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

by Nicole LePera

A parent-figure’s role is to be a guide. A loving parental relationship provides a secure base for a child to return to as they venture out into life, with all the ups and downs associated with this great transition. A guide is largely nonjudgmental, allowing the child to exist as they are. A guide is more likely to observe and act from a state of awareness and wisdom. This allows the child to experience the natural consequences of their actions without intervention and laying the foundation for them to build self-trust. Think of the guide as a wise teacher, someone who has faith in the foundation they have provided and trusts that the student will be able to weather what life brings. The child then internalizes this faith. This doesn’t mean that the child avoids pain, loss, anger, or grief—the wide array of human feelings—instead, the guide or parent-figure has provided a base of security and resilience

for the child to return to when hard times come.

It’s very common for parent-figures to project their own unresolved traumas onto their children.

When a parent-figure denies a child’s reality, they are unconsciously teaching the child to reject their intuition, their “gut feeling.” The more we learn to distrust ourselves, the deeper this intuitive voice withdraws, becoming harder and harder to hear. This results in lost intuition and internal conflict.

The practice of emotional regulation enables us to remain centered and calm through the various stresses that life brings and return to a physiological baseline.

Now that we’re not consumed with survival, we are free to be our authentic selves.

the inability to form true intimacy with others is usually not about some defect in personality but a product of our vagal tone, a measure of our nervous system’s response to our environment. When we have poor vagal tone, we have higher sensitivity to perceived threats in our environment, which overactivates the body’s stress response and leads to reduced emotional and attentional regulation overall.

We can unlearn and relearn as adults, even if we’ve endured significant trauma in our past. We can harness the power of our bodies to heal our minds and the power of our minds to heal our bodies.

Some of us even have an emotional response similar to what is described in popular literature as “survivor’s guilt,” the feeling of being “the one that got away.” These feelings may make some of us hesitant to share details about our growth and achievements with those we “left behind.” Or we may find ourselves feeling terrible about evolving out of our old roles and want our loved ones to follow in our path of transformation so that our relationships with them can remain intact. Many of us truly care for our loved ones, and want them to “see that change is needed” so they can then heal. This is a wonderful aspiration, and the reality is that not everyone may be on the same path. Healing, as you now know, takes daily commitment and has to be chosen. When our loved ones are not choosing the same path as we are, it is helpful to stop fighting the reality of what is freeing up some of our energy to practice accepting all of our feelings about that reality.

We are trapped in fight, flight, or freeze responses that make it physiologically impossible to form authentic bonds.

Achieving intimacy requires expressing your authentic Self (as shadowy as it can often be) without fear of being misunderstood or facing reproach or retribution.