That's how much Liber can mean 2

Nick: freed from a life of extremes.

For a long time, there seems little to worry about for Nick (28). What he tackles succeeds. He is social, diligent, achievement-oriented. A pioneer. His parents: each other's extremes. Mother sweet, sensitive, caring. Father smart, strict, coercive, risk-averse. Knows everything better. Always demands the first, last and highest word. Normal conversation, an exchange of views and opinions, respect for another's individuality: Nick can't remember. What counted at home: to perform and to be right. Sensitivity, listening, feeling - that was for women. And women did the housework.

Father's will is law. Nick doesn't really know any better. But when he has been on the job for a few years, this conviction begins to break him down. He develops into a builder and breaker at the same time. At times attracts, then repels. Loses himself in work or in parties. "Yes, this is me!", he thinks one moment, "this is what I like!". Only to completely change his mind the next. The cause: Nick has come to know another side of himself. His mother's, but amplified. He turns out to be highly sensitive. Confusing! Men aren't supposed to be sensitive, are they?

Really critical becomes this inner conflict when the startup he lifted off the ground catches on. But the better the results, the greener the grass on the other side of the hill. Would another industry suit him better him? Or work for a boss? Should he look for another relationship? Nick begins to feel trapped. Sleeps poorly, is easily irritable, seems to be looking for reasons to collapse what he has built, too.

Mainstream social workers do not understand what he cannot explain to them himself either: that he has no idea how to balance the two poles manifesting in him. Finding a middle ground, finding compromises? Nick wouldn't know what that is, how to do it. And he feels himself sliding into the abyss.

An initial conversation with Thomas inspires confidence. Nick is a conceptual thinker and has an immediate click with the inescapable logic of the Liber concept. And he discovers, "once I pick up practicing, it bears fruit, I see perspective. But if I leave it at that, it doesn't take long before I experience everything as difficult and heavy again.'

That one and that other experience, in the pit, out of the pit, they have to occur several times until Liber realization breaks through completely. Nick sees through: 'my happiness, my sense of security, it is mine and it is in me. And in no one, nothing and nowhere else'. Inwardly, too, he has become "his own boss.

Nick: "Looking back, I was trapped in a mess of unconscious conditioning. I could only think in extremes, in black and white, good and bad. That felt oppressive and that's why I kept trying to escape. To end up in another prison, another extreme. The fact that I started to recognize that pattern freed me from it. It feels like only now am I starting to live.'