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

by Nicole LePera

The familiar feels safe; that is, until we teach ourselves that discomfort is temporary and a necessary part of transformation.

Unanimously, no matter their backgrounds, every client felt stuck—stuck in bad habits, damaging behaviors, predictable and problematic patterns—and it made them feel lonely, isolated, and hopeless.

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.

We are not merely expressions of coding but products of remarkable arrays of interactions that are both within and outside of our control. Once we see beyond the narrative that genetics are destiny, we can take ownership of our health. This allows us to see how “choiceless” we once were and empowers us with the ability to create real and lasting change.

We do have a genetic code at birth. But gene expression and repression are influenced by our environment. In other words: our life experiences alter us at the cellular level.

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.

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Before we can get to these deeper layers, we first have to gain the ability to witness our internal world.

Everything that follows is grounded in awakening your conscious awareness.

it means something much more expansive: a state of open awareness that not only allows us to witness ourselves and the life around us but also empowers choice.

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

When we’re in the “monkey mind,” as the Buddha first described it, we never stop thinking; our thoughts jumble together; there is no space to breathe and examine them.

our subconscious stores every single experience we ever have. This however isn’t just a neutral storehouse for facts and figures; it’s emotional, reactive, and irrational.

How we think, speak, and respond—all of this comes from the subconscious part of ourselves that has been conditioned by thoughts, patterns, and beliefs that became ingrained in our childhoods through a process called conditioning.

The subconscious mind loves existing in a comfort zone. The safest place, it turns out, is one you’ve been before because you can predict the familiar outcome.

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.

practices like yoga and meditation that help us to focus our attention on the present moment, are especially powerful in restructuring the brain. When new neural pathways are forged, we are able to break free of our default patterns and live more actively in a conscious state.

Witness without judgment. Just observe. The path forward is to learn 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.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a trauma expert and the author of the ground-breaking book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, describes dissociation as a process of “simultaneously knowing and not knowing” and says that traumatized people who disengage “simultaneously remember too little and too much.”

commonalities among people who experienced childhood trauma: many coped by building individual “spaceships” that led to lifelong patterns of disengaging, detaching, and making few memories.

Trauma occurred when we consistently betrayed ourselves for love, were consistently treated in a way that made us feel unworthy or unacceptable resulting in a severed connection to our authentic Self. Trauma creates the fundamental belief that we must betray who we are in order to survive.

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.

If parent-figures have not healed or even recognized their unresolved traumas, they cannot consciously navigate their own path in life, let alone act as trustworthy guides for someone else. It’s very common for parent-figures to project their own unresolved traumas onto their children. When even well-meaning parent-figures react under the influence of their own unconscious wounds they, instead of offering guidance, may attempt to control, micromanage, or coerce a child to follow their will. Some of these attempts may be well intentioned.

According to Lindsay Gibson, a psychotherapist and the author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents, this lack of emotional connection in childhood leaves “a gaping hole where true security might have been. The loneliness of feeling unseen by others is as fundamental a pain as physical injury.”

Identifying your wounding is a fundamental step on the healing journey,

When a parent-figure denies a child’s reality, they are unconsciously teaching the child to reject their intuition, their “gut feeling.”

Not being seen or heard in childhood is an experience of feeling emotionally disconnected from a parent-figure.

It is painful not to be heard. It is upsetting to be ignored. It is confusing to learn that we must hide our true Selves in order to be loved. Being acknowledged is one of the deepest human needs.

Parent-figures who live out their lives through their children carry a deep-seated, painful belief that they are a “failure” or in some way inadequate, and often project this core belief onto their children.

the child may feel an oppressive amount of pressure to succeed—and abandons parts of their authentic Self in order to please the parent-figure.

experiences teach us as children that loved ones can and do cross one’s boundaries.

Children learn quickly that some parts of their physical appearances are “acceptable” and some are not. This begins a lifelong practice of believing that receiving love is conditional on one’s outward appearance.

parent-figures behave a certain way outside versus inside the home, training the child to see that humans can have “pseudoselves.”

Children learn quickly that they must shift who they are depending on where they are—just as they saw modeled—in order to survive and be loved.

Emotional regulation is the process of experiencing an emotion, allowing the sensations to pass through the body

Most of us did not have parent-figures who were able to identify, let alone regulate, their feelings.

Icing behavior takes place when a parent-figure becomes emotionally distant or withdraws love from a child, usually as a result of feeling emotionally overwhelmed.

I often picked relationships where I could remain emotionally distanced, removed, often emotionally unavailable.

In 1984, two groundbreaking psychologists who studied stress and emotion, the late UC Berkeley professor Richard Lazarus and UC San Francisco professor Susan Folkman, presented a theory of coping, which they defined as “constantly changing cognitive behavior efforts to manage specific external and internal demands that [exceed] the resources of a person.”35 In other words, coping is a learned strategy to manage the profound unease in the body and mind that stress generates.

How we cope with a particular environment has less to do with the environment and more to do with our conditioned coping strategies around stress.

Just because we’ve experienced trauma does not necessarily mean that we are destined for a life of suffering and illness. We don’t have to repeat the patterns that shaped our early lives. When we do the work, we can change. We can move forward. We can heal.

Addiction and stress expert Dr. Gabor Maté, who is the author of many books including When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress,

This process of leaving and then returning to our baseline of balance is called allostasis. It allows us to develop the biological capacity for resilience.

“As long as the trauma is not resolved,” wrote Dr. Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, “the stress hormones that the body secretes to protect itself keep circulating.”38,39,40,41

racism, bias, and bigotry make their way into the body’s cells, changing the body in fundamental and destructive ways that are passed down through generations. The effects of racism exist in blood and bones.

The vagus nerve has many branches of sensory fibers that run throughout the rest of the body—from the brain stem to the heart, lungs, genitals, you name it—connecting every major organ to the brain.

When we are in this receptive, parasympathetic state, our resources are allocated to higher executive functions in the brain, such as planning for the future, self-motivation, problem solving, and emotional regulation.

When we feel threatened, our body enters activation mode, the home of the fight-or-flight response, activated by the sympathetic system, the yin to the parasympathetic yang.