How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self

by Nicole LePera

This scenario will likely feel familiar: You decide that today is the day that you’ll change your life.

To truly actualize change, you have to engage in the work of making new choices every day. In order to achieve mental wellness, you must begin by being an active daily participant in your own healing.

Emotional addiction is particularly powerful when we habitually seek or avoid certain emotional states as a way to cope with trauma.

When we become a diagnosis, it decreases incentive to change or try to explore root causes. We identify with the label. This is who I am.

We are, of course, given a set of genes, but, like a deck of cards, to some degree we can choose which hands we want to play. We can make choices about our sleep, nutrition, relationships, and the ways we move our body that all alter gene expression.

Healing is a daily event. You can’t “go somewhere” to be healed; you must go inward to be healed. This means a daily commitment to doing the work. You are responsible for your healing and will be an active participant in that process. Your level of activity is directly connected to your level of healing. Small and consistent choices are the path to deep transformation.

Do you often find yourself unable to keep promises to yourself, attempting to make new choices or create new habits but always falling back on your old ones?

Even though consciousness makes us human, most of us are so immersed in our inner world, so unconscious, even asleep, that we aren’t aware that there’s a script continually running through our minds. We believe that script is the true “us,” the Self. But that chatter is just our thoughts. We practice thoughts all day long.

You may label these thoughts as “you,” but they are not you. You are the thinker of your thoughts, not the thoughts themselves.

Every time we make a choice that is outside of our default programming, our subconscious mind will attempt to pull us back to the familiar by creating mental resistance. Mental resistance can manifest as both mental and physical discomfort. It can take the form of cyclical thoughts, such as I can just do this later or I don’t need to do this at all, or physical symptoms, such as agitation, anxiety, or simply not feeling like “yourself.”

There is tremendous freedom in not believing every thought we have and understanding that we are the thinker of our thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. Our minds are powerful tools, and if we do not become consciously aware of the disconnection between our authentic Selves and our thoughts, we give our thoughts too much control in our daily lives.

Trauma creates the fundamental belief that we must betray who we are in order to survive.