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

by Nicole LePera

Others fear true wellness because it is the unknown and the unknown is unpredictable. There is comfort in knowing exactly what your life will look like, even if that reality is making you sick. Our minds are familiarity-seeking machines. The familiar feels safe; that is, until we teach ourselves that discomfort is temporary and a necessary part of transformation.

Psychiatry once called itself “the science [or study] of the psyche or soul.” Today the focus of psychiatry has become overwhelmingly biological. You’re much more likely to be asked about a family history of mental illness and be given a prescription for antidepressants than to be asked about childhood trauma or given guidance about your nutrition and lifestyle.

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.

studies of mice in lab settings, not only did those that were exposed to extreme diets or stress display changes in their heart and metabolism, but so did their offspring and their offspring’s offspring and so forth. There is evidence that this applies to humans, too.

In a study at the University of Glasgow,15 researchers told fifteen runners that they were being administered doping drugs and then asked them to run a race. The runners’ race times increased significantly even though they were getting only saline injections. When our body expects to get better, it sends out messages to start the healing process. Hormones, immune cells, and neurochemicals are all released. The placebo effect provides proof that when we believe we are going to get better or feel better, we often do. It’s a testament to the power of the mind to affect the body with mere suggestion.

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

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. Habits, or behaviors that we repeatedly return to, become the subconscious’s default mode. Our brain actually prefers to spend most of its time coasting on autopilot—it is best able to conserve its energy by knowing what to expect. This is why our habits and routines feel so comforting and why it’s so unsettling and even exhausting when our routines are disrupted. The trouble is, following our conditioned routine keeps us stuck in that routine.

Learn how to spend time alone, to sit still, to really hear your intuition and witness your entire Self—even, and especially, the darkest parts you’d most like to keep hidden.

The research is unequivocal: people with unresolved trauma get sicker and die younger.

Find nature and witness it. Go outside and just experience any small aspect of the natural environment that is accessible to you. Notice the colors of flowers. Sit under trees. Place your bare feet onto grass or into water. Let the wind blow on your skin. Nature is a natural balancer of our nervous system and gives us a “reset.”

if my body could learn dysregulated ways of coping, it could also learn healthy routes to recovering.

The direct line between the gut and the brain makes each meal an opportunity for healing and nourishment.

Once a core belief is formed, you engage in what’s called a confirmation of bias; information that does not conform to your beliefs is discarded or ignored in favor of information that does.

For a relationship to thrive, it can’t be used as a means to fill the voids or wounds caused by a parent-figure.

When we understand other people’s limitations, when we see pain and fear where we once saw cruelty, this is healing.