Psychologist Dr. Nicole LePera Uncovers Ways to End Your Self-Sabotaging Habits | Women of Impact

a lot of us have a lot of beliefs that are keeping us stuck possibly the things that happen to me will always be with me and they likely will and there's still healing that can be done and you can still make choices that can shift or change the way you experience your current reality [Music] psychology today's definition of self-sabotage is when you create problems in your daily life that interfere with long-standing goals the most common self-sabotaging behaviors include procrastination self-medication with drugs or alcohol and forms of self-injury such as cutting but guys i gotta be honest this definition is actually rather extreme what about the type of self-sabotage we may not even be aware we're doing the death of a thousand cuts when you tell yourself you're going to start eating healthy come monday it's on but since it's friday and as well spend the next three days eating everything in sight after all i don't start till monday right self sabotage or what about when you want to meet someone you find someone you like but hang on they don't check all the boxes so what's the freaking point your expectations are so high that they just can't be met self sabotage but guys fret not today's guest the holistic psychologist is back to help us not only identify the patterns of self-sabotage but give very tactical tips on how we can sabotage our self-sabotage the woman who is empowering millions of individuals around the globe to be the hero of their own life by healing themselves dr nicole lupera welcome to the show thank you so much lisa for having me back it's always an honor to chat with you ah girl such an honor to have you back where i want to start this conversation is with a quote of yours our minds seek the familiar repeating the same behaviors is called a pattern which comes from childhood conditioning we repeat what we know so i kind of want to just start from the beginning if that is true how do we start to identify what patterns we have developed from childhood that are not serving us yeah absolutely actually got chills hearing you re-read that just because of how powerful that just statement is and then i think when i answer the question experiencing that statement is incredibly powerful so what do i mean by that observing observing yourself so i can sit here and say you know we're patterned we repeat everything from our lifestyle habits you know the things we do first thing in the morning how we go about our day um i could tell you you repeat thoughts that we get very repetitive um we tend to tell ourselves the same narrative in our head most of us all day long a lot of us now are really familiar with the phenomenon of thoughts producing emotional reactions in the body i think most of us i know myself i've sat on a couch had an anxiety provoking thought you know worried about something happening typically something not positive happening and i myself at least have thrown my body into a complete reaction i would start to feel panicked so a lot of us are repeating the same emotional experiences too and the way we identify that is we watch ourselves observe yourself the large majority of us are in autopilot all day long we wake up and we don't really consider the choices that we're making through the day that part of our brain those of you who are familiar with my work probably hear me go on and on about the subconscious that's where those patterns are stored so when we wake up pay attention to how many choices you're making for yourself that day or is your autopilot determining your day-to-day and chances are you are conditioned you are repeating those same patterns even if you intend to do differently okay that's amazing so how do you do that without judgment and then how do you do you know the david foster wallace quote um be like water my audience are probably sick of hearing this from me but it's the story where there's an older fish swimming one way there's two younger fish swimming the other the older fish goes how's it going boys how's the water the other small fish keep going one of them turns around and is like what the hell is water and the point being is that when you're in an environment day in day out from birth you don't even know it exists so knowing let's say these thought patterns and these assessments that you're making have started from the beginning how do you actually identify in fact even that it's a pattern and not just matter of fact um and then how do you do that without judgment yeah the judgment part i think is the piece lisa that we all struggle with um i kind of universally speak of a critical voice in our head because i quite literally think quite universally we all have that we all sit in judgment of ourself i'm better than you i'm worse than you good bad all of those words come from that ego space so it's a skill it's a practice and it's going to be difficult if you especially if you know you're someone with that inner critical voice you probably your habit is going to be to sit in judgment so i just like to voice these things because i know a lot of us can become very self-judgmental when it doesn't come naturally to us or when we do see those judgments being cast so we want to practice just viewing them as they are and i talk about the childhood and the wounding and the effective conditioning because i think a lot of us do judge ourselves a lot of us have maybe been through a lot of therapy have been through a lot of self-help might even consider ourselves really insightful we might essentially know better but yet we can't execute the choices to quote-unquote do better if you will and then we start to assign judgments on ourselves i'm broken i'm not meant to change i can't get better this isn't the life meant for me and really the list goes on so learning i think how to shift that learning how to just view things objectively as they are and understanding if you are someone who's stuck in that conditioning that it's not actually a sign of something being wrong with you it's a sign that your subconscious is functioning as all of ours do to keep you safe to keep you in that familiar place all right so let's do a real world example um because you're 100 right there's a massive difference between knowing something and then doing something we can know all the information but doing it our emotions get involved right the judgment gets involved and it just stops us so you're a psychologist you know exactly how to work your mind you know the tips and tools you're still obviously evolving and so how do you then let's say nicole wakes up in the morning and goes okay this is tough the situation of the world i know what to do um i don't want to place judgment on it because i know that doesn't serve me and but i'm still not feeling it like actually tech take me through those steps of what it looks like nicole opens her eyes has the negative thought and what yeah absolutely so this question isn't gonna i want to make some room for individual discernment thank you because i'm never going to say universally you know work through it the language i often use you know what i define the thoughts of not to do something or the feelings you know that come up when i go against my familiar when i try to activate in a new direction or make a new choice a lot of us do get that endless litany of reasons why not to do this new thing some of us might feel uncomfortable actually in our bodies we might just not feel like ourselves as we're making these new choices those i call resistances and again they're the messengers from that subconscious that should we choose to listen to those resistances before we know we are back in that familiar rut that's how it keeps us safe you will never hear me universally say ignore the resistance and do it anyway because i don't think that universally applies to every situation so i'll use myself as a prime example i wake up and there's a difference between mornings where i just like it is that old resistance i just kind of like don't feel like it though i can activate and make the choice against that otherwise and then there are different mornings where my body doesn't feel like it i'm emotionally exhausted in those circumstances i do urge the individual to honor their intuition or their inner knowing the part of their body that's saying you know what that new choice isn't for me today i'm actually going to surrender into maybe what my body needs today and it's not getting up at 5am and going to the gym maybe this morning i do something different that's the end product goal though is to get so in touch with ourself to learn often as i still do myself through trial and error to learn what my body and my emotional and my energy signals are to know and be able to differentiate whether or not it is that resistance and this is a moment where if i actualize this new choice right i can keep myself moving in that future self-direction or if this is a moment where you know what i'm going to honor my body or my emotions right now and make the choice that my need is telling me in that moment and how do you then make that distinction specifically what does that look like yeah absolutely and that comes after doing the work for some time right that comes after building a foundational connection to myself for me those of you who know my story know that i was completely dissociated for a very long time meaning i wasn't connected to my physical body so i couldn't hear its needs in any given moment i wasn't connected really nor did i know what to do with my emotions my emotional my energetic body i was more or less i was one of those people who learned from the book maybe how to teach others and when it came to my emotions you know i really really struggled so for me and in my healing journey like a lot of us need to do i took a lot of the steps to rebuild that balance to learn how to be conscious to learn how to connect with my body to sift through and differentiate the different signals so it didn't come overnight however now i'm at a connected enough place that i can start to make sense of the feelings that i'm having whether or not they're in my physical body or in my emotional body so again i know i'm not giving specifics as you do the work you you tend to fall into that connection and i think that's what we're all looking for most of us are looking to find our way back home to figure out what choices make sense for us and we live in a world where there's endless opinions and there's endless information now and there's endless tools and now i think we're all tasked with the individual you know responsibility to find our way to find the way into the tools and and what works for us to empower ourselves all right so once you've let's say you've observed the patterns how do you start identifying that it's linked to childhood trauma and then also even just childhood trauma i heard you talking about like it isn't even just like the super dramatic massive things that happen in life right like obviously extremely horrific sexual abuse things like that but i've even heard you talk about just certain things that your parents have said to you that created a certain belief system in you that you took into adulthood so can you talk to me about that break it down and then how do we start assessing that it started from childhood in order for us to unwind it yeah absolutely and and so the the study that you quoted it was the intro here i think it happened in the 90s ish at that time the way trauma was defined was in those it's in the field referred to as big t right the instances of abuse physical emotional sexual neglect and there was kind of i think seven seven uh questions and you get a score based on how many yeses you have this is amazing we need this in the field this was the first time as surprising as it might be for so many people that it took till the 90s for us to say hey these things that happen in childhood carry these negative effects into adulthood so that's we're really grateful on the one hand that we finally have this document it however i think that that definition is is much more limited than can be helpful for most of us right and i'm one of those people because when i meet something like the aces scale or when i learned about ptsd post-traumatic stress disorder which is typically the diagnosis that goes along with checking those boxes on the aces scale i think i score maybe a one which is very very low it's not one of the higher numbers so someone like myself and i think there's a lot of us especially in the self-healers community that was really confusing to me because i see that i'm not scoring high enough to really necessitate that i should be struggling in any way and i i know for a very long time i mean i have extensive experience i worked with in substance recovery facilities i've worked with individuals on the spectrum right so i i have worked with people who scored very high on the aces yet i had a there was a striking similarity that i would see in the patterns that i was living whether or not they're just in my day-to-day in my thoughts and the way i felt definitely in my relationships and i would see the same patterns in those who were scoring really high on the aces so for me for a very long time i had a hard time making sense of what the hell was wrong with me you think it validated you then i mean i think a lot of us would feel like something's broken or something's wrong or i'll just exclude it and maybe there's no language put it that way for what's going on with me and the danger there or the risk there is that we do tend to assign these then global not so positive evaluations i'm broken i just can't achieve that thing that's not meant for me i'm stuck with these symptoms for my lifetime right that sort of generalized language the more you repeat that to yourself the more you become stuck so a big part of my work you'll hear what i talk about and i and i've coined it or i refer to it i should say a spiritual trauma all of the other ways that i believe and one of the major reasons i call myself a holistic psychologist now is because i believe there's an interconnection between our bodies our minds and i believe a soul that indescribable thing that makes us human that none of us can really put our finger on though i feel like in increasing numbers we're all kind of resonating more and more with that and in that area i believe is where a lot of trauma occurs so when our young soul comes to our family of origin whatever that might look like and whatever you know tucked in country of the world that is i believe quite universally all of our souls as humans seek three things to be seen to be heard and to have the space to just express as is and i think that's the area where a lot of us you know weren't born in environments that allowed that space didn't had an accumulation of experiences where we didn't feel seen we didn't feel heard we didn't feel our reality was validated and then again we stored those in our subconscious and we continue to repeat those patterns and it can cause a lot of the same symptomology of dissociation of medication and numbing with all of the ways that we do that all the ways we cope in my opinion often are born out of those very early spiritual wounds so a very big advocate for expanding definitions of trauma for understanding you know that you might not be checking the boxes of the big traditional things that you thought you know could cause you to continue to struggle in ways that you still might be struggling based on those past experiences and so just something else i like to offer because if you're like me i have very limited memories of my childhood i can't close my eyes and like kind of review like a movie my past so to speak to your question of how do i know if it's based in my childhood or not when i speak about my lack of memory i do get asked a lot what if i don't have memory what if i can't see the moment in time in my past or know that that pattern originated there i don't believe you have to because i believe your conditioned behaviors now are a reflection of that so the question you really want to ask yourself isn't where did it come from and do i need to know where it came from to unpack it it's how is this serving me now and if it's no longer serving me now i have other tools that i can begin to make choices to begin to use and develop new habits all right so how did you then identify because you said i just thought i had a bad memory and i even heard you say in an interview that you just assumed that like oh people in your family's got alzheimer's that's maybe just you but in researching going deep in yourself you started to realize actually no that was just your um i don't know if you use this word but kind of like a survivable mechanism to just forget in the past so how did you even break that down so that oth and i understand like it's not a one for one but just so that people can start to notice oh yeah i actually thought that about myself huh based on what she just said maybe this isn't just me maybe this is something that i've developed and i really need to look at that yeah i think anything anytime we see ourself repetitive okay right that especially in situations i know we all can identify those where whatever we're doing in that repetitive fashion isn't translating to the results that we want right if each time this this this conversation comes up and you know i react in in one particular way and i get this con reaction or repercussion if you will and that doesn't work for me yet i can't stop that's usually an indicator that we're kind of stuck in in that autopilot so for me it wasn't an aha lightbulb moment for me it was very gradual it was beginning to use different tools so for me it was simply realizing how unconscious i was oh consciousness great okay so i've learned what i first learned what does it mean to be conscious okay being conscious means being fully present being in a moment having my senses activate it okay first question ask myself how how often are you in that state during your day and my first answer was i'm not so now i know i don't really know what consciousness is like so until i begin to practice that new habit and settle into now a more conscious life now by contrast i can understand consciousness versus unconsciousness so a lot of us have to begin to action i guess is the way i want to simply answer this to break those habits to give ourselves new lived experiences to be able to understand right which was that remnant of the past and which is the future that i choose to walk toward wow so when you say senses do you literally sit there and go all right what am i hearing yeah let's tune into my hearing sense what am i smelling let me tune into that like do you kind of just take it one by one and just really yeah absolutely so listeners who don't you know yet know kind of how conscious or unconscious they are throughout their day we all walk around with cell phones best suggestion just set an alarm on your phone for random times throughout your day so you might not even remember by the time the alarm goes off when that alarm goes off and you oh my alarm's going off first ask yourself where was my attention where's my attention right now that you know i hear this thing and now i might zap back in to the current moment where was it was i worrying about the argument that i had with my partner in the morning was i may be worrying about what's happening tomorrow was i like me somewhere somewhere else but i don't really know where i was and then when i do identify that i was somewhere else as a lot of us will using your senses doing exactly like you said they can be incredibly what we call grounding because when i'm activating my senses i've now removed my attention from wherever else it was and i've brought it back into my physical body entering the present moment activating the prefrontal cortex and actually different part of our brain from that subconscious that was probably calling the shots until you tuned in firing that up we know that neurons that fire together wire together right so we're almost giving ourselves some mental training and then making it easier to access that conscious state in the future so yeah using your senses ask yourself i'm touching a nice pillow right here right i'm touching i'm smelling i'm feeling and now i'm conscious a lot of us probably will shift right out of that consciousness very quickly if we're used to being in that unconscious autopilot which is why i say it's a practice we have to over time gradually every chance we can make that choice when we notice oh i'm somewhere else to come back here i know that every time you're doing that you're helping your brain to make that your more easy to access stage i love that i mean it's so tactical and i'm such a huge fan of tactic you know technical advice because we can get lost in our emotions in the moment so having that was very extremely powerful um i now really really want to talk about trauma bonds what they are how they show up and i hear it so often right that it's it's the bonds that they have with people that people whether they can't find a partner or um find a partner but they're not happy with like please share your wisdom yeah absolutely and the reason why we're always i think i'm always talking and people really resonate with the concept of trauma bond lisa is because we we're interpersonal creatures we we need other humans a lot of times i do see my work being misinterpreted when people believe that when i speak the concepts of self-healing that i'm part of that message is on an island away from other people and i just want to clarify self-healing means gaining the supportive relationships around you learning how to be in your authentic self and be connected authentically with others because we need others we all need other humans and where our trauma bond conditioning began was from those earliest of humans it was for many of us the caretakers humans i believe might be the only species that is in a state of complete and utter dependency meaning when a human infant is born it cannot live on without another at least one other entity caring for it here those words come again physical emotional and spiritual needs most other mammals right can care for themselves if they're a certain you know age of gestation they can live on we cannot we are completely in a state of awe in a sense when we're just infants we are learning we are absorbing our brain waves are actually firing in a particular kind of frequency that allows us to take in everything around us we're learning essentially and so what we're learning is how all of those needs happen in our body and how to get them met because relationships are so important we began to enter into dynamics with the people around us specifically to keep ourselves connected and safe so that we can ensure that our next set of physical needs get met our next set of emotional needs get met and that we are seen heard and expressed to the best of our ability so now we begin to form bonds you know kind of arrangements with our caregivers and those are the ways that we can replicate showing up into adulthood so those of us who didn't have that space to self-express to just be who we are who maybe heard things like tone down this aspect of yourself or maybe you had a mother who shied away from when you were sad because they themselves can't handle sadness in themselves they probably weren't taught how to cope either maybe you have a parent whose you know spirit is completely constricted they're not self-expressed because they're trudging along in survival mode caring for their family that parent might have a hard time holding space very well intentioned parent don't get me wrong might have a hard time holding space for your spirit and its self-expression so before we know it because that bond is so important we begin to sacrifice those parts of our self we become the helper the caretaker the fixer we learn how to continue to show up in that relationship to get our needs met to the best of our ability we're very adaptive so we begin to make those adaptations we maybe begin to assume those roles and then that becomes a framework for how we relate to others then before we know it we're in school we have little peers and then this is where the patterning starts right we become then that little helper student in the classroom and then before we know it flash forward right we're the helper adult and we continue to show up in these very constricted or restricted ways continuing to keep ourselves from that full self-expression maybe even continuing to do our own needs a disservice maybe putting other people's needs before our own and that's what trauma bonding is essentially simply it's those repeated patterns of relating to others specifically that were formed in childhood that for the most part aren't allowing us to fully express all of our needs all right that was an amazing breakdown so now let's say you're in a relationship and typically at least for me before i started getting the whole mindset space it was like oh it's them right it's their fault it's it's them um but then once you start to self-assess um you start at least for me i was like looking at okay well what's the common denominator right okay i'm always getting frustrated in relationships but okay well that's a me problem um and it's so powerful to identify what that issue is and then work on it and i've heard you even say like when you and lolly started to be very open with each other about what those traumas bonding were you then could approach that relationship at least understanding each other's so that when they act in a way that may trigger you at least you understand where that's coming from so break that down to me how did you get to that point because that's so powerful it's not even just like get over your freaking trauma bonds right you're not saying that you're actually saying identify the trauma bonds in yourself but also i've heard you say about your partner so that you guys can work together that was so powerful so breakdown how do we actually do that yeah and i get questioned a lot you know what happens if we do identify that we're in a trauma bond is this doomed right most of us adults are in one this also applies just to make clear to friendships to any dynamic any time where me and someone else um i too was someone who pointed blame i blamed all of my previous partners for the language i would use is their emotional you unavailability say that about every poem you just it's you you're not emotionally available to me you're not emotionally available to me until i became to until i came to realize i wasn't emotionally available to me so how can i i wasn't even being emotionally open honest transparent i didn't know my emotions nor did i really fully share them with someone else so how can one emotionally connect how did you come to that conclusion so how i came to that conclusion is i watched myself in all of my relationships okay nicole if you're having a hard time connecting with people let's see where are emotions do you bring emotions to friends when you do what do they say what do they do where's the disconnect didn't take long before i realized no i'm not bringing emotions to people i'm not giving anyone an opportunity because i don't know what my emotions are so if we watch ourself again if we see a pattern that's across all of our relationships chances are it's not all of those people like you said what is the common denominator i want to emphasize too two people create a relationship right so either party too is playing a role in the trauma bond that's probably precipitate or continuing so the person on the other side is probably replicating their own past dynamic as well so can you heal trauma bonds absolutely you know it takes a lot of honesty a lot of times the honesty happens after the fact after the argument after the escalation right after my emotions got out of control when i can have access to my prefrontal cortex again to look at it from a different angle and what i came to realize and this is the case with lolly and i as well there are a lot of times when the way you cope in a activated moment or a partner copes to keep themselves safe or to regain safety oftentimes triggers another person so the quick example i'll use is what we call in the field withdrawal approach so we have kind of two people chasing each other so when lolly gets emotionally overwhelmed she shuts down and so the way she shuts down is she either needs to stop the conversation the emotional you know aspects of it or leave the room go take a walk that's again her nervous system is in overdrive and she needs to calm back come back into her safety before we can continue the conversation having an emotionally avoidant mother all these are sounding familiar right oh emotionally avoidant mother i picked emotionally avoidant partners right i was emotionally avoided myself so this is how you start to picture you know put all these pieces together my emotionally avoided mother her lack of emotional connection to me was my first abandonment so when lolly needed a moment at the start of our relationship to regain her safety and her grounding that was probably the most painful thing that could have ever happened to me in that moment because i'm having a feeling and when you leave that's that earliest wound that i had in childhood so what i would do is scream and yell and run after her making her flee more into right because she's now escalating saying why are you chasing me i'm unsafe and i'm saying you're making me unsafe by leaving me and now we're locked and that's really hard to break because in that those moments we're both in that emotional brain and we're both typically both partners or whomever they are are trying to regain safety and again it becomes complicated when two different people are having two different tactics and they're triggering each other in the midst of it all so obviously a lot of work later a lot of both of us starting to understand our escalation points so that we both can start to say hey you know this conversation is starting to feel like it's escalating me into a point of you know not feeling safe anymore can we put a pin in this now and revisit it later sometimes that's the tools that we need to choose as this is evolving learning ourself and when we need to regulate or take steps to regulate ourselves obviously communicating that to our partner so that they don't feel abandoned in that moment and then revisiting the conversation at hand later when we're in a different part of our brain wow i love that you ended on like in the communication because that's going to be the important part is communicating what is happening but also like it has to be both sides so like what would you have done actually if you were just like okay these you know i'm going deep i'm looking at these trauma bonding but lolly wasn't do you think that that would have been a breaking point if you were willing and your partner wasn't because i'm just trying to project people that are listening right where it's like they they clicked on this video because they want to hear from you they want tactics they want tips they're thinking about it and for them it's like they're willing to do the work but what if their partner isn't would you say that that it could be it's really difficult then to both be aligned and have a successful relationship so two things could happen if you're with a partner right that doesn't believe they need to do the work that isn't doing the work whatever i get asked a lot how do i make you know partner wife friend mom change do the work and unfortunately i always give the disappointing answer which is that you can't healing is so individual it takes so many choices so much awareness on a day-to-day basis that you have to internalize the process and do it for yourself or at least show up for yourself in making those choices daily so you just can't doing your own work oftentimes like i said one or two things can happen as you work through your conditioning and developing consciousness and creating new choices sometimes the thing that were issues you navigate them differently the climate and the relationship changes the dynamic shifts gradually just by proxy of you being different that those things aren't necessarily issues you know anymore and or you come to the clarity that the relationship maybe isn't the relationship for your future that's something you'll know as you evolve into this this isn't a choice i don't think you make when you've deemed your partner not willing to do the work because that beautiful space of change can happen and does so my family for instance who i think when we spoke last i was not speaking with them so i for those of you who aren't aware i think for about two years i ended up putting up the ultimate boundary essentially coming from a codependent family and i didn't i went no contact and we're now back and repairing relationships um with my family i know that there's some beliefs that my family has and that my parents in particular have that are there they are what they are right now so with that said you know i know how difficult it is to show up and to navigate relationships i also know that now two years later the person that i while i was still challenged right while those old habits are right there especially when you walk into that family home with the dynamic more or less still in place right i'm like oh it's really tempting i know i'm different now and i'm empowered so when i go home and i experience them i actually experience them differently even though some of their beliefs are still there and they haven't changed if you will in some ways and i want to honor all the changes that they have done so i can relate to that it doesn't bother me as much anymore because i'm in a different space so a lot of your own work could trickle into your relationship um and just shift the way you experience it in a way that makes it more sustainable oh man i still want to go down the rabbit hole of like how you dealt with your family like what was that preparation because here's i i project right everyone projects so i'm projecting um you've armed up and as i was using that word in my own head i was like that's the worst freaking language to go and like welcome your you know or like join your family with open arms if you're telling yourself you're armed up but i kind of think that i would write i'd almost run through every scenario of all the things they're gonna say i would repeat how i will react like so that when i get there i'm not surprised um how did you then if you had let's say set a boundary you weren't seeing your family now you're i want to embrace my family i'm going to go back i know they're doing some work but they're not there yet how did what did that preparation look like because i assume again projecting i assume there may have been some fear that you would slip back into the old nicole yeah absolutely so one the major reason that i made the most one of the most difficult decisions to cut off contact was to prevent was based in that fear of slippage i had tried so many versions of putting different types of boundaries in place with all family members that weren't effective that for my own self because i do come from very codependent conditioning meaning worrying about everyone else's needs before my own you know if they feel some kind of way then i'm to tend to that feeling regardless of how i feel um and i repeated that pattern you know over and over again so cutting them off or making the decision to go no contact for me was to clear out that space and it was almost a two-year period that i felt i need it when i went into no contact it was with a question mark i honestly didn't know what and when was going to come next with them and i was just made the promise to check in with myself to feel my way so after about two years of me just doing work consistently to heal to identify my physical emotional spiritual needs i started to get that inner ping of huh family huh family you know things were starting to like come up for me that i was considering opening that door so i knew right i got to the point where i'm now willing to kind of see where they're at and i had to have many conversations with myself about the boundaries because i was still fearful a little bit that okay well now that they're back in you know i was afraid it was going to be a slippery slope into those old behaviors so i had many moments where consciously i just had to continue to coach myself through to show up what i noticed and this is what's interesting that thinking of well what how are they experiencing the fact that i didn't respond yet how are they experiencing that i told them i'll call them next week when it works with my schedule how are they experiencing oh they're probably mad oh they're probably upset oh they're i would actually talk to them and everything i imagine i'm like hi mom oh hi have you been you know nothing that i imagined was the case was so time and time of doing that i realized wow nicole you're really projecting all of that past and all the ways you imagined they were or maybe did experience them to be in the past into the now and every moment you're having an interface with them a text a call you're not getting confirmation they're actually happy to hear from you you have your conversation you put the phone down and you more or less can keep it moving on your own in your own world and so i taught myself along the way that i can't listen up here i can't i have to watch what i'm imagining and how i'm imagining they're receiving this new space that's essentially what i'm doing can i relate to them and have a little bit of space still have them in my life so not no contact but have more space than i did in childhood that's comfortable for me how do i do that what do i do in the space became my awareness and when i'm in that space and i'm holding space for them if i'm imagining them from that past self i'm doing this all a disservice and i'm causing myself stress because i realized i was having problems with the space i don't actually know how to be in relation with them from a distance so i'm finding my way um and i think the teaching and the lesson that i'm sharing is my mind was projecting a lot of those past stories so i have to take responsibility for that and the language i use with myself often whether it's my family my friends the community i want to hold space for their future self because i've had so many people on my journey that saw a version of me that i was capable of that i didn't yet see that in that helped me along my way even in the beginning if i wanted to punch them in their face you know for and i think this is a lot of the challenge so somewhere in our conversation today you know seeing that that that meme that triggers you or having that moment where a feeling comes up you know can really really be a learning experience in in a lot of ways about ourselves about that conditioning and the more we can hold space for and it can come from that place of oh i don't i don't want you to see this future me you seeing that scares me um my promise to myself though is to hold that space for my family included so to always show up and to try to allow them to show up differently as we all continue to find this new version of a relationship that's more workable for all of us wow there's one thing that you said that i really want to touch on is you said now then i can take responsibility for it and i was trying to think i was like how do i ask this question without people actually getting pissed off or annoyed at me and i was like you know what i just have to be me and say hopefully i've proven i dedicate my life to empowering women so hopefully that's approved to everyone watching and listening that my intentions are very pure when i say how do we stop using our childhoods as an excuse for how we show up today and i mean that in the most like i don't want to be people up because it's not necessarily an excuse in fact maybe it is a reason whatever word you want to use and but sometimes i really do think like if i'm having a discussion with someone and they're like oh but this happened in my childhood it's almost some sometimes i've noticed people use that as a reason to act the way they act and it'd be like well you've just got to accept it because this happened in my past how do we stop using that as an excuse yeah i like that it's a really great great question and i think the more we can incorporate a three-letter word and into our life the more we can become flexible and let things be this and right so yes a lot of us experience things when we didn't have choice we didn't have power we were very young in our childhood and they as we now know as our full conversation they carry effects you know on our physical bodies and our nervous systems our emotional bodies our spiritual senses of self the way we show up in the world yes and as an adult or as a maturing individual right we still have to show up in responsibility for the choices that we make so and i use that word and and i've broken myself of the butt habit that a lot of us do right where we exclude well this happens so that makes this un impossible or etc and the more we and sometimes we just train ourselves with language notice in your mind how many times do i say but this but this this and we can just regimen and and and and the more we make space so i had really painful things that happened to me and i'm maybe stuck in a in a trauma body and a trauma bond i'm stuck repeating these patterns of emotional reactivity perhaps my nervous system is even completely dysregulated making me very understandably feel like i have no control and as an adult there are possibly some tools out there that i can begin to implement one small daily promise at a time to begin to recreate that balance to begin to re-establish because our not only our minds our whole body can be trained can be taught can evolve can change as we grow so bad things happened and they probably are still causing and i talk about the body and all of the foundational practices to help our body regain that balance and i can begin to make those choices to change my future and it probably won't be overnight though somewhere down the line and then the beautiful thing that happens as you walk this journey you actually empower yourself so all of those beliefs and the limitations that i had too i told myself from the genetics that my you know my family gifted me with to even the personality characteristics my whole family's uptight and anxious so that's all i can be is uptight and anxious until i taught myself something else now you and i were joking right about beforehand and i'm like throwing peace signs like calm person right so oh i actually there's more to me so until you walk the journey of healing and change and transformation a lot of us aren't going to believe we can do it gradually however over time i don't even know when belief happened for me but somewhere along the line i began to believe i could and that's the most empowering part of it and i think that a lot of us have a lot of beliefs that are keeping us stuck possibly the things that happen to me will always be with me and they likely will and there's still healing that can be done and you can still make choices that can shift or change the way you experience your current reality oh god girl you go deep onto so much of this in your book so i desperately desperately want everyone to share your book so where can they find it well thank you i'm smiling because uh those of you who will be reading my book which comes out on march 9th though it's pre-order now how to do the work links amazon bookshop couple international links are are available now it's finally the first place where the whole theory of you know mind body soul and healing is all in one place and it just so happens to have a lot of narrative so i go into my journey of healing and obviously community members and clients and i also made sure at the end of each chapter there's exercises and journal prompts so it is a little bit of both it's the content and the information with the story of how it applies in people's life and then the really how to so i'm hoping this is a book that you know will live on for people you can pick it up read it do some of the do some of the work put it down maybe revisit it and have it take on a new life somewhere later so how to do the work love it i'm so freaking excited girl seriously where can people find you because your instagram posts are bloody mind-blowing as well so where can people find it absolutely the dot holistic psychologist is where you will find me each and every day putting out the healing content doing the work of healing connect with the amazing community of self-healers so come join us hell yeah guys guys check out everything she does she's got a book she's got youtube channel she's got instagram which is also fire if you're not subscribed guys click the link below and if you're not following me follow me at lisa billy and until next time guys be the hero of your own life peace out [Music] what up guys thanks so much for watching this video if you'd like another dose of bad or arsery make sure you watch this video right here or this one right here because i know you'll like them but hey also while you're here guys you might as well click that subscribe button down there so you don't miss any future episodes and until next time be the hero of your own life peace out you

Channel: Lisa Bilyeu

Views: 327,304

Keywords: women of impact, woman of impact, lisa bilyeu, tom bilyeu, impact theory, quest nutrition, motivation, inspiration, Nicole LePera, Lisa Bilyeu, Women of Impact, WOI, the holistic psychologist, holistic psychology, self healing, choosing your mindset, healing the mind, changing behavior, change your mindset, work through trauma bonds, trauma bonds, changing habits, nicole lepera how to do the work, how to do the work, nicole lepera tom bilyeu, nicole lepera impact theory

Id: S5H--6aJSbM

Length: 46min 17sec (2777 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020