SEPTEMBER 6, 2012
A month after returning home to Los Angeles, I contacted a therapist I found on Yelp, Alyssa Nobriga. A magical woman, she would go on over the course of several years to help hundreds of clients, from celebrities to business leaders, on their journey to find and feel worthiness.
A part of me hoped she’d join me on my ongoing quest into denial, pretending everything was fine. After all, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, right? I wanted to change, but I was scared of how changing my life would look … and how much work it might be. Would I have to break up with my boyfriend? Leave another job? Change and growth can often be scary and look like chaos … and I was tired.
I gripped my phone nervously as it rang, without knowing what I was in for. Alyssa’s voice was pure and warm, inspiring me to open up more than I ever planned for on our initial consultation. “Tell me what’s going on,” she said. I responded in word vomit.
“I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, and I hate my job. Oh, and, I don’t know if I’m dating the right guy. We haven’t had sex in what feels like forever, and when I was just talking to my friend’s mom about it the other day, she told me that’s just how it is with long-term relationships. But something inside of me kind of wonders if that’s really true.”
I stopped for a few seconds, letting my words settle into the air, and nervously continued: “What about you? Are you married? Is that shit true? Does sex just go out the window?”
She laughed in a sweet way and said, “The biggest challenge I’m hearing here is not what’s going on; it’s the anxiety in your voice. Come into my office next week and let’s see what we can do.”
I told her I’d be happy to work on my anxiety, but what I really needed was a career plan. She laughed, and we hung up the phone. I was just seeking plans as a way to ease my anxiety, and give me a sense of control.
After I got off the phone, a wave of grief hit me. I missed the old me, the one who felt like she had it together, the one who thought the Pentagon was it, and the one who used to think her boyfriend was the one. Seeing things differently, and choosing to grow right now, felt like an inconvenience. I thought of how caterpillars turn into butterflies, how snakes shed their skin, and how seeds burst when plants start to grow out of them. Each of their transitions looks like total destruction. That’s me, I thought. But there was no guarantee that it would work out for me as it did for the butterfly, the snake, or the plant. Maybe I would just sit in destruction, the Divine Unknown hell I was getting used to.
I walked into Alyssa’s office, nervous and excited about what was about to come out of our conversations.
“Let’s call in the light,” she said. I nodded in agreement, even though I had no idea what “call in the light” even meant. She smiled and said, “Close your eyes.” From there, she continued into a guided meditation. I had never meditated before, but I trusted her for some reason, because there was something soothing, magical, and healing about her presence.
As soon as the meditation ended, I tensed up again because the productive worker in me wanted to shift into getting things done. It was time to figure out my career right then and there. If it could be accomplished in the hour we had together, that would be great. I almost felt my life’s clock ticking beside me as I sat there in the room.
“Thanks for that,” I said. “So about my career … Any ideas on how I can figure this thing out? My resume is literally starting to look like a graveyard of my trials and errors. I’ve tried so many different types of jobs and internships and it still feels like something is missing.”
At the time I started seeing Alyssa, shortly after my move home from DC, I had also just started a new job at a political risk consultancy in downtown Los Angeles, managing a team of intelligence analysts tracking security threats for a corporate client with staff working in unstable regions across the globe. She started asking questions about my job history, so I told her about how my first job after graduate school was as an underpaid administrative assistant at an advertising agency, and how I took the job thinking I had to “take what I could get” because no one replied to my job applications. I then went on about how I quit my admin job out of nowhere and moved to DC, where I’d landed my job offer working for the Pentagon. I told her about how the process of learning how to job-hunt and create options for myself changed my life.
I told her about how the week I decided I’d leave my Pentagon job in DC, I got a job offer here at home in LA to do what I was doing now, all because my job-hunting skills were continuing to pay off. I networked so hard, in fact, that job offers from my networking conversations in DC trickled over to me consistently throughout the course of an entire year. I started sharing stories of terrorists we were studying in the office throughout the day, and how it made me feel to mentally hold so much intelligence that was critical for people’s safety.
Alyssa raised her eyebrows and nodded: “Sounds like you have a lot of responsibility on your plate at work.”
I do, I thought, as a variety of terror attacks flashed through my mind. That week alone, I sat with my North Africa analyst to assess a video of people running away from a bomb in a small farmers’ market, in hopes we could analyze the attacker. That shit sticks with you, you know? I thought about how I came into work that morning for a training class with an FBI agent, who was trying to make light of the heaviness: “What’s today’s problem of the day, my friends?” he said. “Are we workin’ with footage of extremists this morning? White supremacists? Lone wolves with a gun issue? You tell me.”
I refocused my energy back into the room with Alyssa. “Oddly, my job itself isn’t even really why I feel heavy. To me, it’s everything … else.”
“Okay,” she continued. “What counts as everything else?”
“Well, for one, the feeling that I’ll never really figure this out, that I’ll never really know what I’m meant to do with my life. Feeling like my time on this planet is meaningless, like I don’t even matter. Feeling like my new normal in life will look like being in a cubicle or sitting on a financial carousel collecting one paycheck after another, with a 3 percent raise each year, if I’m lucky. There’s a hopelessness to it all, you know? So that’s one thing—my career, and really wanting it to matter. The other stuff, I don’t know.”
She sat there, almost waiting to see if there was anything else pending from my life download. I felt my chest tighten at the thought of the other stuff. I inhaled, looking for a breath of air, feeling like I was beginning to suffocate from it all. Then she asked if I was okay. I felt like I was opening Pandora’s fucked-up box of worms. Except, it was more like a box of baby piranhas. I told her I felt like I was suffocating in my chest, like I was cornered.
She asked me: “If you could give the suffocation in your chest a color or consistency, what would it be?”
Weird question, I thought to myself, but fuck it, I’m here; may as well go along with it. I went on about how it felt like dark blacks and grays, like a thick, slow suffocation gas seeping into my lungs and heart. I was smiling, uncomfortable, and surprised at my own answer.
She sat there for a moment before giving her reply: “When’s the first time in your life that you remember that feeling, the dark black and gray suffocation gas seeping in?”
Reaching into my memory bank felt like I was reaching into a black void. All I saw was nothingness. And then I didn’t. Suddenly, I remembered something that I don’t talk about often: being molested when I was young.
“I remembered something weird,” I admitted. “I was seven years old or so, just waking up from a nap in my canopy bed at the house I grew up in … I opened my eyes to a boy I had known my whole life, who was visiting the house that day. He was standing over me, naked, asking me to touch him. I had no idea what he was talking about, and it was really scary to me … I was so young, I hadn’t learned about sex yet.”
Alyssa sat in silence, and I noticed her eyes moisten.
“Look,” I said, “I could go on about this, but I already saw a shrink in college to talk about it, and I feel like I have totally let it go. And it only happened once.”
She interrupted me: “Once is enough.”
“What’s any of this have to do with my career?” I asked defensively, abdicating all hope that we’d get anything done that day.
“A lot,” she said with unshakable certainty. “I hear that you’ve talked through what happened to you, but have you felt it? I ask this because some people just talk and talk and talk about painful things as a way to act like they’re processing something, when really they’re just speaking from their mind as a way to avoid actually feeling what is happening in their heart.”
I thought about all the breakups and losses I’d been through in my life, about how I’d rationalize them and talk about them to no end, only to face random nights of tears and heartbreak alone in the dark. I thought about how once at a juice shop I saw a juice the color of the shirt the boy who molested me wore and started crying in line. This is how trauma can work: an emotional reaction can be triggered from seemingly out of nowhere.
The mind is a place we often like to go to justify our pain and to feel it less. After all, our mind is wired to protect our survival in the world, and part of what it likes to do is protect you from really feeling the breaks of your heart. But that pain you collect throughout your life—from those who passed away, breakups, or rejections—its residue often remains, waiting for your permission to let it surface (and heal). I realize now that people often go to desperate lengths not to feel their feelings, because let’s face it: pain is intimidating. It can wipe you out for a day, hurt your performance at work, and more.
As a coach now, I can see that Alyssa helped me notice two ways people operate when their life feels painful or overwhelming: resistance or indulgence.
Everyone seems to have their own personal preference, and in my case with Alyssa, it was resistance. Resistance often looks like not talking about something at all, or it can even look like talking on and on about whatever the issue is, as a way to avoid just sitting with it and truly feeling it. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but talking can look like just sharing information from a mental level, without really feeling its weight on your heart. But, as Carl Jung once said, “What you resist, persists.” That’s why it’s in meeting the feeling, really getting curious about it and being with it, that you are able to release it.
So there I was, with Alyssa, in resistance. I was talking as a way to appear as though I was processing something, without actually having to bear the weight of feeling it. Have you ever done that in your life? Talk, and talk, and talk, sharing your story of pain with everyone and their mom, in hopes they’ll say something magical that makes the pain go away. Where do you notice yourself doing this? These moments are actually ones where we need to just lie there with the covers over our heads, allowing the pain to flow into our bodies like a rising ocean tide.
If you’re not in resistance to feeling your feelings, perhaps you’re in indulgence, the other side of the spectrum. As a coach, I’ve noticed this is when you’re so emotional about something, so overwhelmed by it, that you choose to marinate in the drama of it. Being in the drama of something is often just another way to avoid feeling the breaks of your heart. As spiritual leader Eckhart Tolle wisely says, “When you live in complete acceptance of what is, that is the end of all drama in your life.”
Alyssa outlined this concept of resistance versus indulgence for me, and it never left my mind. I thought about all those creepy times at the Pentagon where I caught myself crying in the bathroom mirror, feeling the drama of the moment, inspiring me to cry more. I smirked and thought: Alyssa’s interesting; I better keep coming in to see her. It was as though she was my mother in a past life, and this meeting was somehow our reunion.
Alyssa asked if I was open to her asking me more about the memory with the little boy, and I nodded, settling into the beige velour couch like the typical scene of someone in therapy during a romantic comedy. For whatever reason, I trusted that she knew who I was on the other side of this anxiety I’d carried with me since that day with the little boy, and she somehow helped me feel like I was bigger than whatever was making me anxious.
“So, tell me, when the boy was on top of you, how did you feel?”
“Scared, shocked, confused … I don’t know,” I said, still feeling a small wall come up around me. Next, she asked me a question that would forever influence my work as a coach.
“And if your fear in that moment could talk, what would it say?” Alyssa asked.
I imagined a thick gray gas seeping into my chest.
“My fear would have said to him: ‘Get off of me; why are you doing this? I’m not safe anymore, not even in my home.’”
“What do you think you made this experience mean about you?” she asked.
“That I’m disgusting, that I don’t matter, that I’m powerless in my life.”
I was stunned by my words, as they abrasively cut through the air between us. We often have two experiences: the first one is what happens as a fact, and the second one is what we make it mean—about ourselves, about the other person, about the world. This meaning, especially in traumatic situations, often shifts our wiring and belief system, and these limiting beliefs, if they emerge, can stay with us for years on repeat, until we notice them. It was so profound to see how much confidence I carried with me into my career, and yet how anxious I was because of an event, rooted in an experience that appeared totally unrelated to my career. What events in your life have triggered a deep emotional reaction? Do you carry them with you today?
Alyssa reflected on my comment about feeling powerless and replied: “Does that feel true, that you’re powerless, or disgusting?” she asked.
I replied, “Not right now, but in that moment, it did. And when I think about it too much, it does.”
In this moment, I realized who I am is so much bigger than the meaning I make of myself. I wasn’t disgusting; I was human. I sat there, feeling so human and so compassionate toward myself. I thought about all the times I didn’t feel safe in the Pentagon and all the times I felt alone, my feelings rooted in this one traumatic experience of being molested by someone I knew and trusted.
“Does that feeling of not mattering come up for you in your career, that if you don’t figure out what you want to do with your life, you don’t matter? Or that you’re powerless to actually figure it out?”
I nodded yes and awaited her insight like a dog desperate for kibble.
“What would it be like if you didn’t believe that your career had anything to do with how important you were? What would it feel like if your career didn’t even matter?” she asked inquisitively.
“It would feel like freedom,” I admitted. “But it does matter. And I want to do something that counts.”
She reminded me that I could do anything I wanted with my life and then gave me an insight I still think about today—that we’re all like cars, driving around the world, choosing to fuel up with one of two different types of gas: either fear or inspiration.
Up until this point, I’d been driving my car around life with a gas tank full of anxiety and a fear of failure. The great news about fear is that it can often motivate you to get where you want to go. The bad news is that the entire journey can suck. And that journey, those sucky years, can become your life.
Alyssa looked at me. “I’m interested in seeing you have fun in your career and life. So, you tell me, what fills you up with inspiration?”
This was the first time I thought about the concept of a You Turn, the idea of coming home to myself, and best of all, to my inspiration.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, feeling defeated. “I guess I don’t know myself.”
As the session was coming to an end, Alyssa looked at me and said, “Let’s have you forgive yourself for the judgments you bought into that day you were molested. Your judgments about him, yourself, and the world as a whole. I’m going to show you a tool that I learned at the University of Santa Monica’s spiritual psychology program. It’s called compassionate self-forgiveness. Put your hand over your heart and repeat after me: I forgive myself for buying into the belief that… Now say what you believed about yourself during what happened with the little boy,” she directed me.
I awkwardly put my hand over my heart, trusting her with so much vulnerability, and repeated, “I forgive myself for buying into the belief that I’m disgusting.”
“Well done,” she encouraged. “Now, what’s the truth? Start with, ‘The truth is…’”
The truth is, I thought to myself, I was just seven years old, and I didn’t do anything wrong. Sitting there, I felt my body shaking, and I said those words aloud to her, caught in that moment we all tend to feel before we start to cry and our bodies know it.
“Okay,” she said warmly. “Next, let’s have you forgive yourself for buying into the belief that you’re powerless. Make sure to update it with the truth.”
I looked at her, vulnerably trusting her with every word, and showed her my fragile heart in a way that I’d never shown it to anyone before. I sat in stillness, and words started flowing out of my mouth:
“I forgive myself for buying into the belief that I’m powerless in my life. The truth is that I’m powerful. The truth is that some things are out of my control. The truth is that surrendering is actually quite a powerful thing to do. The truth is that my experiences don’t all define me, that I’m more than any of them.”
I sat in the poetry of what I discovered: powerlessness is actually quite powerful, because it’s in our powerlessness that we get to surrender and commit to trusting the universe to have our back, to be a net and catch us in the air as we leap. I put my hand over my heart, quivered, and continued silently in my mind:
I forgive myself for buying into the belief that my career is what makes me matter.
The truth is that I matter, and that I have a positive impact on the world with or without my career.
I forgive myself for buying into the belief that my value is tied to how much money I make.
The truth is that I can provide value regardless of how much money I have, and the best things in my life have nothing to do with money.
I forgive myself for buying into the belief that I’m not safe.
The truth is that I have my own back and I’ll take care of me.
Those last words felt like air coming back into my lungs, or really, like black and gray smoke leaving my body.
“See you next week,” Alyssa said. “In the meantime, will you do two assignments before you come back?”
I nodded. This woman, her spirituality and loving nature, was so mesmerizing that I’d probably jump off a cliff if she told me to.
The first assignment she requested of me was a joy journal, where I’d write down the one moment that lit me up the most each day at work for the next thirty days. From there, she suggested we take a look and see what patterns existed in my joy. The second assignment was to sit with the question: What is the payoff of my anxiety?
None, I thought. What a crazy fucking question. I rolled my eyes. “Okay, Alyssa, I’ve had enough of this vulnerability today.” She laughed, and I walked out a different woman.
Walking to my car, I kept thinking about Alyssa’s question, and grabbed my phone to call my best friend, Nicole Nowparvar, who is also a psychotherapist with clients around the world. Interesting, I thought as the phone rang. I am surrounded by therapists. What does this mean about me?
She answered the phone hungry to hear about my session with Alyssa, and I mentioned this question she asked me to sit with, where I’d explore what the benefits were or the payoff was of keeping my anxiety intact. As always, Nicole asked me great questions: “Well, when you get anxious, Ash, what do you do? Who do you become?”
I replied with the ultimate example of Alyssa’s resistance concept: “I don’t know. I freak out, and I call you and I talk and talk and talk.”
She laughed and interrupted me with words that blew my mind. “Sounds like a full-time job, Ash.”
She didn’t realize it then, but I did: that was the payoff for me. When life became too much to handle, instead of facing it, and sitting with it, I’d go somewhere familiar: my anxiety. My anxiety gave me permission to totally check out of any situation and jump into an encapsulating hurricane with myself. It helped me avoid life when it became too much. Like an addict who turns to their drug of choice when life feels like too much, I’d turn my focus to anxiety.
Anxiety, just like a lot of other emotional states (such as anger or depression), was my frenemy. It was the friend I’d hang out with when I was too much of a mess for other people to sit with. In a way, anxiety would absorb me and excuse me from dealing with whatever was in front of me.
I thought about how this one guy I knew was irritated all the time. I thought about how he seemingly used his anger like a miserable vacation spot he’d go to visit when life was too much to handle. The payoff? He didn’t have to be with whatever situation sparked the anger; he didn’t have to take responsibility or feel the feelings that actually came up from a situation. His anger was an opportunity to run away from facing his pain in any given scenario. In the same way I chose anxiety as a way to check out and avoid responsibility, he chose anger so that he could just escape and marinate in that comfortable—though miserable—feeling. Anger was his drug; anxiety was mine. People also can get so overstimulated by these feelings that they form a habit of emotionally checking out as a defense mechanism, or they could go in the complete opposite direction, where instead of checking out, they activate and try to control others so that situational outcomes are in their favor, soothing their anxiety or frustration. This is the shadow side of “empaths”; while they tend to “feel others’ feelings” and compassionately want to help, sometimes they simply want to fix others’ problems so that they themselves can feel better, versus properly helping the other person. All of this can be very damaging to relationships.
What “frenemy” do you hang out with when life starts to feel like too much? What emotional drug of choice do you tend to turn to when you feel overstimulated by a situation? Is it anger? Indecision? Shame? Blame? Anxiety?
In retrospect, I learned that these painful feelings are messengers more than anything else. It’s okay that we resort to them. In fact, these feelings are not negotiable. They’re here whether you want them to be or not, but what you do with them is in your control. You don’t have to let these feelings hijack your peace, but rather you can choose to see them as powerful messengers, perhaps shining light on issues and showing you something in your life that needs handling. My anxiety was just an indicator that I was out of alignment and avoiding something I needed to handle: the truth. Looking back, my anxiety let me know when it was time to end romantic relationships that weren’t working, or quit jobs that I hated. Anxiety is friendly in that way, I thought.
When you feel these challenging feelings, see them as an alarm that your peace is about to be hijacked, and realize you have an opportunity in that moment to choose your response. This is growth. When the gravitational pull of the universe wants to keep you in your old self, growth is about choosing to be who you want to be. All of this said, sometimes you don’t notice when your peace has been hijacked. The way to work with this is to start taking note of how you behave when you do notice you’re not in alignment. In my case, I tend to speak quickly, and almost talk like I’m spinning out in circles, and I start needing to catch my breath. When are you off-kilter, and how do you behave? Knowing this, you can make a You Turn back into your sanity.
Looking back, there were so many moments in my life when I decided to step out of anxiety and into the truth:
The day I confided in my mom that I was molested.
The day I broke up with my high school boyfriend after five years together.
The day I let go of that “best friend” who always put me down.
I realized that the truth can be painful, but more often than not, there’s no anxiety in the truth. Often, the truth is simply a painful gift packaged in calm, raw honesty. In a way, the truth doesn’t tend to feel anxiety-ridden (that’s what avoiding it feels like); it just feels sad, inconvenient, or whatever else. Everything else—the anger, depression, sadness—is just a coping response we’ve adopted over the years of our lives.
As prescribed, I kept a daily “joy journal” for the next seven days.
Day One: My joy journal entry was, ironically, helping one of my intelligence analysts with her resume. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed helping her find a new job, and she was surprised at how good I was at resumes. She was leaving her job not because she hated the work, but because she wanted a change of scenery. Since she was one of my top-performing analysts, I appreciated her mastery, and I always told her that, one day, if she wanted to make a move, I would support her.
Day Two: The highlight of my Tuesday, and my joy journal entry, was when my friend called asking for advice on whether she should break up with her boyfriend. I went on about how she was avoiding the truth, and that’s why she felt anxiety, which resonated for her. Takes one to know one, I thought.
Days Three, Four, and Five: On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, my joy journal entries were about how the best part of my day was editing an intelligence report, somehow making me feel like I had an ability with words.
Day Six: On Saturday, the highlight was reading a personal development book, called A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. It’s still one of my favorites.
Day Seven: On Sunday, the highlight of my day was meeting friends for coffee and talking about how to land more job interviews, something I had come to master.
The following day, I parked my car down the street from Alyssa’s building and noticed that it was rush hour. A girl sauntered down the sidewalk in front of me, her eyes glued to her phone, walking eerily close to the edge of the curb, where drivers were flying by and abruptly switching lanes. I started approaching her more closely as she seemed more distracted with every step she took. As I closed in, she stumbled and was about to fall into the stream of whizzing cars. Reaching out, I grabbed her backpack, pulled her from the curb, and we both fell to the sidewalk. Hard.
She screamed at the commotion, almost as if she was about to yell, “Watch where you’re going,” yet quickly realized that I had just stopped her from facing what could have been her last moment on this planet. She looked over at me and said in shock, “Wow. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I continued, “Please, be more careful.”
After we helped each other to our feet, I turned around to walk away and heard her voice faintly amid the noise of cars humming by, asking what my name was. I yelled “Ashley” into the wind, and she replied, telling me that she thought I may have saved her life.
I turned and looked her in the eye for a quick moment. It was one of those odd moments where your lips open to say something totally unexpected. “You must be meant for something really big, avoiding an accident like that.”
I guess now I know why I was five minutes early to my appointment, I thought to myself, unexpectedly trusting that life is always unfolding in its own perfect way, even when it doesn’t seem like it.
What’s gotten into me? I wondered as I walked into Alyssa’s office. Setting my bag down, I sat on her couch and handed her my joy journal. I was curious as to what she’d have to say about my entries. By this point, she’d started to feel superhuman to me, like a force of femininity and truth that I’d never encountered before. Opening the journal, she looked at the first page in silence. She sat there for a solid two minutes before finally looking up at me.
“You seem to love helping people in their job hunt,” she told me, with a curious tone in her voice.
I smiled, because it was true. I did love helping others get job offers, or even figure out the best career path for them … and I was great at it. Alyssa smiled back at me and asked if I’d ever thought about becoming a career coach.
“What’s a career coach? Like a hockey coach?” I laughed. “Like, sitting on the sidelines of people’s career, cheering them on?”
“No,” she said softly. “You would simply show them how to land job offers the same way you were able to.”
I thought about what she said for a minute before offering my assessment of the idea. “The term ‘career coach’ sounds like code for broke and unemployed.”
She responded with a compassionate smirk, as if she had some master plan in store for the woman I was meant to be. “We’ll see about that,” she said, laughing just slightly.
Toward the end of our session, I told her about what happened before our session, with the woman on the street. She listened intently and asked me only one question:
“What if the sole reason for you being on this planet was to save that girl from getting hit by a car today? Would you feel like that was enough to give meaning to your life? Is it enough to know that, because of your presence, another human being is alive?”
“Maybe?” I said, in a tone that sounded as though I was asking a question.
She responded with a reassuring smile, telling me how interesting she found it that I had discovered a lot of meaning in my life, meaning that was unrelated to my career.
I surrendered to a thought rushing to the surface of my mind: I guess I matter … with or without my career. I simply smiled over at Alyssa as she said, “Worthiness is your birthright. You are born with worthiness, and you don’t have to hustle to earn it.”
As I walked back to my car, I thought about the principle of oneness. No matter the circumstance or appearance of things, we are all connected. I remember having read somewhere about the butterfly effect: how when a butterfly flaps its wings near the North Pole, its wings collectively influence the winds in South America. This idea falls under the chaos theory, where small changes initially can lead to drastic, unpredictable changes over time.1 I thought about how I was able to help that girl get out of harm’s way just because I was on the right side of the street that day, standing behind her at the right moment. I thought about how her family would have had to attend her funeral if she fell into that traffic, and I felt an inexplicable sense of trust that we are exactly where we are meant to be … moment by moment.
Later that night, I cozied myself onto the couch with a freshly poured coconut chai latte and googled the job title “career coach.” At first, I saw a few purple websites, ones with images of rainbows and waterfalls, and even saw one for a stripper-turned-life-coach. I had seen enough. I closed my Mac and sat there for a few minutes, sipping my warm latte.
Then my curiosity started to spike. I opened my Mac back up and kept searching. I found a couple of websites with more polished career coaches who looked interesting. I remembered my first meeting with my career counselor, and thought to myself, Man, I could have used a person like this in my life. I remember walking into my career counselor’s office, with her looking at me, as I asked: Do you have any guidance on how I can pick a major?
She gave me every boring platitude you could think of: “Do what you love and the money will follow.” I rolled my eyes, thinking I could’ve read that in any self-help book … The conversation was as useful as my own appendix, honestly.
I looked at her and asked, “What if I don’t know what I love? What if I don’t know what careers are out there? What if nothing is a fit for me?”
I walked out wondering if liking something or being passionate about something guaranteed your success in it, and my instinct was no, passion does not mean success.
I caught myself lost in this memory, and then started typing on my Mac again. I narrowed my search and googled:
“Career coach for millennial women.”
“How to get a job offer.”
“How to figure out your purpose.”
“How to find your best career fit.”
I immediately noticed how little was showing up in direct results as it related to career coaches. I kept googling and googling and googling until I found myself in what felt like an internet black hole. There were no career coaches to help young women like me. I realized that maybe, just maybe, Alyssa was right. Maybe I had found my niche.
In a world telling me it had the answers, I finally realized that all the answers I really wanted were inside me. I turned inward and finally listened to that wise voice in my head, paying attention to the things that brought me joy on a daily basis. This guided me to finally make a You Turn.
And for the first time in my life, Grandma Lorraine’s Divine Unknown felt inspiring.
Your career is a playground, and this chapter is here to remind you that while it’s a vehicle for your own self-expression, your career is not a prerequisite for your worthiness. You are worthy without a career, and your life is meaningful without a career. All of this said, a career is simply a vehicle for you to play with and use as a way to add more self-expression and purpose into your life if you so choose.
This chapter is also about understanding what emotional experiences have created trauma that holds you back in life, and in your career. Needless to say, I never thought being molested would catapult me into anxiety, and that I would bring it with me into my career—until I healed it. We all have painful memories that can create trauma, and each of our traumas translates differently. The moment I was molested, my brain froze and went into a “What do I do?” mode, and that same response (and anxiety) is what I carried with me into anything in life when I didn’t know what to do or felt overstimulated—just freeze, panic, or shut down. After realizing that I was doing this, I went in the opposite direction and started spinning out, which looked like talking very quickly, or trying to get a sense of control by quickly handling or fixing something. These two responses—freezing or spinning out—are very common. For some people, painful memories have generated a common life experience of anger; for others, it’s anxiety, victimhood, powerlessness, sadness, or grief. One thing is true: these experiences are woven into the fabric of your life until you understand the root and decide to heal. That’s what we’re going to do in this section.
For a long time, I would motivate myself through negativity and fear of failure, and I would have to work through my automatic response of freezing or spinning out. I’d look in the mirror and hear the words You’re fat. Those would motivate me to go to the gym. I’d be writing my resume and hear, You went to a mediocre college, and that would motivate me to build a network or job-hunt even harder. Our negative aspects have a payoff.
My anxiety was also a motivator. That mean-girl voice in my head calling me fat when I looked in the mirror is what motivated me to work out; that anxious voice I heard in my head as I wrote my resume inspired me to hustle and network. But eventually, our fear, anxiety, freezing, and spinning out gets exhausting, and we all wonder if there is perhaps another way. The truth of the matter is that you can achieve very big dreams from a place of fear. It’s just that the journey is a lot more tiring.
What holds us back? Negative thoughts. Challenging memories. Trauma. Our personal pain, and the meaning we make of it. All of this forms some aspect of us. Which one do you carry? According to research, more than 50 percent of US citizens will experience major trauma at one point in life; in fact, I’ve read research that indicates that this number is as high as 80 percent. Major trauma literally alters the chemical reactions and development taking place in your brain, so it’s no wonder that so many people experience stress, anxiety, and depression.2 While trauma may take place in a moment of time, it’s the cascading pain and beliefs you buy into that imprint the trauma on your nervous system and mindset. This is where the real damage is.
In fact, if you look at Dr. Masaru Emoto’s study on the molecular composition of water, you’ll see that these thought patterns occur not only on an emotional level, but also on a physical, molecular level. Dr. Emoto examined the impact of one’s thoughts on the molecular composition of water by performing a split test: one audience was to look at the water and think positive thoughts, and a separate audience was to look at the water and think negative ones. Upon examining the difference in the water based on the thoughts of the audience, Dr. Emoto discovered that negative thoughts actually impacted the molecular bond between hydrogen and oxygen in the water.3 Given that we’re 70 percent made of water, it is key to understand that every single thought creates form on some level, and it is completely in your control to decide how it will inform your life.
Trauma also appears in our physical expression, which is often sneaky and hard to notice. For me, in Alyssa’s office, it looked like sleepiness. She’d comment on how I’d come in energized, and when we started talking about different experiences from my career or life, ones that stored some level of trauma, my eyes would glaze over, I’d start yawning, and I’d become incredibly sleepy. This sort of physical response, chronic fatigue, is incredibly common among those who have experienced trauma, and six times more likely to occur when working through childhood or sexual trauma.4 Unfortunately, the effects don’t stop there; memory takes a toll and either you over-remember the event or dissociate to some degree and bury the memory within yourself.5 Both paths are difficult to carry but represent your body’s way of fighting to protect itself.
There are two ways you can build your life: on quicksand or on a rock. Quicksand looks like a pendulum. You’re happy or sad. You’re winning or losing. A rock looks like an unwavering sense of inner joy and gratitude, regardless of what happens outside of you. That sort of life requires a lot of awareness and healing, which you’ll do in the exercise below. Much of your reactivity is rooted in past memories. In fact, usually when you’re feeling negative, it’s because your mind has come up with a story about the situation you’re in, and if you tune in to that memory, you’ll find that story will somehow remind you of your past. Take a moment when you’re feeling negative or your peace is disturbed. Choose to search briefly in your memory for a time that felt similar in the past. The memory you find represents the root of the limiting belief you face today. If you can work through it, you become freer.
1. How do you tend to emotionally respond to challenging situations? Is it sadness? Fear? Panic? Guilt? Shame? Anger? Anxiety? Indecision? Mentally checking out?
List your coping emotion of choice. This emotion is an aspect of you that probably traces back into your life and memories and often can serve as a block in your career, confidence, and relationships.
2. Get curious about when you felt that emotion first in a memory.
3. Ground yourself in the memory. What were you wearing? What time of day was it? Who was there? What disturbed you?
4. Tune in to what was happening for you on a mental level.
a. What thoughts were you having about yourself in this moment?
b. What judgments or thoughts did you have about the other person or people (if one or many were involved)?
c. What judgments did you make about the world as a whole in the moment that your memory took place?
d. What did you make the situation mean about life?
5. If that emotion had to be a color, what color would it be in your mind? If it had a consistency, what consistency would it be? Thick, knotted, airy? If you had to give this part of you a name, what would it be?
6. Fill in the blank with a few answers. “I’m the one who __________.”
Example: I’m the one who people like, has good fashion sense, and loves rap music, or I’m the one who gets in the way.
a. Ask yourself: Where did this identity come from? Is it working for you or holding you hostage to a career or life that isn’t actually working for you, or aligned?
There is no force stronger within yourself than the part of you that wants to have an identity. It creates a sense of safety to decide on who we are, and it gives us a framework to make decisions. That being said, you can outgrow your identity or be highly limited by it. Our trauma and experiences influence the identity we hold of ourselves, and how we operate in the world. However, when we heal trauma, our identity shifts in a big way. This loss of our old identity can cause a natural grief that can feel confusing, but know that grief like this can come when you’re simply onto something greater.
All of this said, sometimes trauma or pain requires more than the exercises in this book, or a conversation with a friend who loves you. If you’re struggling, know that there are resources out there for you, and the decision to seek the support of a professional therapist or psychiatrist is courageous. As well-known actor Jim Carrey once said, “I think if we all acted the way we really felt, four out of eight people at a dinner table would be sitting there sobbing.” I’ve always believed that everyone needs a therapist. Your pain is a part of your human experience, and you deserve the life you can create as a result of your healing. Resources I love include PsychologyToday.com’s “find a therapist” function, or websites offering more affordable virtual therapy, such as BetterHelp.com or TalkSpace.com. Know that finding the right support can be a process, and it’s simply part of your investing in your transformation. If the first person you work with isn’t a match, stay the course. You deserve the transformation available for you on the other side.