Reading Daniel E. Ansel’s Dual Realities as Someone Trying to Unlearn the Story
There’s a version of myself I don’t like to talk about. Not because it’s shameful exactly, but because it doesn’t fit the narrative I’ve worked hard to build: the one where I am thoughtful, kind, and in control. But that other version still lives here, in my sharp tone, in the impulse to withdraw, in the small decisions I can’t explain until they’ve already hurt someone.
That’s why Dual Realities: The Illusion and Reality of Free Will by Daniel E. Ansel didn’t just land as an intellectual read. It landed as something else entirely, something closer to a reckoning.
The book’s premise sounds simple, even academic: free will isn’t binary. We are not entirely free, nor are we entirely bound. Ansel introduces the idea of a continuum, from reactive choices, driven by emotion or conditioning, to reflective choices, and eventually to strategic free will, the kind shaped by insight. But behind that framework is something harder to admit: the idea that much of what we do, especially when we’re wounded, isn’t fully conscious.
And if it’s not fully conscious, is it fully ours?
That question haunts the book in the best way, not with melodrama but with sincerity. Ansel, drawing from decades in behavioral health and social work, never strips people of accountability. But he also never demands that we forget what shaped them. He doesn’t believe in clean lines between harm and healing or between those who do damage and those who try not to. Often, they are the same people. Often, they are us.
Reading Dual Realities as someone who has been in therapy for years, who has done the worksheets, named the patterns and read the books, I still found myself holding my breath. Not because the ideas were new exactly, but because Ansel threads them together with a kind of moral humility I haven’t often encountered.
He doesn’t try to rescue anyone. He just doesn’t throw them away.
For people navigating trauma, or what some call “complex recovery,” the kind that doesn’t follow a linear path, this matters. So many of us learned early that survival meant adaptation. That love was conditional. That trust came with consequences. Those lessons weren’t always spoken. They lived in glances, in slammed doors, in the silence that follows the wrong kind of question.
Eventually, they lived in us.
By the time we become adults, those adaptations are so baked in they feel like personality. Like choice. We say, “I’m just not good at closeness”, or “I’m the kind of person who shuts down” as if we wrote those rules. Dual Realities asks us to look again, not to rewrite history, but to understand that history writes us unless we interrupt the process.
Ansel spends time examining how the brain makes decisions before we’re aware of them and how past experiences create neurological grooves that predispose us to certain behaviors. He references science, Libet, Damasio, Kahneman, but not to impress. He’s building a case for grace. For the idea that autonomy isn’t just about resisting temptation or “being better,” but about developing the capacity to pause, to notice, to ask what part of this is me, and what part is something I learned to survive?
That question is heavy. It carries grief. Because when we begin to identify the scripts we’ve inherited, scripts that led us to hurt people, or leave too soon, or stay too long, we also begin to feel the weight of what we might have done differently if we’d known better. That’s where the emotional core of this book lives, not in abstraction but in that quiet space where regret and understanding meet.
And it’s here, too, that Ansel does something few authors in this space manage: he allows for moral self-examination without self-erasure. He acknowledges that we are shaped but not doomed. That the things we’ve done, especially in moments of reactivity, are real and must be reckoned with. But he separates accountability from punishment.
It’s a subtle but vital distinction. One that the recovery world doesn’t always get right. Sometimes, in an effort to take responsibility, we overcorrect. We tell ourselves we’re broken, unworthy, and dangerous. We measure our progress in terms of how harshly we can narrate our past. But shame rarely transforms. It just corrodes more quietly.
Ansel’s view is gentler but no less demanding. He believes in change. But he knows it’s slow. He knows it happens not in the dramatic apology or the overnight breakthrough but in the unglamorous moments, resisting the urge to lie when it would be easier, showing up even when the stakes are low, choosing curiosity over defence for the third time in one week.
And he knows that for some, those moments are monumental.
There’s a kind of quiet advocacy running through the book, one that speaks to therapists, teachers, and community workers but also to anyone who’s ever had to earn their own growth one insight at a time. Ansel writes about systems, judicial, medical, familial, and how they often demand accountability without making room for the conditions that undermine it. He isn’t anti-accountability. In fact, he sees it as essential. But he wants us to ask better questions.
Not “Why didn’t they just stop?”
But “When did they learn that stopping wasn’t safe?”
Not “Why do they keep sabotaging everything good?”
But “What did they learn about what love costs?”
That shift, from judgment to inquiry, is more than semantics. It changes how we treat others. And it changes how we treat ourselves.
I’ve been on both sides of harm. I’ve been the person who walked away too soon, who panicked in closeness, who pushed someone until they had to let go. And I’ve been on the receiving end of those patterns, too. Reading Dual Realities didn’t absolve me. It didn’t offer an answer to the late-night questions that still tug at me. But it gave me a different lens. One that doesn’t mistake damage for destiny.
What surprised me most was how useful the book was in the mundane. In how I approached a disagreement with my partner. How I noticed a pattern returning in my communication with a friend. In the small moment, I caught myself catastrophizing, paused, and asked what I was trying to avoid.
That kind of awareness isn’t dramatic. It’s not even visible to anyone else. But as Ansel suggests, that’s where agency begins, not in the myth of total freedom, but in the fragile, hard-won moments where we see the script and choose to revise it, even if just by a single line.
So much of healing is unlearning. But unlearning requires space: space to question, to feel, to try again. That’s what Dual Realities offers. Not a new identity, not a diagnosis, but space.
Space between thought and reaction.
Between history and hope.
Between who we’ve been and who we might still become.
And in that space, something shifts. Not everything. Not right away. But enough.
Enough to try again. And maybe, this time, to choose differently.