STOP LIVING BY CHILDHOOD RULES.

Your past shaped you, but it doesn’t have to keep calling the shots. Rewrite the patterns keeping you stuck.

What you learned in childhood might explain your struggles,
but it doesn’t have to decide your future.

Unpacked

ABOUT THE BOOK

In Unpacked, licensed psychotherapist and author Kristen Jacobsen offers a clear, no-fluff path to understanding how childhood shapes the way we move through adulthood. Through personal stories, clinical insight, and practical tools, she helps readers recognize how early emotional dynamics quietly become the blueprint for adult anxiety, self-doubt, and perfectionism.

This book explores how common patterns like:

  • Overworking to feel worthy

  • People-pleasing to avoid rejection

  • Emotional shutdown to stay safe

  • Self-criticism to stay in control

...aren’t random habits, they’re survival strategies that started in childhood and followed you into adulthood.

Whether you've done years of therapy or are just starting to wonder why success doesn’t actually feel good, Unpacked will help you:

  • Understand how your subconscious beliefs were formed

  • Connect the dots between your past and your present patterns

  • Recognize how your nervous system got wired for hypervigilance

  • Learn tools to shift the emotional scripts you’ve been stuck in

With a mix of honest reflection, client stories, and guided exercises, this book helps you move beyond insight and into change. You'll stop just managing symptoms, and start changing what’s underneath them.

If you’re ready to stop living by the rules you never chose, Unpacked shows you how to let them go.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

How your early beliefs still shape your work, confidence, and the people you let in.

Why your coping strategies, like overthinking, hustling for approval, or shutting down, aren’t flaws but leftover survival tactics.

Simple, practical ways to rewire your thinking, calm your body, and finally live like you’re safe to be exactly who you are.

  • "Finally, a book that explains why smart, successful people still feel stuck. Every chapter hit a little too close to home, in the best way."

    Amanda

  • “Like therapy with receipts. Kristen gets right to the root of why we sabotage ourselves, and how to stop.”

    John

  • “Unpacked helped me understand myself in a way no self-help book ever has. It’s equal parts compassion and clarity.”

    Bella

Kristen

Meet

Kristen Jacobsen, LCPC, is a licensed therapist, speaker, author, and coach who helps high-achieving adults unlearn the subconscious beliefs driving their anxiety, perfectionism, and emotional exhaustion. With a background in evidence-based therapy and a talent for cutting through psychological fluff, Kristen brings sharp insight and grounded compassion to her work with clients, and now to her readers.

After years of seeing intelligent, self-aware people continue to sabotage their own peace, Kristen wrote Unpacked: How to Detach From the Subconscious Beliefs That Are Sabotaging Your Life to help readers get to the root of their patterns. Blending personal narrative, client stories, and practical tools, Unpacked shows how childhood beliefs shape adult behavior, and how to finally rewrite the rules.

Kristen’s work centers on a simple idea: what you learned in childhood might explain your struggles, but it doesn’t have to decide your future. Whether through therapy, public speaking, or the pages of her book, she helps people stop overfunctioning, start healing, and live more aligned with who they truly are, not who they were expected to be.

As Seen On

  • The wound you avoid becomes the loop you live. You'll meet the same person in five different bodies, and you'll hit the same stall in your career and business in a thousand different ways. Sit with your Self. Discover who you are.

    J. Mike Fields

Start healing what’s been running the show.