’t know I was holding. It gave me permission to stop striving and just be. Life-changing.”
-Lisa A.
“Lacey’s writing is like having a conversation with a wise, compassionate friend who truly gets it. I saw myself on every page.”
-Sarah T.
“Finally, a self-help book that isn’t about self-improvement. It’s about self- remembrance. A must-read for anyone tired of the hustle.”
-Adam K.
About the Author
I’m Lacey K. Kelly, a licensed therapist and the creator of The Process of Unbecoming. My work is shaped by years of sitting with people who were trying to make sense of their lives without turning themselves into problems to solve, and by a growing skepticism toward the cultural habit of treating the human condition as something that needs fixing.
The Process of Unbecoming emerged from both my clinical work and my own lived experience of exhaustion, illness, and identity coming apart. It isn’t written as a guide from the other side of those experiences, but from within them—where questions remain active, wholeness isn’t lost, and being human is no longer framed as the obstacle.
Learn More About Me
God is a Dirty Word: A Post-Secular Reckoning with Meaning and God
In The Process of Unbecoming, the work stays close to what happens when the effort to fix or improve the self begins to loosen. It traces how identity forms in response to conditions, how protection shapes experience, and how wholeness remains intact even as familiar structures fall away. Rather than moving toward a truer or better self, the work turns toward the ground of being human itself—beneath the stories we’ve learned to live inside.
When the noise quiets and the project of becoming recedes, a deeper question often arises about meaning and what we’re oriented toward once we stop organizing our lives around fixing ourselves.
What, if anything, holds us when certainty drops away?
God Is a Dirty Word: A Post-Secular Reckoning with Meaning and God explores the cultural inheritance that taught us to flinch at the language of God, and the ways both religion and secularism have narrowed our capacity to speak about meaning at all. This isn’t a book arguing for belief, and it isn’t a rejection of skepticism. It’s an inquiry into what becomes possible when we no longer treat questions of God and meaning as either naïve or dangerous, but as part of the human condition itself.
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