Every really great, incredible coach, mentor, light worker, or healer has a handful of stories that you probably will never hear.

Stories about clients who were incredibly difficult. Situations working with students that left them jaded, scarred, wounded, and exposed.

Hurtful experiences happen in this space.

And so often we hear from the clients who share their experiences of how they’ve been taken advantage of by coaches who malpractice or make promises they can’t keep.

But what about the stories on the other side of the fence?

What about the situations where coaches are learning hard lessons as they master their skills in real time. Stories where healers are learning to redefine their boundaries. Stories where light workers are facing their own wounds as the shadows come up in their facilitation process.

We often don’t hear them. Because so many are so afraid of people knowing the truth of their lived experience as they project an energy of “success and achievement.”

It feels scary and uncomfortable to share these stories. But a while back, I made a promise to myself to invite in a series here on Substack to talk about some of the things in a series about business developmental trauma.

As an entrepreneur, you are stretching, growing, learning, and developing in real time as you support other people. And sometimes those lessons feel hard and heavy. Sometimes they leave you feeling ashamed and embarrassed. Sometimes difficult things you experience with clients can take years to unpack.

Everything I share in this series (and you can go to the first post if you’d like to read more about it) is from a place of autonomy and sovereignty. I’m sharing what I’ve experienced because at this time I truly feel ready to talk about it. And I’m talking about it because I want anybody out there who’s had similar experiences to know that they are not alone.

I used to feel so much shame about the difficult, confronting experiences I had in my journey of being an entrepreneur and holding space for other people. Because frankly, I never heard stories like this. But the more I’ve talked openly with friends and colleagues, the more I see that this isn’t about shame.

This is about being humble enough to learn.

Let’s go back. 2023. My Instagram was expanding.

I was stretching and growing and getting more visibility on the internet. The inquiries for working with me one-on-one were expanding at a rapid pace, and I was finally stepping into a version of myself that, for so long, felt like a distant dream.

I was becoming the girl who had it “figured out.”

At least on paper. At least on my Instagram.

Deep behind the scenes, I was still learning. Even though I had been doing this work since 2015, every year I was stepping into a deeper, more embodied version of myself. And that embodiment came with hard initiations that most often I didn’t feel ready to experience.

Those initiations rattled my nervous system.

Especially this one.

This is the story of how I landed a reality TV star as a one-on-one client.

And I give you that language and context as I tell this story because the truth is, her notoriety really did play a role in how I felt. Leave it to my ego to be super proud of myself that I, Lauren, this little girl on the inside with tons of baggage and trauma and complex, unintegrated shadows who came from nothing, was able to actually manifest somebody who was very worthy, visible, and important.

It felt like a really big win for me.

And when we’re talking about business developmental trauma, the first sign it’s about to happen is when you come into a relationship with a client from a disempowered state.

For me, I put her on a pedestal above myself. She was somebody that I was honored to receive. And I was going to do everything I could to keep her.

When she came to me at the time, she was moving out of her visibility as a reality star and shifting into her own legacy as a content creator. She wanted to build courses and online programs, and she was really inspired by the way that I had done it on the internet. More deeply, she felt incredibly connected to the vulnerable stories I shared about my trauma. She herself had been in an abusive relationship where she was taken advantage of, and she also struggled with mental health challenges. So we really connected on our lived experience. She resonated with the stories of my “old life.”

After our discovery call, we stepped into a year-long container. And because I felt somehow unconsciously unworthy of her, and because she boosted my ego, I was going to do everything I could to make sure she had the best, most supportive experience.

Now, I get that as a job in our coaching world and mentor world, we do have a deep calling in our heart to do well for our clients. But there’s a difference between showing up in integrity to do a good job versus showing up to do a good job because you’re afraid of not doing a good job.

My deepest wound and unintegrated fears often lie in the power I give others. I look at people who have success, confidence, and achievement in their life, and I feel unworthy of a relationship with them, whether it be a friendship, a colleague-to-colleague relationship, or a coaching mentorship dynamic. I, for a long time, would cower and shrink down at anybody who appeared to be more achieving than me.

Side note: this is a repetition compulsion from my own childhood. My father grew up in a dynamic where he was made to feel less than his brother, who had more success, and my grandfather would treat his brother with more love and attention than he gave my own dad. And my dad would shrink. So to me, this is an unconscious paradigm of my own nervous system. And when I look back at this relationship with this particular client, I can see that what manifested was a replay of not just her trauma patterns, but my own.

The first red flag I ignored.

This client came to me because she wanted business strategy. And in our discovery call, I was very aware of the emotional and energetic situation she was holding and how her energy and emotions were directly impacting her entrepreneurial path.

She didn’t want to talk about any of those things. She wanted to stick to strategy.

And that to me is the first red flag. If you, in your sole essence as a facilitator, believe certain things to be true, and your client comes into the space and doesn’t believe those things to be true, and you have to adjust to meet their values, you’re going to have incoherence in the space. And that incoherence creates a large disruption and really prevents you as a facilitator from doing your job.

If you believe that energy and emotion play an important role on the entrepreneurial path, as I do, when a client doesn’t want to go into that work, it simply makes your job difficult and sometimes impossible.

There were times in the early seasons of our mentorship relationship where I found myself frustrated and fearful that I couldn’t be in my fullest expression of truth as the one responsible for holding the container. I couldn’t call her out or mirror to her the emotional patterns that she was playing. I couldn’t speak to the energetics of opening up more capacity to receive. These are all incredibly important things in my work.

And so I found myself shrinking down to keep her as a client “happy.”

This was just the first thing in many layers of our relationship unraveling.

Later on during our time, she stepped into a distorted interpretation of truth.

When I shared content on the internet, she started to become slightly paranoid and very angry, believing that the stories I was sharing about my own life were actually stories I was using about her life that she had shared from her and our time together.

This felt really uncomfortable to me because it was deeply untrue. And I mirrored that to her, and I called it out. It felt really hard to speak my own truth in general to this particular client (again, the dynamic was so off balance) and somehow, because of the power dynamic that was created, I actually somehow believed I was doing something wrong and felt incredibly ashamed.

Was I really doing what she said? Is it possible that there’s truth in her warped perspective?

I know now with my entire body that what she was saying was so far from correct. But at the time, she was activating my trauma. And I know this to be true because there was a great sense of shame and fear present in my body.

There was absolutely no evidence and no truth in the idea that I would take someone’s story and use it as my own. We just simply had similar stories, and it’s why she came to work with me in the first place.

But what inspired her to step into my work eventually became something she used as armor.

She was becoming very triggered by everything I shared and constantly reflecting that in messages to me in our chat feed in between our calls.

A lot of my perspectives about healing were not the perspectives that she embodied herself. I believe in my own relationship to trauma that everything that has happened to me has been the greatest initiation of my life. And even though there were horrible things that happened to me, I can stand here and say I am truly grateful for every lived experience.

She, on the other hand, was still in her wounded parts. She couldn’t fully step into the perspectives that I had because she was still in active trauma. So she did everything she could to make me wrong in my personal lived experience.

A pause for anybody out there who is a coach, mentor, healer, or facilitator.

There are things that you may attract into your field in the work you do that will be beyond your scope of practice. There might be times where you attract a client that you just don’t have the capacity to support. There may be times where a student comes into your work and you realize that student is not a great fit for what you offer because they’re not at the level or in the conscious mental space that they need to be in order to receive your work fully and safely.

This isn’t a reflection of hierarchy or a conversation about who’s above anybody else. This is just simply to say that your work is not for everybody. And when you try to alter, morph, and adjust your work to please everybody, you’re going to end up in situations where you learn hard lessons.

To me, receiving feedback that my content and authentic expression was harmful to her brought up a lot of fear in my body. It made me question my own integrity.

I began to feel incredibly insecure about my own expression. I questioned whether or not I was worthy of telling my own life stories from the authentic perspective that I lived them in. And I began posting on social media with a great sense of fear that I was somehow doing harm, or would get hurt, or receive backlash for what I was saying.

I froze.

Basically, her energy of aggression extremely impacted my nervous system.

I didn’t understand that at the time. But I can see now that I wasn’t at the level of maturity in my legacy work that I am today.

Now I deeply understand that my truth may not be everybody’s truth, and I know how important it is to honor that, but to also honor the authentic expression that wants to come alive in me. My greatest impact I can have in the world is being honest. And I have to value my desire to impact the world more than my desire to please everybody else.

That was not the case back then.

Flash forward a few months later.

This particular client went through a very deep traumatic experience.

And again, I just want to reiterate: sometimes, when clients are in active trauma, they need deeper support than your scope of practice can provide.

This particular client later disclosed information I was not aware of when we began working together. She had been hospitalized for her mental health recently. She was taking a wide variety of medications, and she also had been in a violent abusive relationship that ended. And while all of this is part of my personal life history as well, her experiences were extremely recent on her timeline… more recent than I was aware of when we signed together.

Her urgent messages continued, and one evening she sent me a very chaotic message about how her former abuser had reached out to her, and she felt extremely unsafe. And she was in full believe that he was going to come to her house and attack her.

I want to be clear: The defined boundaries of this container (by her) were that we were here for business strategy. And while I really don’t know the validity of her fear because I myself am not her, and not living her real experience…. It seemed very real for her, but also, had been a continuous fear living in her field constantly.

I can sense that a lot of what this particular client was experiencing on the day to day was a consistent state of paranoia that was deeply in need of therapeutic support.

I, as a coach, cannot offer therapy. And she needed something deeper.

Her messages, looking back, felt extreme in my body. And simultanously it also felt like a deep invitation for me to be manipulated.

It felt almost like she was setting me up to see how I would respond… which she had done several times in our container.

After many months of having our relationship broken down by the anger, aggression, and paranoia she was projecting onto me, I think she just got to a point where she wanted to set me up to let me go.

When she shared about her trauma being activated and my response was a response of trying to ground her back into her body, she felt like I was not showing up the way that she needed me to. When I invited her to claim her power and seek support, she was angry that I wasn’t doing certain things that a therapist would do. And she subscribed to a story that I was no longer a safe space for her.

To be clear, I was never a safe space for this client.

But the way in which she did it was making me “wrong.”

But I was wrong.

I should have said “you need deeper support than what I can provide” but at the time, I didn’t want her to believe she failed if I let her go as a clientl. I didn’t want her to feel rejection, and I didn’t want to disappoint her.

In the end, I felt all those feelings instead.

She needed more help than I could provide. But my ego of wanting to be her mentor, wanting to save her, rescue her, be the solution to her problems, do a good job, and be proud of myself for doing a good job, all of that got in the way of the true integrity of her own personal needs.

Had I been where I am today, I wouldn’t have signed her on that discovery call. I would have recognized that she wasn’t a good fit, and I would have been able to direct her to the resources that she really needed to have.

That relationship, from start to finish, lasted about five months.

And it was a very, very difficult time.

Because the relationship didn’t really end after we parted ways.

If you’ve ever been in a weird, warped situation with a client like this where they project their trauma onto you, make you wrong, and try to replay old wounded dynamics, you can close those containers feeling extremely exhausted, defeated, and full of shame.

Sometimes you question yourself. You wonder if you’re even meant to do your work. You feel like you’ve been mistreated, but simultaneously you feel guilty, like you did something wrong.

Should I have behaved that way? What could I have done differently? What’s wrong with me that I couldn’t make this client happy?

I think at the end of the day, any shadow that is unintegrated within us is going to be mirrored in the interpersonal relationships of our client work. And that is part of the work. I think knowing this, it makes sense why a lot of people are afraid to step into their power and do this type of work. We don’t want to face our wounds sometimes. We don’t want to look at our old shadows. And we certainly don’t want to get hurt or hurt anybody else.

This was one of the greatest lessons I received on this path of mentoring others: that even though I can be a hustler and a hard worker who wants to attract clients, get results, and be incredibly successful, showing up in my business with that as the priority is always going to get in the way of the true, authentic results that a client deserves.

You cannot make the spaces you hold about yourself.

You cannot be fueling your ego with victory when a client comesyour way who feels special or important.

You don’t need the client to validate your own sense of self-worth.

I invite you to, instead, show up in a state of neutrality …to say that “I’m going to do the best I can with the resources I have available"“. And the best you can do is be honest, authentic, and true to your own intelligence, skill set, and facilitation.

My work is not for everyone.

Your work is not for everybody.

And while this may feel like a long post full of juicy story, I think the core of this is really to remind you that we all go through fucked up experiences. We all have hard times as facilitators, coaches, healers, and guides. And we all go through cycles of questioning our self worth as we learn the hard lessons of what it means to truly lead.

So if you’ve been through something like this, you’re not alone. If you’ve had a situation with a client that made you feel unsafe, or left you feeling like you didn’t do a good job, or even left you feeling like somebody was mad at you or disappointed in your offerings, just please know that you could have the biggest heart in the world, and not everybody wants to sit in that space of love with you.

You are a human. You are learning. You are developing in real time.

And compassion for yourself is the most important medicine in your toolkit. Not just for the world, but also for yourself.

xox

Lauren Eliz Love

Lauren Eliz Love is a shamanic practitioner, somatic trauma healer, and founder of Somatic Wealth Recoding Technique — a trademarked body-based method that rewires the nervous system’s relationship with money, worth, and wealth. After an awakening in Sedona, a shamanic initiation with plant medicine, and her own journey through chronic illness and deep trauma healing, Lauren channeled her lived experience into a body of work that bridges ancient earth medicine with modern trauma science. She is the creator of The Sanctuary App, host of The World Needs Your Medicine Podcast, and is dedicated to guiding women into the body where the real healing lives. Her work is for the woman who has done the work and knows something deeper is waiting.

Then I became an entrepreneur and realized how wrong I was.

For those of you who aren’t aware of my beliefs, my perspectives or my teachings, let me get you up to speed on the things you need to know about how I see the world. It’s important context you need before diving into this series. (Yes, this is a series, there are more posts coming.) Here are my firm beliefs:

1. Trauma is not what happens to us. Trauma is what happens in our own bodies as a result of what happened to us. (thank you Gabor Mate’)

2. I believe that once we decide to heal, all the things that we didn’t heal will start to come up as an invitation for us to rewrite the stories, patterns and programs that kept us “unhealed” in the past. This challenging confrontation is what I refer to as one of the 12 spiritual laws of self healing. And it’s called “The Law of Rewrites.” (The 12 Universal Laws study is inside my Sanctuary App if you’re called to learn more about this.)

3. And finally, business is a spiritual game. And the game’s strategy (aka how to win it) is actually HEALING the patterns that the game is trying to teach you. And healing those patterns is what creates wealth. (You can see my Body of Wealth Program , the 6 Spiritual Laws of Wealth course or Divine Wealth Codes course inside the Sanctuary app for more info.)

4. Oh… and maybe just one more important belief: I believe that it’s really important for us to talk about everything we are about to dive into in this series.

Business Developmental Trauma: About this series.

Last night I was in a deep cuddle session with my husband when my nervous system grounded into peace in a way I hadn’t felt in a very long time.

Back in September, I had a very big realization that it was time for me to take a break from all the hustle and push in my business to really slow down and process some of the traumatic things that took place over the last several years as a business owner. I had been pushing so hard, going so fast, hitting 2 consecutive million dollar years in my business, and traveling 30 percent of the year to host retreats in my plant medicine work.

It was all a lot, and so many difficult things had happened over the last 7 years or so that I just knew I really needed to stop prioritizing money and start prioritizing myself for minute.

Nothing difficult happened in my retreats - those were amazing and absolutely incredible but damn… everything I was holding in the interpersonal relationships I was navigating behind the scenes with clients, employees, and colleague was so incredibly challenging that it left me feeling unsafe and uneasy in almost everything I did.

Truthfully, I felt like I was dying internally all the time. I felt like there was a battle I would have to face around every corner. My guard was up. My fears were loud. My nervous system was, as Peter Levine says, “All dressed up with nowhere to go.”

So I needed to go inward and focus on myself. And stop trying to grow my business.

Not to say that you cannot do both, but in September I knew I needed more space for the Me magic of life…. so I could find a way to truly restore myself and renegotiate the trauma that was living in my nervous system.

So I stripped back all of my responsibilities. I let go of my team. I slowed down my 1:1 roster intake and stopped launching courses. I put all my programs into the Sanctuary App for easy access for my students and released the Body of Wealth program in the process.

Then I paused. I went inward. And EVERYTHING I was avoiding came up.

It was hard to face.

The fear of no longer being important. The concern that all my money would run out and I wouldn’t be safe. The old attachments to being someone who goes so fast, so hard, holds so much and is so busy all the time. The attachment to being someone who was responsible for other people. “Who am I without all of this?”

And then I realized that “all of this” was the very thing preventing me from seeing all the things inside of me that needed healing… all the deeply difficult experiences I had and never fully recovered from were continuously pushing me past a breaking point of stress, anxiety, and worry.

And then, in a “why me” moment, I realized…. “I am going through this so I can one day speak about this. Because no one else is.”

Why is no one talking about the trauma that happens on our business journeys?

It’s a shame that so much of the online marketing world is flooded with showcasing achievement, success and happiness. Yes it’s so incredibly inspiring to see all of this, but that inspiration feels incredibly superficial when in reality, this path isn’t always all that glamorous.

There are learning curves. Bumps in the road. Ruptures with people you love. Trust that is broken. Difficult self doubt. And all the while…. you think to yourself, “It must be me. Because i don’t see anyone else going through this.”

And even people do step into a space of vulnerability to share their “realness” - it can often feel incredibly performative.

It’s a shame because I can’t imagine living my life that way, personally… to not be so deeply connected to myself that I don’t actually express or embody my truth.… That reality feels so hard, forced, and almost like a lie. I want business to feel like a true extension of my joyful beautiful life.. not something I craft as joyful so I can escape the underlying feelings and sensations I am avoiding.

And on a second note, it’s also a shame because people really need REAL truth about this real experience of building a business. and it is not always easy.

Business Developmental Trauma IS a real truth of this world we are all navigating as business owners. And we DO need to talk about it.

So, last night, cuddling with my husband and feeling my body exhale… after spending the last 10 months unpacking from my own prolonged Business Developmental Trauma, I decided it would start a series about it.

This series started on instagram and will continue both here on substack and on the IG. If you didn’t catch the first post, it goes into the whole story, background, and context of what I will be producing over the next few months around this. There are way too many stories to share and too many personal experiences that I am sure you can relate to. I’ll invite you to go read it, because there is valuable information inside that post that won’t be contained here in the substack article.

But to get you up to speed on what I feel you need to know:

Business developmental trauma is the prolonged exposure to repetitive interpersonal traumas that happen in your business and impact your physical wellbeing, sense of safety, emotional health, creative channel, and ability to create true wealth. They can be experiences we have with clients, colleagues, employees, or even our social media followers. And they are experiences that dysregulate our nervous system and put us into an emotional and energetic sensation in our bodies that make us feel like we have no escape. If it’s “too much, too fast, too soon” to our felt sensation in the body, and it doesn’t have proper space, time and support to repair, it ends up creating a rupture within our self that we can name as “trauma.”

And it’s fucking hard. Not just because Business developmental-trauma is so nuanced and complex.. but because there aren’t a lot of people talking about this. Entrepreneurs who “make it big” (the people we model and aspire to be like) make money off of teaching you how to be successful “just like them.” But they often shy away from speaking about these deeply painful experiences publicly. For reasons… i’d say… you have to ask them about.

Perhaps it’s because they themselves have a fear of being judged, or a concern of being “not credible.” Or maybe in essence they are just naturally a more reserved person who likes to keep things private.

But in my opinion, I think if you really want to create results for people, you have to be truly honest about the lived experience that you are walking so that they can have all the information to walk that path too. Other wise, when people go through a hard time they start to question “why is this happening to me?” and wonder if they are actually “doing it right.”

But that’s a post for a later day.

Regardless, over the last 12 years of my own personal experience as an entrepreneur I have learned that the moments when my own appearance and “what do they think of me” is at the center of my energetic focus, I lose my own sense of self. And… I lose my ability to truly create an impact.

So here we go.

Business developmental trauma here’s why it happens and how it happened to me.

Business Developmental-Trauma is something that can happen when we have childhood trauma that is left unintegrated, ignored, or not fully repaired. And I believe it is caused by a few things.

Here’s a list to see if you relate to it.

1. We were raised with absolutely no respect of our boundaries so we build businesses that have no boundaries and then all the trauma comes up.

2. We were raised as people pleasers with over-functioning tendencies so we cross our own boundaries and get retraumatized from that.

3. We have a really unhealthy relationship with money so we let our boundaries be crossed because we think that’s what we have to allow in order to receive.

4. We have the innate need as human beings for “repetition compulsion” - this is a term coined by Sigmund Freud and is our unconscious drive to recreate or repeatedly act out painful or traumatic events from the past in order to heal them (see is paper “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” from 1914.

5. We don’t really know any other way, quite honestly. We unconsciously attract things that don’t meet our needs or create healthy safe space because… well.. we weren’t taught how to meet our needs or create our own safe space. We don’t know how to speak our truth, ask for what we need, and our emotions get enmeshed with our own identity. As a result, we have a hard time separating ourselves from the painful experience that is “learning how to be a human” and so we take everything on personally in our own bodies. “What does this mean about me.”

Couple all of this with the fact that we feel no one fully understands what we are going through (because no one is talking about it) and hence.. we have a stuck trauma with an inability to repair.

For me, 12 years is a long time to be an entrepreneur but do you remember where your own level of consciousness was when you were 12 years old? Yeah… We had a LOT of learning to do right? And being a 12 year old business owner is kind of the same way. We are still SO young. 12 years is not a lot of time for lived experience… even if it does feel like so much has happened.

When I was moving through these difficult experiences with clients, employees, colleagues, and even social media followers who tried to cancel me years ago (another story I’ll share from 2019) I didn’t really know why it was happening to me, quite honestly. And it took me years to identify. And in those years.. even MORE difficult experiences manifested to wake me up to what this was: Business-Developmental Trauma.

My personal Experience with BDT.

The very first Business-Developmental Trauma (BDT) I experienced (where I felt fully separated from my sense of safety) was in 2015… my first year as an entrepreneur. A woman I met at a Tony Robbins event looped me into creating a brand together. And I quickly learned that she just wanted an assistant and wanted to tell me what to do…. and then the boundaries got crossed and I was left holding a relationship rupture with no explanation from her and no desire to move through it.

The second BDT I experienced was a continuous one: Hiring someone who did not like me. She was incredible at her job, but also incredible at avoiding this very important truth. And it played out over many years, and was very destabalizing to my safety.

There were MANY. And I will talk about all these experiences in this series as we go. And not all of them were JUST negative moments. Trauma can happen in big moments of celebration too.

The biggest example I can give of this duality of trauma and it’s manifestation was an expansive moment of my timeline in 2018 when I had made $125,000 in a week. I was at a training seminar in San Diego when I crossed the milestone. Checking my phone neurotically in between training classes to see if anything went wrong I was working with way too many people at once, stretching my capacity of time and availability continuously, saying yes to everything and chasing money to feel an inner sense of security.

That week, on top of a big moment of celebration I had a full blown panic attack. I literally couldn’t hold it all.

Not only was I expanding financially in a way I had truly never experienced before without a chance to fully integrate it and ground it in (This is coming from someone who was making $30,000 a year in her corporate life living below the poverty line just a few years earlier)…. But that week I received 3 emails from 3 very unhappy students in my mastermind who wanted to cancel because they “needed more from me and felt I only cared money and was “using them to boast my own success.”

It really hurt. And, it wasn’t all entirely wrong perspective. I was absolutely petrified and fearing my own survival at the time.. As someone who lived and was married to an addict who drained our bank accounts… money still held the deep engrained wounds of instability and lack of safety.

so yes… in a full blown trauma response of my life at the time, not fully integrated from the past traumas I experienced with him, I did care a lot about money. Too much, in fact.

Now I know better, and I can see that money is just a reflection of my own internal self and that I am safe with everything I interact with (money and people) because I am safe within my own self. Thank you Somatic Wealth Recoding Technique (the Body of Wealth program can teach you.)

But back then, I gave ALLL my power away to everything outside of me. People. And money.

That’s probably going to be the full deep juicy story I share first in this series btw.

But basically, it was too much. Too soon. All at once. I was flooded with a big massive expansion while simultaneously being flooded with a fear of being rejected and disliked. It was all too heavy and hard to handle and I did not handle it in a good way.

Looking back I can be compassionate with myself because I really didn’t have the tools or conscious understanding to fully know what was happening within me at the time.

But now I see: I had no one to support me. I had no one to explain to me what was happening. I had no boundaries. I was not grounded within myself. So I had a full on break down panic attack trauma response in my body dealing with two very intense frequencies at once.

Had I been given guidance from a mentor at the time to explain and help me understand what was happening in my own body, things probably would have been so different. But this experience was the first of many that created an incredible sensation of debilitating stress and dysregulation in my body. Less than a year later, I was holding a 700,000 dollar a year business with so much chronic fatigue, pain, and anxiety that I actually had to take a 9 month sabbatical to heal because I couldn’t walk, my hair was falling out, I had a skin on fire rash all over my body and I felt like I was dying, (Again - another story for a later day.)

So what was different about these last 10 months? Another pause? Yes. But this time it wasn’t a “everything’s crashing and burning” and I have to go away to heal kind of problem.

This was.. “I am consciously creating space in my life to understand what is happening. And I choose to make that more important than money”

It wasn’t until I actually took that space, repaired my own internal system and got better resources that I could finally see: OH. THIS IS BUSINESS DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA.

Again - the more detailed definition is in the instagram post here.

How to tell if you have BDT.

First, this is something I named and put language to because it was helpful for me…. and because I didn’t have any resources at the time when I was navigating this to understand what was happening, having language for the lived experience changed EVERYTHING.

Business Developmental-Trauma.

On the other side of this experience, and helping other clients heal from similar experiences, I now see it clear as day. Here are some signs you may relate to.

• When someone decides to shut down their business because it’s “misaligned and they are moving in a new direction” - it isn’t always because they are truly being guided. Sometimes it’s because they have trauma from their busines that they aren’t fully ready to process. (But wherever you go, there you are.)

• Sometimes we have BDT with coaches we hire.. where we are told and manipulated into believing their way is the only way and then we struggle with understanding how to make our businesses work or how to even trust ourselves as we work it (this is something I see A LOT with clients.)

• Sometimes when someone has a hard time making decisions in their business about what steps to take or what to create, it isn’t always the case that they aren’t a creative person or that they are “indecisive.” Sometimes, they’ve been so traumatized in their business from past actions that they are frozen in time.

• And sometimes when someone says, “Look how magical my business journey is” online, you can feel the undertone and the energy inside their body that says, “this isn’t actually truth.”

All I can say is that I’ve been there. And it is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s simply protection. Because you don’t know any other way.

What does holding BDT actually look like?

These experiences manifest in so many nuanced ways. In my trauma school the teacher once asked the question: “How do you know if someone is traumatized.” and the answer is actually that: it’s nuanced.

Because 80-90 percent of our communication is nonverbal, BDT can look like the following:

• Writing a post and feeling a gut sinking feeling in your body because you had angry comments come to you in the past when you shared things.

• Posting a video on social media and feeling your heart race because you were once called fat when you shared yourself dancing.

• Feeling immense lethargy as you sit down to serve clients on a day of client calls because you have had clients who drained your energy.

• Being afraid to hire employees because someone took advantage of you and you now don’t know who to trust.

• Bracing when a client tells you “there’s something I want to process with you” because you think it’s about you (since there was an experience in your past where it was… and it created a big rupture in your past.)

• Holding immense fear on taking on more clients because you had a rupture with a client in the past.

• Being afraid to receive more money because more money made you more responsible for other people and someone projected that expectation on you in the past and asked for their money back when they didn’t get what they wanted.

• Being afraid to mastermind or network with other people because someone who was your colleauge took advantage of you in the past and now you’re closed off to connection.

And let me be clear: it isn’t the experience itself that defines trauma. because, let’s be honest, there are plenty of people who go through difficult things and navigate them pretty smoothly.

But again - when we don’t give our nervous system the time, the space, and the support it needs in those moments: We become traumatized.

So… I’m going to end the post here. I want to hear your thoughts. Our Body of Wealth Somatic Experiencing call is tonight and if you’re reading this after Wednesday July 22, the replay will be up in the Sanctuary app. you can go check it out and also make sure you follow the @recodingwealth instagram account for the IG updates on this series if you resonate. Because the more detailed stories are coming soon.

What do you think about this post? What are your experiences with BDT? Would you like to share in the comments? I’d love to hear from you.

And thanks for listening babe.

I know it’s pretty crazy to process and think about, and in many ways that community was one of the best things that happened to me in my entire life.

If you don’t know the back story, I’ll share it with you here. Simple, short, and to the point.

I moved to Sedona for a year when I had severe chronic illness and an immense amount of trauma that was coming up. I wasn’t able to hold it, and I needed help. I found incredible healers in Sedona, and decided to move there to support myself for a year.

Yes, I was married at the time. Yes, my husband supported me, packed up all of my things, drove me across country (I was so sick I couldn’t travel at the time), and got me a long-term rental so I could be fully supported in my healing process.

That’s a crazy story for a later day.

In this article, I want to talk about why I left that community, and some of the things that I noticed being immersed in a spiritual culture, and how spiritual communities can become unsafe for people who are on their healing path.

Don’t get me wrong, I truly, fully believe in the power of community. Since then, I have held community in person for many, many years, and have built an incredible community on Instagram since 2015. But one of my deepest priorities and values is safety in community. And I think that’s because I spent many years as a child feeling like I didn’t belong in community that I really wanted to be a part of, whether it was the culture of my soccer team, the girls at school, or the popular crowd I really longed to fit in with.

Anyway. Coming back to the topic of spiritual communities.

I find that some of these places can be infiltrated with a lot of unhealthy behavior. And I think it’s really important that we as spiritual people have the ability to discern whether or not these communities are safe for us.

So let’s drop in and talk about some of the ways we can identify safe or unsafe community when we are trying to find a spiritual group or network of people to connect with.

Let’s start with discernment. Because this word comes up a lot in conscious community.

To discern is to use your internal compass to decide whether or not something is truly healthy, safe, and in alignment for you.

Discernment is a very important quality to develop as a spiritual person, as somebody who’s on a healing journey, and especially as somebody who’s holding space for other people.

But sometimes in spiritual communities, people label things as discernment when deep down they’re actually using judgment. They are casting judgment, or forming negative opinions about other people, and shutting those people out because in some way, shape, or form they themselves feel higher or above that other person.

The other day I was talking to a really incredible brother who also left the spiritual community, and we were reflecting on this. How the culture that we were hanging out in and immersed in, in Sedona, was full of a lot of this behavior. Basically, somebody would feel more enlightened, more conscious, more awake, more above another person, and would cast that other person’s behavior down into a place of shame. They would moralistically judge that person, cut that person off from the community, and say, “I’m just being discerning.”

Using discernment is about protection, safety, and boundary.

Using judgment on another person is about moralistic hierarchy.

And that’s very, very present in a lot of spiritual communities.

Moralistic hierarchy.

In isolated spiritual communities like this, there tends to be this energy of wanting to be above. A lot of people who are spiritual wake up to what we define as “the matrix,” the world, the reality of normal people. And when we wake up to that, there tends to be this process of judging in order to separate from.

For some reason, we as human beings think that the only way to separate from something is to judge what we’re letting go of.

In spiritual communities, there tends to be this moralistic hierarchy. This need to place yourself above somebody else. I’m better than them because I don’t eat meat. I’m more enlightened than that person because I don’t watch reality TV.

It seems that in these spiritual communities, the ascension is not just an internal process, but an external process of trying to cast wrongness onto another type of person in order to cast accomplishments upon themselves.

Competition.

In spiritual communities, there is a TON of competition. It seems to have a very Darwinistic nature, where spiritual people in groups tend to compete with one another for the strongest to survive.

I think part of being spiritual is learning to understand the animalistic nature within ourselves and to correct that behavior. Especially when it comes to this point. When we’re competing for our enlightenment, when we’re competing to be the best, most spiritual, evolved, conscious person, we’re not welcoming the shadow. We’re not inviting in the learnings. We’re not allowing ourselves to be human.

So this can lead us to avoid our vulnerability. To put on a mask. To dress up in a performative way to claim our spiritual consciousness.

And on that note…..

Avoiding the shadow.

It’s one of the most disappointing qualities among unhealthy spiritual communities.

In my experience, our shadow is the most potent, powerful medicine that we have within ourselves. To face our fears, our darkness, our sticky parts, our discomforts, our insecurities, and our wounds. This is the entire point of healing. Learning how to come into right relationship with those parts of us that we’ve once rejected and ignored is actually the beautiful journey of returning to wholeness.

But in spiritual communities, sometimes there’s really no space for these things.

People are judging each other, competing with one another, forming opinions about how the other one behaves, and pretending to be very loving and accepting, but not actually allowing for the safe space for people to authentically unravel their darkness.

I have experienced this firsthand. And I can tell you from my experience, it’s quite difficult when we are going through healing processes in community. We’re going to mirror to one another. We are going to notice people’s shadows come up. People’s sticky parts. People’s uncomfortable things. And those experiences may play out in a difficult way.

For example, you may be going through a fear within yourself that you are not enough for belonging in community. And you may play out a process that causes people to question whether or not they feel safe with you.

Is that you being an unsafe person? Is that you having so much trauma that you shouldn’t belong in the community?

Or is it true that the community should learn how to hold safe space for these old stories to unravel and rewrite back into wholeness?

This is very, very important.

Replaying group think. Cult-like culture. Conforming.

I don’t really know how to put this point any clearer, but I see this a lot in spiritual communities, where people actually don’t form thought for themselves.

There’s too much of a desire to fit in and belong, that people often stop using their own common sense and stop discerning within themselves to lean into group think. And it’s unhealthy.

People develop a cult-like nature where everybody has dogmatic principles and beliefs about what it means to be spiritual, what it doesn’t mean to be spiritual. And how to be accepted and approved of in the group is about adhering to those qualities and principles that everybody else is agreeing to.

Basically, lean in or get out.

I think one of the beautiful qualities of a healthy community is that we can all learn, challenge, and grow from one another. I can tell you from my experience running a very healthy community myself for the last six years of over 97 self-healers, and also building and growing a digital online community of over 35,000 people, I certainly believe it’s true that we all have learning to do with one another. It’s not about one person being powerful over everybody else. It’s about us all leaning into the growth of the mirrored reflection that we offer each other.

And finally. Spiritual leaders.

I’m going to leave this as a generalized statement, because I don’t think being a spiritual leader is a dangerous thing. I think there’s definitely a way to walk in right relation, and there’s a way to be able to actually lead others towards their own evolution, power, and growth that doesn’t require them to sacrifice their own innate inner healer.

You can be a spiritual leader and teach people how to find their inner leader within themselves.

And I think that’s what I learned from my spiritual teacher myself. I met my spiritual teacher in Sedona, and he continues to be an incredibly big part of my life. I’ve learned from him, I grow with him, we’ve developed an incredible relationship together. And I never see him as somebody who’s above me. I see him as somebody who’s learning with me. Sometimes he plays the role of teacher and I play the role of student. And other times the roles are reversed. He’s welcomed and allowed that growth to come into our friendship, and it’s built an incredibly deep sense of trust.

Other spiritual leaders, from what I hear, are not like this so much.

They tend to control. They tend to force. They tend to want to stay above the entire community to create a sensation of control.

This to me is not a spiritual leader.

This is colonialism. Conquest. Claiming people as your own and using people for your own benefit.

And I think this is one of the biggest things we have to be discerning about when we are stepping into spiritual communities.

There definitely can be a leader who’s holding the space and point of a particular culture in a particular community (I do this in my own life). But I think there’s a difference between that and egoically controlling and colonizing people.

So I’ll leave it at that.

What are your thoughts? What do you think about this? I would love to hear more. Thank you to all of those who inspired this post from my Instagram, and I’m looking forward to hearing what you guys have to say on this really important topic.

xox

Lauren Eliz Love

Lauren Eliz Love is a shamanic practitioner, somatic trauma healer, and founder of Somatic Wealth Recoding Technique — a trademarked body-based method that rewires the nervous system’s relationship with money, worth, and wealth. After an awakening in Sedona, a shamanic initiation with plant medicine, and her own journey through chronic illness and deep trauma healing, Lauren channeled her lived experience into a body of work that bridges ancient earth medicine with modern trauma science. She is the creator of The Sanctuary App, host of The World Needs Your Medicine Podcast, and is dedicated to guiding women into the body where the real healing lives. Her work is for the woman who has done the work and knows something deeper is waiting.

Okay so I know that title is going to get some people… because the truth is everyone and their mother comes to the medicine to get clarity in their entrepreneurial path. “Show me how to become wealthy!” and “give me my business plan!” is always the intention I see among high achieving business women. And I want to address it immediately, because the way that plant medicine actually created wealth was not what you may expect.

Nobody handed me a business plan in ceremony.
Nobody came to me in a vision to tell me what my instagram bio should be.

That’s all ego.

I will say, through the medicine I DID download the teachings I was meant to offer the world. But that’s a conversation for a later day….

I didn’t drink the medicine and wake up with a million dollar idea downloaded into my nervous system.

I came to ayahuasca because I was suffering. Like…. really, really suffering.

Here’s the part I don’t talk about enough.

I am a rape survivor.

In 2019, I was raped and attempted suicide. And then spent about six years heavily medicated. Antipsychotics, antidepressants, more labels from doctors than I can even count. My body was somewhere underneath all of it, trying to find its way back.

When I had my spiritual awakening, something became really clear to me: what happened to me was not my fault. I was not responsible for what was done to me.

But I was responsible for what I did about it.

So I started exploring. Studying. Looking for something that could actually reach the parts of me that the pharmaceutical industry hadn’t been able to touch. And that search led me to psychedelics, and eventually to ayahuasca.

Ayahuasca isn’t just a spiritual experience. There’s science behind why it works. The MAOIs in ayahuasca, and compounds found in mushrooms, have been shown to support neuroplasticity and repair neurological damage caused by trauma. So when people ask me if it’s “real”…. yes. It’s very real.

Here’s some more info for you if your curious… you can also scroll right past this if the science isn’t your thing:

Ayahuasca works because it is a combination of two different plants that rely on each other to become active in the body:

• DMT (Dimethyltryptamine): This is the primary psychedelic compound, found in the Psychotria viridis shrub. Normally, if you swallow DMT, stomach enzymes called Monoamine Oxidase (MAO) destroy it immediately.

• MAOIs (Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors): The Banisteriopsis caapi vine contains beta-carboline alkaloids (harmine, harmaline, and tetrahydroharmine). These act as MAOIs, temporarily turning off those stomach enzymes. This allows DMT to enter the bloodstream, cross the blood-brain barrier, and alter brain
  

  Both Ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms belong to a class of molecules that scientists call psychoplastogens—compounds capable of rapidly promoting structural and functional neural plasticity.

  • Growing New “Branches”: Research shows that these substances cause neurons in the prefrontal cortex to sprout new dendrites (the branches that receive information) and dendritic spines (the sites where neurons connect). This physically repairs atrophied neural pathways damaged by chronic stress and trauma.

  • The TrkB and BDNF Pathways: A key scientific breakthrough confirms that classic psychedelics directly bind to TrkB receptors (the targets of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor, or BDNF). BDNF acts like “fertilizer” for the brain, triggering the growth, maturation, and maintenance of nerve cells.

  Trauma often leaves the brain stuck in rigid, maladaptive loops. Psychedelics physically disrupt this rigidity through two primary mechanisms:
  

  • Downregulating the Default Mode Network (DMN): The DMN is the brain network responsible for your sense of self, ego, and repetitive self-reflection. In trauma survivors, the DMN is often hyperactive, locking them into loops of fear or depression. Ayahuasca and psilocybin temporarily quiet the DMN, allowing different parts of the brain to communicate with each other freely.

  • Activating the Sigma-1 Receptor: The DMT in ayahuasca specifically binds to the Sigma-1 receptor (SIGMAR1), which modulates intracellular calcium channels and cellular survival. This specific activation is linked to neuroprotection, fear extinction, and making traumatic memories “labile” (flexible), so they can be reprocessed and integrated without the intense, original fear response.

So ya… the science is there.

But back to the millionaire thing. Because here’s what actually happened.

When I sat with the medicine, she didn’t give me a roadmap to success.

She showed me everything that was in the way of it.

And there was a LOT in the way.

I was carrying an immense amount of unworthiness that was literally repelling wealth. Because of my sexual trauma, because of what my body had been coded to believe about safety, I was moving through my entire relationship with money from a place of fear.

Fear of failure. Fear of not being enough. And honestly….. failure didn’t just feel scary. It felt like death. Like, actual death.

This is what complex PTSD does. When we have a big trauma that we haven’t processed or integrated, our nervous system starts to read everything (money, opportunities, relationships, success) through the lens of that original wound. Something’s wrong with me. That’s the story that runs underneath it all.

And that story was running mine.

No matter what I pursued, no matter what I tried to create, I always felt like I wasn’t enough for the outcomes I really wanted. I felt unworthy of the freedom and success I could see other people living. Like there was some invisible glass ceiling I just kept bumping into, and I didn’t even understand why.

Ayahuasca showed me the ceiling. And then helped me dissolve it.

She is a shadow medicine. That is her whole purpose. To bring up the unintegrated parts of you, the things you’ve been carrying that you haven’t fully faced, so that you can finally come into right relationship with yourself.

And what I discovered in that process was this:

The story that I was unworthy? That wasn’t me.

The story that I was incapable? Also not me.

Those were patterns of abuse and trauma that had been projected onto me, placed into me, without my consent. And I had been living inside of them like they were the truth.

Through the medicine work, I started letting go of all the things that were not actually me. And what was left….. was someone I didn’t fully recognize yet. Someone who was confident. Someone who felt safe. Someone who knew what she wanted and actually believed she could have it.

That is where the wealth came from.

Not from a business strategy.

From finally being free enough inside myself to actually receive it.

What changed on the other side.

After years of this work, I started noticing things shifting in ways I never expected.

I had a deeper understanding of what I actually desired in this life. Not what I thought I should want. What I genuinely, authentically wanted.

I had a deeper sense of confidence in my gifts and in my facilitation. The self-doubt that used to be my constant companion just…. quieted.

I had clearer boundaries. Which meant I stopped leaking energy in every direction and started protecting the things that actually mattered to my growth.

I had a deeper sense of safety to communicate my needs. To take up space. To ask for what I was worth.

And my relationship with money started to mirror all of that back to me.

Because here’s the truth: your outer world is always a reflection of what’s happening inside. And when I cleaned up what was inside, the outside had no choice but to change.

If you want to hear me go deeper on my full psychedelic healing journey, I covered it all on Episode 20 of The World Needs Your Medicine Podcast: My Psychedelic Healing Journey with Ayahuasca, Mushrooms, and Sacred Ceremony. You can listen here:

Or on Apple here

xox

Lauren Eliz Love

Lauren Eliz Love is a shamanic practitioner, somatic trauma healer, and founder of Somatic Wealth Recoding Technique — a trademarked body-based method that rewires the nervous system’s relationship with money, worth, and wealth. After an awakening in Sedona, a shamanic initiation with plant medicine, and her own journey through chronic illness and deep trauma healing, Lauren channeled her lived experience into a body of work that bridges ancient earth medicine with modern trauma science. She is the creator of The Sanctuary App, host of The World Needs Your Medicine Podcast, and is dedicated to guiding women into the body where the real healing lives. Her work is for the woman who has done the work and knows something deeper is waiting.

I want to start this by speaking truth into some of my own personal lived experiences, and also recognizing that my personal experiences might be different than yours. Hopefully I say something that resonates with you.

But the truth is…. I’ve never actually thought I would be somebody who would define themselves as a spiritual healer.

In fact, I remember an ayahuasca ceremony about a year ago where, after the deep and beautiful healing that we offered to the students, one of the girls raised her hand and asked why I don’t call myself a healer. She seemed almost quite frustrated by my lack of claiming of the word “healer.”

Why don’t you call yourself one? she asked. It’s very clear that’s what you are.

But the truth is, for a long time I was resistant. Resistant to calling myself a healer. Maybe that was because of what I thought people would think. Maybe it was because I was afraid of the responsibilities. Or perhaps maybe I didn’t want to claim any part of the ego. Look at me, I’m such a big incredible spiritual healer.

I think there are a lot of people like that out there, who are showing up on Instagram, sharing the candlelit altars and the fancy dresses and the shamanic energy work, and they do it with such pride. And while that’s really beautiful, I never really felt like I would be one of those people.

Maybe that’s why the lessons of initiation have been more difficult. Because a part of me deep down was avoiding claiming my own inner healer.

But here’s what I know.

In this world today there are so many of us carrying the torch to help the world collapse timelines, shift generational patterns, and heal wounds. And while it looks different for everyone, I can say that over the last 12 years mentoring healers and light workers in the online space, there are some really strong similar patterns. Things that I myself wish I knew when I first started.

For context, here is my journey that I think you might want to know about if you’re reading this article.

I had my very first deep spiritual awakening in 2012 when my grandfather died. That awakening was very spiritual, deeply emotional, and woke me up to the unprocessed traumas of my life that I had been avoiding for many years, including violent sexual assault in my early teens, and a rape and suicide attempt just before I turned 20.

So in 2012, this spiritual wake-up really woke me to my truth that I needed to heal. And a spiritual path was starting to open for me.

Since then, I’ve been really devoted to trauma work, my spiritual connection, my self-healing. And somewhere along the line I started to teach and share the things that I was learning, which led me to plant medicine, ayahuasca, and shamanic facilitation.

I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be a spiritual healer.

And if I made a conscious choice, I feel like these would be the 10 things I would have had to understand and agree to prior to walking this path.

So hopefully this list helps someone.

The 10 things I wish I knew about the life of a spiritual healer before I actually started walking this path.

1. You will die a million times in one lifetime.

I feel like this is such an important principle to understand, and yet we don’t really truly understand it until we walk it.

Dying a million times in one lifetime looks like letting go of certain paths of your life trajectory that you thought you would have forever. Feeling surprised by the unexpected twists and turns that spirit takes you on in the journey called life. Letting go of identities, versions of yourself you thought you would be forever. Breaking up with friends and changing your life path and social circles are all part of this process.

Dying a million times in one life feels painful. But in every experience you’re shedding and stepping into a new version of yourself.

It’s a deep prayer and commitment. And it’s hard to describe and put to words. But I think anybody who’s been on this path can understand and relate to this principle.

Dying over and over again to become a deeper, more embodied, more true, connected, and whole version of yourself is, in essence, the process of a spiritual healer. We are healing the world through our own lived experience.

2. It’s lonely sometimes.

Most people think that with great influence comes a great amount of connection and being seen and loving share circles of sisterly intimacy and depth. And while that may be true, there’s also another side to this perspective.

Being a spiritual healer can feel lonely because the people in your life so rarely understand what you are moving through.

There have been many times where I’ve been called to cocoon and isolate and pull away from community to go deeper within myself. There have been seasons where I’ve experienced a severe amount of family judgment and criticism for walking the path that I have been walking in my life. And it’s hard sometimes to be in regular reality when people don’t really get what it means to even be a spiritual healer.

So yeah…. it can be lonely.

3. Your greatest teacher is your family.

Medicine doesn’t always taste good. And when it comes to family, sometimes the medicine we receive is harsh, frustrating, and abrasive.

I know in my life both of my parents have said hurtful things about my choice of work. I’ve experienced rejection and misunderstanding more times than I can count. And I spent many years craving love and acceptance that never really arrived from my family or my lineage.

My grandmother, who I love so dearly, refers to my work as “primitive.” And I’m pretty sure none of my sisters really fully understand the depth of my work. Still, they do come around. Not all of them, but some of them. And it’s really beautiful to see what can happen to your family when all you do is hold a prayer of your own development.

This is one of those things that took me a really long time to learn. Because when I started healing, changing, and shifting, I wanted to heal, shift, and change everybody around me. I wanted to talk about my work and inspire my family to come along the path.

But the truth is not everybody is meant to be walking the way you do.

Sometimes, if you slow down, you can really see that you’re the one holding the torch. And while that can feel lonely, your family is teaching you how to trust that power within yourself, even when nobody is walking with you.

4. You will take 90% of your action before you feel ready.

Again, this is one of those tastes of medicine that doesn’t actually feel good to swallow.

I have experienced this over and over again in my work. Spirit leads and takes you down new paths and avenues you don’t quite feel ready or prepared for. You are moving in a new direction, in a new way, unexpectedly, just simply because the seasons and tides change.

And every time you deepen your gifts, your power, and your legacy, your medicine as it gets stronger will require you to lean into taking action before you feel ready for it.

I’ve worked with a lot of women who feel like one more certification or one more spiritual mentor will make them feel confident and secure enough to lean in. But the truth is, this entire path is about leaning in before you feel ready.

And while it is important to do your best to be educated in your style of facilitation and understand your trauma-informed work…. ultimately, 90% of what you do as a spiritual healer is going to be soul led and spirit led.

You have to walk with it. And walking with it means trusting what is moving through you before you feel ready to even trust yourself.

5. 90% of the people in your life will think you’re crazy.

Some of the greatest things I’ve ever done as a spiritual healer were sparked unexpectedly. And were followed with a thought within myself of….. am I crazy for doing this?

Following intuition. Knowing how spirit moves you. Listening to your guides. Anchoring into your channel.

There have been many times where I myself even felt like I was crazy to pursue what was moving through me. So if that’s the case…. how can I ever expect anybody outside of me to more deeply understand what is moving within my own self?

It’s my responsibility to feel safe in what is coming through. And to be somebody who isn’t dependent on external validation or recognition.

My gifts are my gifts. Your gifts are your gifts. Your healing path is your healing path. My healing path is my healing path.

And while people will think I’m nuts or you’re nuts…. at the end of the day, only you know what is true in your own legacy path. Nobody is more of an expert on that than you are. And trusting that is the key.

6. You’ll mirror people’s shadows. And sometimes that costs you.

As an ayahuasca facilitator, I understand that the medicines of the earth that I study become the medicines of my own arsenal within my body of work. And ayahuasca is, in essence, a shadow medicine. People who study with her understand this, and know that facing your deepest, darkest shadows is actually the way to your empowerment, your healing, and your transformation in life.

As any type of facilitator, your stretching, your growing, your evolutionary experience is going to bring up other people’s shadows.

Speaking your truth may give somebody the ick. Saying what is resonant for you may make another person feel uncomfortable.

I think the hardest part of this is when it happens in your interpersonal relationships.

But your work is going to mirror other people’s shadows. And sometimes that is going to cost you. But it’s more important to honor and respect the truth of your light and the gifts of your service than it is to keep quiet and stay stuck.

When you stay stuck and you don’t express your truths, your power, your medicine, you are indulging and allowing other people to stay stuck too.

Sometimes being in your power brings up somebody else’s shadow. And that’s not your responsibility to manage. And it’s not your responsibility to worry about.

Ultimately, that’s sovereignty.

7. You will need a lot of alone time.

This again is one of those things that took me a long time to learn.

Needing a lot of alone time is something that we often resist and ignore. Being in solitude, sitting in quiet, these are hard privileges to cultivate in our busy lifestyle and culture. There’s a lot of go, go, go, get it done and achieve energy, especially when you are sharing your medicine in the online space.

There’s so much to be said for slowing down and stepping into a connection with nature.

And I find for me some of the deepest essences of my content creation have come through in the quiet.

The truth is, your gifts and your facilitation will only develop the more you sit in solitude with yourself. There is no replacement for that medicine.

Solitude is really the only way.

8. Over-holding doesn’t help anyone. Boundaries are key.

I’m kind of in awe over this list as I’m reflecting, realizing that every item gets more powerful than the next.

I spent so many years as a healer over-giving, over-pleasing, and over-indulging in other people’s trauma patterns. Women would say they would need a lot of accountability, and I would show up for it. Women would tell me that they wanted to be held or guided a certain way, and I would contort and mold myself in order to meet that expectation.

At the end of the day, your medicine is your medicine.

And when you’re over-holding somebody, most of the time you’re indulging in their trauma patterns and their beliefs that they’re not capable or worthy of their own self sovereignty and power.

Spiritual healers are powerful in their gifts of medicine. So it’s normal that when people come into your work and resonate with it, they really, really want to lean in and ask for a lot more than what you are willing to give.

Your boundaries are key.

And how you hold your boundaries and how you protect your energy is going to teach people a hell of a lot more than over-teaching ever will.

Remember, children learn by modeling behavior. And when you are the mother of your medicine, you are required to hold that integrity with your students. Be in your boundaries. Be in your sovereignty. Be in your clear communication.

That will teach your students how to show up that way in their own life.

9. You will have absolutely no idea where you’re going. Surrender is key.

And you will change your mind thousands of times.

This work is evolutionary and quantum, and it evolves fast and unexpectedly. When you’re following the devotion of your prayer, and you’re leaning into the gifts of your medicine, you aren’t going to have an idea where it’s all going to end up.

It’s not your job to understand that.

Actually, your job is to just be present with what is.

10. Development is only good when we are stewarding ourselves first.

I’ve been leaning into this lesson a lot lately. And I feel like this is going to be an entirely different post speaking to the power of stewarding our medicine instead of developing it.

If we can lean into the metaphor of the earth as an example, we have been developing her for so many years, and it’s created destruction of our planet. Our atmosphere has been altered. There have been raging fires, droughts, floods, and winds of change as the earth aggressively demands to be restored back to her natural state.

Development is about having an idea and controlling the outcome and taking action to making it happen.

But stewarding land is about listening to what it wants to be. Paying attention to what she needs. And advocating for her to grow.

And I think if we can all lean into that analogy as it relates to our spiritual path, we will receive true powerful gifts that will change the world for generations to come.

xox

Lauren Eliz Love

Lauren Eliz Love is a shamanic practitioner, somatic trauma healer, and founder of Somatic Wealth Recoding Technique — a trademarked body-based method that rewires the nervous system’s relationship with money, worth, and wealth. After an awakening in Sedona, a shamanic initiation with plant medicine, and her own journey through chronic illness and deep trauma healing, Lauren channeled her lived experience into a body of work that bridges ancient earth medicine with modern trauma science. She is the creator of The Sanctuary App, host of The World Needs Your Medicine Podcast, and is dedicated to guiding women into the body where the real healing lives. Her work is for the woman who has done the work and knows something deeper is waiting.

A few years ago I started to notice this trend in the world of psychedelics.

A lot of the people who inspired me to begin my journey studying ayahuasca were the very same people who were leaving the plant medicine world to lean back into the church.

Many of these people who had a history of family upbringing in religion were denouncing their work with Ayahuasca to reclaim Christ.

It really made me think for a long time and ponder about the integrity and safety of the work.

I myself have been sitting with Ayahuasca since 2019. And after a year long initiation with my spiritual teacher and medicine carrier, I began supporting him in ceremonial work. For the last six years I have been acting as an apprentice, a guardian, and also a carrier of plant medicine facilitation.

I’ve walked people through the deepest depths of their traumas.

I’ve held women as they cried for their womb and shook the oppression that had been placed on them from lineages and lineages ago.

And throughout the many, many experiences I’ve had (I once tried to count, and I’ve sat in over 100 ceremonies), I was always so confused why so many people had experiences like this.

I think a few different things are happening. And not enough people are talking about it.

I want to be clear, this is my own opinion, and it’s not me projecting my beliefs or ideologies onto other people.

But I do think, and have noticed a trend, that most of the time when I talk to these people who lean so deeply back into Christ consciousness and denounce ayahuasca…. most of what they describe is this: their facilitated experiences were not actually safely facilitated spaces.

These were spaces where people were drinking large doses of medicine when they didn’t really need large doses, or their nervous systems were not really at the capacity where a large dose would have been appropriate.

These were spaces where indigenous lineages were not respected, talked about, or even honored.

These were also environments where there weren’t enough guardians in the spaces for people to receive direct support when they were navigating difficult times.

Ayahuasca is a shadow medicine. And she brings up fear.

It’s a natural part of her work to unearth the parts of us that we are afraid to look at. Our insecurities, our doubts, our limitations. The deep, deep things that we’ve been holding onto that aren’t actually ours. The results of years of trauma and programmed belief systems of control and oppression.

Especially as women, this can always come up and confront us in our work with ayahuasca.

And that’s exactly why it’s so important to have proper facilitation and safe space.

It really makes me sad to hear the stories of people who run away from plant medicine work because they’ve experienced something so horrific or malpractice that they blame the medicine instead of blaming the carrier of it.

Ayahuasca doesn’t hurt people.

Ayahuasca is not bad.

Ayahuasca is not dark or evil.

It’s the improper facilitation of her work that can lead to these stories and paradigms being replayed again for the trauma survivors that come to her for healing.

And it’s our deepest responsibility as facilitators and carriers of our medicines, psychedelic or otherwise, that we devote ourselves to having trauma-informed spaces that are safe, that give students agency, and that allow proper facilitation of this work and healing to actually transpire.

In my experience, what safe facilitation actually looks like.

Some of the things that my teachers taught me that I continue to carry through in my own work look like:

1. Allowing people to drink a little amount of medicine if they desire (agency of choice) and educating them about dosage and range of dosage.

2. Having enough guardians in a space.

3. Making sure that when spaces are co-ed, there are proper amounts of guardians, and that male guardians have boundaries when working with women who have trauma.

4. Not leaving women and men alone during medicine work.

5. Not leaving anyone along during medicine work.

6. Doing medicine work in a proper, safe environment, home, set and setting, whatever that is for your own personal needs.

7. Making sure that students are aware of the lineages of the medicines being carried, and paying reverence to those lineages during the work.

8. Having proper diet protocols prior to sitting with medicine to cleanse prior to the sit.

9. Having proper medical screening prior to sitting with medicine.

One of the very first places I went to go sit with medicine is the very exact place that I would never recommend to any of my students who are going to continue their work or even begin their journeys. And it’s unfortunate that many of these places still exist.

Coming back to our original topic about Jesus.

When we are drinking the earth, we are drinking her deepest form of Christ consciousness.

And it is here that we find reverence and respect for Buddha, Allah, Jesus, Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, Yeshua, and all the names you use to describe purity and holiness.

It is through her work that we are really studying the Christ consciousness within ourselves.

I think a lot of people return to their religious traditions out of curiosity. Once we heal from our shadows, we long to build relationship with the roots of our spiritual lineage in a healthier way than we were raised to have previously. And it’s really important to honor and respect that too.

Developing a deeper relationship with Jesus after ayahuasca isn’t wrong.

But when you’re denouncing ayahuasca in the process to claim a savior, you are replaying the patterns of religion that keep us controlled in the first place. Labeling things as right, wrong, good or bad, dark and evil versus light.

At the end of the day, we are all returning to a state of wholeness within ourselves. And these medicines, whether they are found in a book, in scripture, or in a cup of the earth, they are here to guide us back to our whole being.

I hope this post inspires you today.

If you would like to explore more about my ayahuasca work, retreats are available on laurenoflove.com. And you can also take my Plant Medicine 101 course inside of the Sanctuary app.

xox

Lauren Eliz Love

Lauren Eliz Love is a shamanic practitioner, somatic trauma healer, and founder of Somatic Wealth Recoding Technique — a trademarked body-based method that rewires the nervous system's relationship with money, worth, and wealth. After an awakening in Sedona, a shamanic initiation with plant medicine, and her own journey through chronic illness and deep trauma healing, Lauren channeled her lived experience into a body of work that bridges ancient earth medicine with modern trauma science. She is the creator of The Sanctuary App, host of The World Needs Your Medicine Podcast, and is dedicated to guiding women into the body where the real healing lives. Her work is for the woman who has done the work and knows something deeper is waiting.

So lately I’ve been noticing this really ugly, dark, and uncomfortable part of myself.

And because I have been doing this healing work for a while, I feel like this is really a safe space to be honest and vulnerable about that personal experience with all of you.

My hope is that sharing about this part of me helps me feeI a little bit better, and when you read about this part of me, maybe you feel a little bit better too.

Because the truth is, I think we all have this part within ourselves.

It’s the part of us that I think needs a lot of love.

I can speak for myself. I definitely have spent a great deal of time judging this part of me, wanting her to go away, and feeling really critical of myself every time she comes up.

So let’s just name her and get right to it.

I have a part of me that feels angry that I don’t get my way and I don’t get to have everything that I want in my life right now the moment I want it.

When I close my eyes and try to imagine her, I visualize a young teenager kicking and screaming, stomping her feet. She’s pounding her fists, angry that the things she wants that feel so accessible simultaneously feel so far away and impossible to reach.

Right now, this is manifesting in my life in a few different ways.

I’ve been dreaming about having a place with land to bring students to for my healing ceremonies over the last couple of years. I’ve been traveling so much all over the world to facilitate my work, and I really just deeply desire and long for a safe landing pad to call my own home.

My medicine longs for a home.

And I long for it too.

And lately I’ve been finding myself impatient, frustrated, and angry that the thing I want hasn’t fully arrived yet.

When I tap into that emotion, I ask myself where it comes from.

And the first thing I can recall to memory is an experience I had when I was about 12 years old and the new NSYNC album No Strings Attached was being released.

I think it was a Friday morning, because a lot of my friends were having their moms drive them to the record store before school, and they were all coming into class late so that they could get the CD when the store opened at nine.

My mom refused to do it.

And I remember feeling so angry and so upset that this one thing I really wanted, wasn’t going to happen. “Why do I have to fight so hard to get what I want?” I remember thinking.

It wasn’t just so that I could have this cool new CD. It was also because I wanted to belong and do the same thing all my friends were doing so we could have that experience together. The thought that somebody outside of myself was stopping me…made me furious.

And that’s how I feel right now, too.

There are things in my life that I wish were here right now. I wish I had the ability to hire a contractor who could build a foundation on a plot of land back in my woods and hire an electrician and a plumber and install a septic tank and buy a fancy dome or cool yurt, where I could have my dream manifest.

But there are practical things to consider.

Building a foundation all the way in the woods requires permits. Installing electricity far into the property line is a bigger expense than you would guess.

And there are a lot of other reasons why this thing that I want so badly has not actually shown up in my world yet.

I think it’s because this thing I want so badly is teaching me how to give up control.

And… how to be patient with the inner teenager that’s still inside of me.

How easy would life be if everything we wanted just came to us all the time? How worry-free would our realities be if we could just snap our fingers and call in the things that we want whenever we wanted them?

I would love a reality like that.

But unfortunately, there are things to learn in this human experience.

Life is not just about having things. Life is about learning how to refine and cultivate yourself in order to be a match for the things you want.

And while I’m frustrated, I also know that there’s something that I’m learning here.

Leaning into it doesn’t feel quite easy sometimes, especially as a trauma survivor. When things feel beyond our control, trusting the process feels quite difficult. And when there’s something you want and you don’t quite feel safe enough to have it yet, there’s a whole lot of inner work and a deep invitation to really slow down.

So that’s what I’m doing.

I’m slowing down.

And I just wanted to write this for anybody out there who feels frustrated that the things that you want aren’t here yet.

Stomp your feet, scream and shout, shake your fists.

It’s important to feel what you’re feeling without judgment.

I want it now is a normal part of all of us.

It’s okay that we aren’t patient. It’s okay that our spiritual study hasn’t perfected the art of surrender just yet in our life.

But maybe we can lean in here to the moment and just say…..

If there was something that I was really meant to have right now, I would have it already.

I think the reason I so desperately want things in my life is because I grew up in a reality where I really had to fight to get the things that I desired. I wasn’t allowed to do a lot of things that my peers were allowed to do. And so oftentimes when there’s a logistical or financial reason why I can’t do something as an adult now, I often just blame my partner for stopping me or holding me back the way I used to blame my parents.

I think I’m learning and leaning into a more softer approach.

If I was really meant to have this, I would have it already.

And what would my life be like if I firmly believed that?…..

xox

Lauren Eliz Love

Okay, my love. So, here’s the story.

Are you ready for it? I hope you are, because I’m really excited to share it.

So, first and foremost, I want to acknowledge that I’m not actually writing this. I’m standing on my deck, drinking some rose water, listening to the birds chirp, and reflecting on the wild, insane ride I’ve been through over the last two weeks. (thank you AI for allowing me to express myself in my voice, and then transcribing it word for word for me here.)

Something is happening right now. And I know you can feel it too.

I have no idea if it’s just me, but in talking to some of the medicine sisters who are in my mentorship, one to one, and in group….. and I can say with certainty that this time period that we are in is incredibly potent. So many of us are shifting gears and deepening, awakening to more truth, letting go of the things that don’t serve us. It feels like life is moving at lightning speed. And I’m not sure if most days I am actually keeping up.

But today, I feel like I am, so here we are!

But yeah.. It’s been hard to keep up some days….So much so that truthfully….it’s been really quite challenging for me to feel comfortable and alive with the idea of even showing up on social media sometimes. And I LOVEEE content creation!

I feel like, and I told this to somebody on a podcast interview today, I feel like every time I walk into Instagram, I feel like I’m walking into Walmart at midnight on Black Friday. No joke.

It seems like there’s so much chaotic energy swirling around me, and while I could judge it, run away from it, or shame it….I know its a good thing. Even if its been fucking driving me nuts.

Why? Well…

I know that in my experience, when I’m noticing patterns and trends in how I relate to Instagram, that oftentimes there is a metaphor of some relation within myself. And the truth is, internally I have felt very chaotic and very unclear. But the fact that I am feeling that, witnessing it, and doing something about it…. MAN… It’s really the healing process expanding me in a CRAZY beautiful way.

The honest truth about where I’ve been.

I have been dealing with a sensation of not knowing where my life is taking me. There. I said it.

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE VISION IS!!!

I mean … my life.

Like… where do i Live? What type of business am I building? What goals do I have?

… answer…….

CRICKETS.

Omg….

This drives me nuts for so many reasons.

1. I am a CAPRICORN. I need an action plan. And 2. ……

As someone who helps people cultivate visions for a fucking living…. Its frustrating when your gifts aren’t working for your own self.

Not knowing the big picture vision is part of the process of my own evolution right now. It’s just the season I am in. And I know it means that I am meant to walk with exploratory energy and curiousity and trust. (I’ve been here before so I know its a special time of rebirth.)

But as someone with trauma, I am feeling unsafe because of that..

Yes I know it is all on purpose and I am trusting divine process, of course, but as someone who has a dysregulated nervous system sometimes turn online when the “known next steps” are offline…. it can feel so hard.

I also feel a frustration in all of this because as I am feeling unclear, I also was feeling unclear with how to express myself. I mean… duh… of course.

Keeping up with trends in AI…. perfecting yapping videos…. learning “whats different about social media in this era” …. it all feels like a lot.

Especially because all the yapping videos and marketing guru content feels so pressure filled sometimes.

I just feel like things are moving faster and faster out there.

But internally…. within myself, I am also moving faster and faster now. So…. ya. Of course? right?

This is an era. A big one.

And I am not experiencing it alone.

I can feel a knowing deep inside my soul that there is a group of us.

A collective group of us is out in the field right now doing our “spiritual work” by basically learning how to grow and be huma . We are really studying, expanding, and learning in a way we have never done before. YAY FOR US!

WE. ARE. DOING. THE. WORK. Right?

Well if you relate, you may notice a feeling of coming more into refinement with your truth in your life. Maybe you are waking up more deeply to your wounds and processing them in a new way… maybe you are acknowledging that your destination “dreams” in life are now (and alway will be) a non-negotiable, inevitable must.

Maybe you’re finally decisding to move towards your desires in an unshakeable way

Whatever it is… don’t get me wrong… it’s big.

I don’t always feel that sense of certainty, but I can say it with confidence now. my love….

And I want to remind anybody out there who doesn’t necessarily feel confident about this: you are changing.
you are growing,
you are becoming someone new.

and it’s really important that you remember that..

Yes, I created an app.

So, as I stand here on my deck, drinking rose water, listening to the birds chirp, I want to remind you of that inevitable truth and power within yourself.

I have been feeling really unclear lately, and I’ve been preparing my energy to open the doors for my new app. It’s SOOOO hard to open doors when you feel unclear btw.

But something shifted deeply within me and this was birthed.

It’s called The Sanctuary, and it’s a place that houses all of my teachings, all of my programs, my meditations, my workbooks, and my creations.

Everything from my live group coaching programs, my Somatic Wealth Recoding Technique, to my HEAL Program. It houses an incredible community that participates in live experiences of these courses. And… It also holds my LIVE VIrtual Events (our next one is the Rooted Reset June 15.

There’s an opportunity inside there to network and make friends.
To develop yourself.
To bloom.

I feel like, community is going to be such an important piece of this app.

Because… as you may have found as you read this post… we resonate TOGETHER.


On June 15, we are opening doors to the Sanctuary. Enrollment is only open for one day and you can get a year long access pass.

Truly, I feel like every time I open up something new in the world, there is this sensation of excitement within myself.

Not just for what I am offering, but because I know that i am becoming new within myself as well. And I can feel that truth now more than ever.

In this era of my life, I have been letting go of old friendships, old stories and old wounds. I’ve been breaking patterns and old habits and ending old stories too… which, let me tell you….is not as easy as it sounds.

I’ve been finding more permission within myself to lean into a regulated nervous system, and I am holding prayer, and feeling strong to actually Trust that this is all “part of the process.”

And if you relate….

You are on your way. Even when you have a hard time believing that.

I think I just wanted to write this to remind anybody out there that it’s happening. Even if you can’t feel it. Even if you struggle with accepting it sometimes. And even when you doubt yourself, wondering, am I doing this healing thing all right?

You are on your way. You literally can’t mess it up. All you have to do is actually show up.

You are becoming.

You are evolving.

You are learning how to be in your gifts.

You are learning how to follow your truth.

And of course… I hope you lean in to join us inside The Sanctuary App. Because on June 15, we are all setting an intention for our next year ahead.

Doors open June 15. One day only.

Doors will be open for the Sanctuary one day only, on June 15. We’re starting our day with a six day Rooted Reset.

When you join The Sanctuary, you can come participate in that experience.

We are going to hold a six day devotional ROOTED RESET. We are going to be clearing the energy that no longer serves us in our root center to attract more safety, security, wealth, and abundance.

Because… if you are like me… you’re probably feeling like while all this deep inner work is happening… you need some rooted stability. :)

So if you’ve been feeling burnt out, this is your chance to experience a groundedness.

And what a beautiful way to ground in to a year of study inside the App, together, as a community.

If you join The Sanctuary on June 15, I have an invitation for you.

Pause and ask yourself, “What is my intention for the next year ahead?”

Every single person who joins The Sanctuary on June 15 is coming in with a devotional prayer and promise to make this next year ahead become the best year of their life.

We can all gather together, set intentions, and get clear.

On June 15, we are starting a year of transformation.

That’s why I’m only keeping doors open to The Sanctuary for one day. So, mark your calendars, and I hope to see you there.

laurenoflove.com/app

and remember: Whatever you choose.. you are BECOMING. and THIS… this is the time.

xox

Lauren Eliz Love

Let’s have an uncomfortable conversation about an uncomfortable topic, shall we?

Because I feel like at this point we are pretty close. I’ve been sharing so vulnerably with you in all my other articles, it feels like this one should be no different.

Let’s just get right too it.

True Confession: For a long time, when a certain type of woman was successful, I would find myself feeling….. a type of way about it.

It wasn’t everyone, let’s be clear. It’s not like I was walking around feeling threatened by the idea that someone had something big or glamorous or celebratory in their life. (NO! Of course not!)

It was… a TYPE of woman that would really trigger these feelings in me…..

Yes. A type. You know the type.…

The pretty girl. The popular girl.

The “has it all and everything about life is amazing” kind of girl.

The “you think she’s lying about how great her life is” kind of girl. but the “maybe she’s not lying because she is actually amazing” kind of girl.

The truth is you’ll never know because she’s the “keep the cards close to the chest” kind of girl.

And….. even though we don’t like to admit it….

she’s the girl who some how brings up all of our insecurities because we realize that we ourselves are “not that kind of girl.”

OOOF. Ya. I said it.

This type of girl, some how.. in someway… has something that we want.

But yet…. we judge her and see her flaws to make ourselves feel better.

Maybe her life looks so perfect online so we call her “fake.”

Maybe she loves curating her image so we call her “superficial.”

Maybe she celebrates her victories so publicly that we call her a “narcissist who is so obsessed with herself.”

Maybe she really prioritizes her personal boundaries, so you call her a “selfish person.”

I have been both the woman who is judged, and the woman who judges.

Whenever one of these beautiful women was someone I secretly wanted to be like (or someone I wanted to be liked by), I would make them the villain in some way, shape or form to make myself more comfortable.

If they had a lot of success, I would secretly feel envious.

If they were really beautiful, I would role my eyes and say “they cared too much.”

If they were really presentable and professional, I would say: “She’s not in her heart what a phony.”

And when these women did not desire to be my friend….

I would reject all of their success because they rejected me.

If I saw them being important in the world, I would get angry because I didn’t feel important to them, and that triggered me.

And whenever these women went through journeys that involved gaining weight, burning out, or having a life challenging experience… somehow… for some reason… I felt happy about it.

Yep….. I said it.

Why do we feel this horrible sensation come up within ourselves as women? WTF is this weird pattern anyway?

Years ago, this was something I really had to face and forgive within myself. As someone who’s so dedicated to inner work, who preaches kindness and compassion, the fact I was operating this way was shameful and embarrassing to me personally.

I spent a lot of time reflecting on the weird nature that we as women have to hate one another and where that comes from and I asked myself some questions:

Why do we feel this uncomfortable way? Can we change this nature? Can we return to love?

Today I have the most beautiful relationships in my life. None of these weird wounds are present..…..thank God. But for many years I found myself surrounded by women who were overly competitive, critical and full of gossip about each others’ successes and setbacks just like this.

I surrounded myself with women who would be loving to your face but would say horrible things behind your back.

My social circles were full of girls who would compliment your outfit, and then behind your back say “oh my god, can you believe what she is wearing?” I had friends who would hold you while you cry about your partner, and then call up a friend the moment you leave to gossip about the personal information we just vulnerably discussed. “I CANNOT believe she’s still with him.”

“You won’t believe what I just heard!”
”I have the gossip- you ready!?”
”Guess what I just found out!”

I will admit I used to be part of this bandwagon of sister rivalry.

And when I look back, I can understand why I was so competitive, gossip-centric and quick to judge others.

I learned this. It was familiar… and familial.

The roots of our rejection:

When I was little, we would go to my grandmother’s house every Sunday. My mom would gather around the table with all of her sisters and they would talk. It was always gossip about who was getting divorced, what drama was happening with which old friend from high school, and what other relatives on the “other side of the family” were in some type of secret crisis that no one knew anything about (but everyone knew everything about, actually.)

And when it came to “body talk,” there was always room at the table for that.

The women around me growing up would always talk about body sizes, who gained weight, who lost weight… who was looking amazing and who needed help…

As a young child I would listen to conversations where women would pick and prod at what they wanted to change about their own bodies…. With a little bit of judgement here, and a little bit of self deprecation there….

But when they were talking about other women, even though judgement and deprecation was present…it sounded.. .well.. different. There was always this strange undertone of happiness…. Like they were excited about it when someone else was struggling.

“Did you see so and so must have gained 15 pounds,” I’d hear them say.

It was a good topic for gossip, I guess. A way to feel joy in someone else’s discomfort. And maybe… they liked seeing someone else “fail” at something they were “failing at” too?

As I grew up, I found myself having the same gleeful conversations internally to myself any time someone I didn’t “care for” was having a less than desirable experience.

The popular girl who was dating the boy I liked got a zit. She was kind of mean to me so I was happy she didn’t look perfect anymore.

The girl in the school play who got the better role then me? Well, she was constantly rude to me all the time so when she completely spaced out on her lines during Sunday’s matinee, I felt elated.

That friend in college who I had a whole big blow out with Sophomore year? She dyed her hair and got bangs… I smiled when it didn’t come out good.

Can we reflect on this and be honest?

Why is this the pattern? Where does this come from?

I know one thing for sure: I have only ever spoken internally about another woman the way I have (at one time) spoken internally about myself.

So I think we have to ask two questions here: Why do we have this developed unkindness that looks like we love watching people fail?

And more importantly….. what wounds do we have to face within ourselves to heal this?

The reality is this is relational trauma:

• attachment wounds,

• relational trauma,

• status/survival conditioning,

• inherited female socialization.

This is the climate we were born and bred into. As women, we are taught unconsciously that beauty equals safety, desirability means power, social acceptance equals survival, and rejection means danger.

So when another woman is desired on social media with tons of followers and engagement, we believe: “she has power.” When she is accepted by her peers we believe she has “safety.” When another woman embodies something that feels unattainable for us, it can activate old nervous system pain:

• “I’m not chosen.”

• “I’m not enough.”

• “I’m outside the circle.”

• “I’m less valuable.”

• “There’s no room for me.”

And boy do we want there to be room for us.

So when that woman who has it “so easy” and “has everything” later struggles, gains weight, gets humbled, gets rejected, loses status, or “falls” in some way, our nervous system experiences a sensation of relief:

“Oh. She’s human too.”
“I’m not beneath her anymore.”
“The hierarchy corrected itself.”

That relief can masquerade as pleasure.

Not because someone is evil but because comparison temporarily regulates the unavoidable shame we hold in our own nervous system that is unprocessed from our own lived experiences.

A lot of women inherited competitive femininity. We’ve been taught by society that there is a scarcity around beauty and attention. Some how, we formed the belief that another woman’s shining light diminishes our own.

But what if we didn’t have to hold all of this anymore? What if we could let it go? Who would we be as a collective feminine force if we weren’t holding onto this story?

We can heal this when we know what it is (and that it isn’t our fault.)

There are psychological and social reasons that we feel a sense of satisfaction when someone else struggles. And we need to honor that before we go down the “what does this pattern say about me” rabbit hole.

Here’s a list to lower the self guilt you may feel if you have this pattern too:

• Social comparison: Humans naturally compare themselves to others. If someone feels insecure about beauty, success, relationships, aging, money, or status, another person “falling” can temporarily reduce that insecurity. It creates a feeling of “I’m okay after all.”

• Scarcity conditioning: Many women are raised in environments that subtly teach there’s limited space for attractiveness, attention, success, love, influence, or safety. That can create unconscious competition rather than solidarity.

• Internalized beauty pressure: In cultures where women are heavily judged on appearance, weight gain can become symbolic. Some people unconsciously interpret another woman “letting herself go” as lowering the comparison pressure they feel on themselves.

• Schadenfreude: (If you’ve seen Avenue Q on Broadway, you get this.) This is the psychological term for taking pleasure in another person’s misfortune. It’s a normal human emotion that can appear when envy, resentment, rivalry, or perceived unfairness are present.

• Projection and unresolved wounds: Sometimes people react strongly to traits in others that trigger something unresolved in themselves — confidence, sexuality, success, freedom, discipline, attention, etc. Watching that person struggle can feel emotionally regulating to someone carrying shame or inadequacy.

• Group bonding through criticism: Some social circles unconsciously bond through gossip or tearing others down. It creates temporary belonging at the expense of empathy.

That said, emotionally healthy and secure people usually move in the opposite direction:

• they feel inspired rather than threatened,

• compassionate rather than relieved,

• collaborative rather than competitive.

A good indicator of someone’s inner state is how they respond to another woman becoming more beautiful, successful, loved, confident, wealthy, or visible. Secure people tend to expand when others expand. Insecure people often contract.

But we can move differently. And we CAN become secure.

If I see a girl who decided NOT to be my friend having friends ALL over the internet….

Instead of being angered by that, I could notice that anger and recognize that it was coming up to process something that had not been healed yet.

I am angry, because I still feel pain.

If I see a girl who is struggling to feel good in her body now, perhaps that’s an opportunity to show those old versions of me compassion (the versions of me she reminds me of.)

If I notice a girl having a hard day who hasn’t really given ME the time of day… maybe instead of being happy about her frustration, I could perhaps see the moment as an opportunity to end an old story (rather than recreating it.)

Maybe if we looked at all of this from a place of “what is coming up for me?” Without making ourselves WRONG, we could see that this was all an invitation to heal instead of hurt one another.

Maybe, all of these women who dance in our shadow are there to invite us to heal the shadows within our ownselves.

Maybe we can see that the judgement we have towards someone else is really because something isn’t fully integrated or settled within our own self.

But this is not an opportunity to judge our own development here…

It’s a chance to actually just love the parts of you that still need a bit more love.

What are your thoughts?

*Note: Trigger Warning: there is a reference to physical violence from parental figures in this post.

It’s crazy to me that this Substack article has lived in my draft box for the last three weeks. The title of the article was “why is my family so exhausting?” and I started writing it after I took a family vacation and came home feeling like I needed a vacation from said vacation.

Why IS IT SO exhausting to be with my family anyway? I left the trip wondering.

Yes. I was exhausted.

I came home and started writing this post with a grueling hunger and curiosity to discover the answer to that question.

• Why do we do all this healing work and still struggle to be around our families sometimes?

• Why after all of our development, inner work, and years of therapy, do we still burn our nervous systems out just by walking into a room with them?

• And why do we feel so guilty about it too?

Nearly one whole month after clicking “create new article” I still felt too exhausted by my family time to even finish writing three sentences about it.

I guess that’s how it can be right? You move through something and you think you are ready to talk about it because you’re “on the other side” but the truth is you still have another 21 days of needing to process it (sometimes even longer) before you can really actually find the words to communicate your lived experience.

I see families all the time on Christmas cards with their polo shirts and duck shoes on some boat they all went sailing on. “Look how happy they are,” I think to myself. “Look how great their life is. Why is my family…. not like that?” - true thoughts from my brain every Christmas.

This was the first time in 22 years that my family had all been all together for such an extended period of time. And because of reasons that are probably 237 other Substack articles… I was really anxious about the whole ordeal.

But I’ll share the reasons I was nervous just so if you get nervous about being around your family too, you know that you belong here:

I have spent a great deal of time as an adult processing my childhood trauma. I have spent many years unraveling the awareness that my emotional, psychological and physical safety was at times not fully held by my parents to the standard that I believe would qualify as “good enough” parenting. I spent many years afraid of my father, and even more years feeling judged and unseen by my mother.

And every time I am with them… my body braces in its painful remembrance of the environment I grew up in.

You can read my article, growing up with an emotionally absent father here by the way.

Do you relate? And if you have siblings, are you the only one who feels this way?

Every child is raised by different parents. Even siblings.

I am the oldest of three girls, and even though we all grew up in the same house, my sisters didn’t go through the same experiences I did. For a long time, this was really challenging for me to accept. “Why did I feel like I had so much trauma to process compared ot my siblings?”

I wondered if perhaps I was making everything up. Was it really that bad? Did I actually remember things properly?

But there’s actually a term for this. It’s called “Non Shared Environment” known as NSE.

NSE, Non-shared Environment, is the scientific term for why children in the same family have different experiences. This behavioral genetics concept explains that siblings' environments differ due to unique experiences, such as birth order, differential parenting, different friendships, or different reactions to the same events, making them as different as children selected randomly.

It’s just a simple fact: Things that happened to me did not happen to my sisters.

My mother once held me down on a bed and screamed she was going to kill me.

My father once through a shoe at me in a violent breakdown about money.

And my sisters, when you ask them about their upbringing, they generally say things like: “It was pretty good,” or “mom and dad did the best they could.”

So…. was it me? Was it my inherent nature that brought out these qualities in my parents? Did I push buttons? Did I instigate?

Maybe yes. But perhaps asking that question in the first place is an indication of the overwhelming trauma pattern of fawning that still lives in my body as a result.

Hmf.

While it may be true that our parents do the best they can…

As the old therapy adage says…

two things can be true at once.

So while it is true that our parents do the best they can, what is also true is that my childhood wasn’t something I reflected back on with a sense of cherish or appreciation. For many many years before my healing path, those nostalgic reflections only came with a great sense of grief and anger.

And I can honor and acknowledge that within myself….without making myself wrong.

I believe that how I was raised as a child informed my decisions as a young adult before my healing journey happened and thankfully changed my life’s direction. The truth is, had I not found my healing path, Id be dead by now.

When you are operating from attachment injuries, and a feeling of not being worthy enough for safety, you often make unsafe decisions that aren’t healthy or even value your own wellbeing.

That leads to addiction, abusive relationships, and a lot of other painful life paths.

None of that happened to my siblings. But for me, it was very much my lived experience.

What I know now: You can love someone, and love yourself enough to also acknowledge the pain they have caused you.

I think a lot of people can relate to the fact that while they love their parents, they still feel like they are some how responsible for the messed up things that happened after childhood….

Or…. at least the thousands of dollars we spend on therapy to process it.

It’s common to wonder: “am I ungrateful?” or “am I making too big a deal of this?” or the concern of “making your parents feel bad for talking about things like this,” is a common concern for a lot of clients I work with.

“perhaps maybe the burden of responsibility should soley be on my own self,” they say to me with fewer words. “Was that depression and anxiety I struggled with as an adult really my parents’ fault?”

Maybe my sisters were just more equipped to handle things than I was…..

Perhaps maybe I shouldn’t share my story like I want to because I might upset them.

When you open up to the world of healing and fall down the rabit hole of processing your grief, anger, and disappointment around your upbringing, you also fall down the rabit hole of becoming more educated.

You read the books. Listen ot the podcasts. Take the online classes. And suddenly, your lived experience feels validated with the new language you have to define it.

“Oh. my boundaries weren’t respected a child.”
”Oh. I literally had no sense of psychological safety.”
”Oh. That’s where my anxious attachment patterns comes from.”
Mom didn’t teach me how to regulate my nervous system. Is that how I became an addict?”

But in that wakeup, we can also start to see our parents in a different light too.

Things like…

”Oh dad was an addict and that’s why mom was so angry all the time.”

Or….
”wow my grandfather was an actual narcissist. "
and
”My mother definitely has complex PTSD.”

”I didn’t see it back then but…….”

The veil is lifted. and we are forever changed in how we see our past.

So back to “Lauren takes a family vacation.”

While I’d love to believe I am “so healed” that spending a weekend with my family is a walk in the park…. the truth is…. my family are simply not “walk in the park” kinds of people.

Everything is loud all the time and people love to talk over one another.
No one has boundaries so there’s no personal space.
Everyone is trying to manage everyone else’s emotions instead of tending to their own nervous system.
Dad walks around emotionally removed on his cell phone blasting facebook videos on replay.
Mom over-functions worrying about the grandkids and whether or not they will eat the dinner she cooked.

It just all feels like a lot to me sometimes.
And I am sharing it not to complain - but to relate.

The truth is I really struggled with writing this Substack article because even though I knew I wanted to share about the process I went through… I kept navigating immense amount of guilt over writing it in the first place.

So many women talk to me about the struggle of trying to be with their family after being on a healing journey, and doing inner work. Being in an “unhealed” environment with the same people who were involved in the situations you had to heal from is…. challenging to say the least.

Do you ever feel bad being with your family? But then have you ever felt bad that you felt bad about that?

On one hand, I’m happy that we can all be together. How beautiful! Yes. “We’ve come so far,” and “what a testament to time healing all of our wounds,” but…then again….

On the other hand, I felt like opening the doors to that vacation home opened the doors to all the remembrances of the way in which I used to struggle as a kid.

• Everyone is being loud and I feel ungrounded.

• I don’t feel like my needs are being met but I am not speaking up.

• I want to go take care of myself but I feel guilty. It fels like I have to be present for everything.

Yes. It’s difficult to be with my family sometimes because of their patterns and behaviors, sure.

But what feels more deeply challenging to navigate is being MYSELF and embodying my HEALTHY behaviors with my family.

To sustain all the inner work I have done and to feel grounded in the experience of our time together feels like a lost art I cannot seem to cultivate.

my trauma gets activated, my boundaries get crossed, and I become very overstimulated.

My body gets inflamed.

I get extremely tired.

I freeze and start to shut down.

And I stop doing anything I can to help myself.

• Did I go for morning walks by myself? No.

• Did I take time to meditate everyday? Absolutely not.

• Did I eat well and get good sleep? What is that?

Why does this happen? Why do we stop taking care of ourselves when we are around the people who didn’t fully take care of us as children?

It’s called: Trauma-Rooted Burnout:

Trauma-Rooted Burnout (or “The Burnout Nobody Talks About”)

Therapists like Annie Wright, LMFT, describe Trauma-Rooted Burnout as a specific, deep fatigue that occurs when you return to the environment that shaped your nervous system to be hyper-vigilant. Even if you have done significant healing, returning to the source of the trauma can force your nervous system back into high-alert survival mode, causing massive energy depletion

You could also call this: Psychological Regression: This is the tendency to revert to old, childish roles and behavioral patterns when back in your childhood home or around family members, despite having grown significantly as an adult. You may feel like a helpless child again, which can lead to emotional distress and exhaustion.

You might even refer to it as Family Burnout: which is what our body goes through when we are in an environment opf prolonged, chronic and pervasive stress in our family unit. It can often leading to feelings of being defeated or a need to emotionally detach.

Here’s why it happens: Why This Happens (According to Experts on “the google.")

• Hyper-vigilance: Your nervous system is designed to detect danger. When you are around your family, your body responds to that rememberance as though it is in danger, running a high-energy “threat-detection algorithm” the entire time.

• Adrenaline Crash: The intense stress causes you to use adrenaline and stored energy reserves, leaving you completely depleted once you leave.

• Masking: Trying to maintain your new, healthy boundaries while family members treat you according to old narratives is exhausting…. so we end up masking.

Why is my family so exhausting? This is why.

Now I know, but it still hurts.

I know that my mother and father would not be happy to know that being in their presence is difficult for me at times. But the truth is, as a child they had no problem letting me know how difficult I was!

It’s interesting how guilty we sometimes feel about things like this. I recently released an episode about the vacation on the World Needs Your Medicine podcast: Healed Daughter Unhealed Family. After my aunt saw the episode and left some angry messages on my instagram posts about it, I had to call my mom to let her know.

”I don’t understand I thought we had such a nice time,” my mom said.

“We did mom. But two things can be true at once.”

I felt instant grief. Sadness. Regret. Disappointment. A burning desire to make sure none of my family members were mad at me for speaking my truth and that I didn’t hurt anyone in the process of sharing my story.

But why is that my job? Where did I learn to over function like that?

That’s another post for another day.

Anyway. In the end… I hope this article helps someone. So often students are surprised they aren’t the only ones who feel this way. And I just hope you know you are not alone.

xox

Lauren Eliz Love

“He was never around.”

It took me a long time to acknowledge that truth within myself: that I grew up without my dad fully present in my life.

Mostly because I believed that having my father present in the room, attending my soccer games, and sitting at the dinner table every evening meant that he was “there.”

But emotionally, he wasn’t. So was he really?

The trauma of an emotionally absent father—often called a "father wound"—creates a deep sense of unworthiness, rejection, and insecurity, regardless of whether the father was physically present. This emotional neglect causes children to feel invisible, leading to adult struggles with low self-esteem, intense fear of abandonment, difficulties in trusting others, and a propensity for seeking validation through unhealthy relationships or perfectionism.

I recently asked my community on instagram if this was something they too experienced in their life… and I was shocked to hear the stories of women feeling unseen, unmet and unheard by their fathers. In deeper conversations with my community, I started to ask these incredible women questions about the impact that wound had on their lives.

“I am afraid to open up to more intimacy in relationships,” one woman said.

”I find myself unable to provide myself my own financial stability, and I am sure that’s related,” another woman wrote.

“My dad was always telling me to stop crying, so now every time I feel emotions, I find myself ignoring them” I read in a direct message from a student.

If you relate, I hope this post finds you and has an impact on your heart today.

My own father wound.

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite things to do was sit on the couch with my father and watch the Little Mermaid. I was about three or four years old, and playing that VHS on repeat was my personal passion and the beginning of my addictive personality disorder. I loved it, and I couldn’t get enough of it. Almost every afternoon before my nap time my dad would pop in the tape into the VHS player and I’d venture into the magic of Ariel’s world. My dad would wrap his arm around me, charismatically sing along with the every song, narrate movie word for word and quote Ursula with passionate acting and joy in his voice. "No more talking, singing. Zip!" he’d declare with laughter.

Now, I’m 37 years old. And when I look back on the story plot of that iconic Disney film I can see all the metaphors of the plot as they became my actual lived experience in all the years that followed.

“Daddy’s little girl,” a dream to be just like Ariel.
A woman chasing the love of men who cannot hear her.
Silencing and changing myself just for a sense of belonging in the world.

It’s almost as if Walt Disney was warning me with Ursula’s magic crystal ball: “This is what will happen to you, Lauren.”

Or perhaps maybe I was just programmed into believing it?

While I can dance in the perspective that the film had an impact on my subconscious mind and unconsciously shaped my own life decisions, the truth is my father was who he was, and his identity informed my own personal becoming as an adult (until I started my healing journey in 2012.)

No Disney movie could have caused or conditioned that into existence.

My father, maybe like yours, is an emotionally unavailable man. He is distant and closed off. He sits and scrolls his phone in every room he is in. He half listens when you speak and shows little love-based emotion. He shuts down when you talk about your feelings. He rarely asks “what’s going on in your life.” It’s like the is there… but not. And while his behavior is all his own, it led me to form some strong beliefs and behaviors within my own self.

I believed that my voice wasn’t heard and that it didn’t matter.
I over-functioned to perform and achieve just to hopefully get “acknowledged.”
I attracted unhealthy relationships with the same wounded patterns.
And I spent years neglecting my own emotional truth just to make others more comfortable.

My father’s trauma-programmed personality, behaviors and habits, all played a role in the development of my codependent behaviors in relationships, my unconscious attraction to dysfunctional partners and my unwavering need to contort myself for a sense of acceptance. And all of these patterns played out for many many years before I began my healing journey, and created a great deal of trauma in my life.

Once I grew up beyond my toddler years, special moments like the ones on the couch watching the Little Mermaid disappeared and were replaced with an emotional void that felt as silent and as empty as Ariel’s voice.

My dad would never look up from his computer when I came home from school.
He would be unresponsive to my emotional needs as a young girl.
He was detached, unavailable, and uncomfortable with my vulnerability as I grew up.

And these are patterns that still continue to this day.

A lineage of emotionally neglected men.

The truth is my father was never able to be emotionally present to others, because he was a man who was never emotionally available to himself. And I think that’s something that many millennial women can relate to. It seems like our generation was the one to really wake up to these patterns in the masculine and ask the question: “Is this really actually okay?”

My father was the first born of his own family, just like me, and he was raised by two Italian immigrants as a first generation United States citizen. There was no space for emotions in the home back then, especially as a young boy being raised with strong wounded masculine traits. My grandmother was essentially a mail order bride and my grandfather was a very cold, strong, and emotionally disconnected business man coming to America to pursue the dream of financial opportunity. He worked long hours, was rarely home, and wasn’t really pleased when my father was born (so I have heard.)

My dad also, is gay and experienced a lot of childhood abuse in his own upbringing. He spent his whole life feeling unaccepted by his parents, and years hiding that truth within himself about his sexuality. He chose to raise a family with my mother to “make his parent’s proud” because….well…. “that’s what people do.” It wasn’t until I was in my late 20s that he lived a semi-open life and separated from my mother.

This information, while deeply personal, is an important part of the equation for me and felt important to share in writing this post. Coming to understand myself more deeply really required me to understand where my father came from too. And the truth of the matter is, I was raised by a man who rejected his own emotional reality for the sake of survival and in turn, rejected my own emotional reality in the process of raising me. And I can have deep compassion for that now.

My emotional depth made him uncomfortable because he couldn’t hold space for his own emotions.

One of the earliest signs of this for me happened when I was in my early teenage years. I was leaving the soccer field and telling all my friends I loved them as I hugged them goodbye.

“Why do you say I love you to everyone Lauren?” my father asked when I got in the car. “You shouldn’t really do that.”

That memory informed many of my life decisions over the years. I spent a long time grappling with an inner rejection of my own emotions, feeling wrong compared to the rest of the world, and questioning my own inner desires to be an emotionally expressed woman.

And this certainly, like many women know, played out in my dating life.

As I matured into adulthood, I chased emotionally unavailable and emotionally unhealthy men. I dated partners much older than me who never knew how to fully meet my needs, and I spent years in unhealthy relationships settling for a lack of depth and emotional connection that I truly longed for.

After every relationship failed and left me hurt, I personalized the loss and rejection I experienced and believed that there was something wrong with me that I couldn’t have my needs met.

“Maybe I am the problem,” I would think to myself.
”Perhaps I want too much” I would say.
And ”Maybe what I am looking for is just not out there.”

In truth, attracting these disappointing relationships was an unconscious trauma response pattern: I was literally recreating the neglect that I experienced in my childhood.

Now, I have language for that lived experience: It is called “repetition compulsion.”

Dating your father’s wounds: Repetition Compulsion

Sigmund Freud. an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis first coined the term “Repetition Compulsion.” If you google it, here’s what you’ll learn:

Sigmund Freud’s repetition compulsion is the unconscious drive to reenact early, often painful, traumatic experiences or relationship dynamics. Introduced in 1914 and expanded in 1920, Freud viewed this as an attempt to master past trauma, rather than seeking pleasure. It explains why individuals repeat toxic relationships, behaviors, or, as described on Verywell Mind, keep recreating situations that bring discomfort.

If you’ve never heard the term before, repetition compulsion is embedded in one of the 6 developmental issues that can manifest for children of complex trauma. This is when survivors unconsciously attract relationships that duplicate the abusive and neglectful patterns of their childhood.

Simply put: We keep recreating it because a part of us wants to reenact it to heal it.

Repetition Compulsion is a common occurrence for people who carry wounds of complex childhood trauma, and I think it’s important to see that from a self-compassionate perspective: deep inside, we are trying to do our best to heal and we are chasing the experience we unconsciously believe will allow us the opportunity to break the cycle.

But the cycle doesn’t break externally until we first break it within our own self.

For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me that I was continuously attracting men who left me disappointed and unsupported. But through my years of deep inner work I came to realize that trauma blends the part of our brain that experiences emotion with the part of our brain that experiences our own self-identity.

”I am wrong,” is not reality. It’s a trauma response.

Survivors are doing their best. And the guilt and shame we feel about our repetition compulsion needs to be left at the door.

True compassion is the doorway to healing ourselves and beginning our journey of breaking the cycle.

Healing starts when we name our lived experience.

In case you are wondering, here are the signs you grew up with an emotionally unavailable parent:

• They rarely asks about you or your life.

• They center conversations around themselves and their experiences.

• They don’t celebrate your accomplishments or rarely notice them.

• They struggle to show affection or say ‘I love you.”

• They reject your emotional experience or exhibit signs of awkward uncomfortable energy when you have emotions.

• They rarely give you compliments (sometimes are only critical, or sarcastic.)

• They don’t listen to you or invalidate you (“stop making things such a big deal, don’t be dramatic.”

While I relate deeply to this list of signs and symptoms, I spent many years dismissing them as a sign of abuse. After all, “there are plenty of people who have it worse.”

But neglect is abuse. And emotional abuse is still abuse.

The rage of the wounded father and breaking the victim consciousness.

My dad had an anger that was as fierce as a raging wildfire. When something bothered him he would blow up and storm out of the house and come back hours later as if nothing happened. The ruptures in our household with the lack of a followed up “repair” were continuous.

Even today, whenever I notice my father getting frustrated, my body begins to shut down and disassociate.

In my marriage, I spent years feeling fearful of my partner whenever he experienced frustration, worrying that he would blow up just like my father.

That rage response my father carried had a ripple effect in my world.

Growing up, many of my friends would avoid coming over to my house to play.
When I started dating, my partners were terrified of my father’s presence.
And my mother often dismissed his behaviors and just tried to “move on” from those moments where he yelled and had an outburst.

Anger is a healthy emotion to experience as a human, but there is a very big difference between healthy expressed anger and violent communication.

For a long time all of these things left me feeling disappointed and angry about my own childhood experience. “Why did I choose this family?” and “Why wasn’t my childhood better?” were questions I played out in my mind frequently with no answer other than a felt sense of grief.

But through my own healing journey I have come to notice that all of these things shaped me into who I am today.

I am now a deep advocate of my own needs.
I have a strong value for healthy communication.
I have a wide variety of empathic gifts that were birthed through the sensitivities I developed as a child in these experiences.

And while I know this is a perspective that may be hard to claim for some…. (as it took me a long time to claim them within myself) I can feel an appreciation for the fact that I broke the cycle of my lineage.

I no longer attract unhealthy relationships.
I can identify wounded patterns in men and have strong boundaries when I see certain masculine wound behaviors in both men and women.
I am able to attend to and tend to my own emotions and deeply prioritize the time it takes to do so in my own life.

And I think that all came through when I started taking radical responsibility for myself.

The truth is, that while we are not responsible for the behaviors of our parents, we are responsible for healing the codes of what still lives within us.

And healing is a continuous process that truly begins when we acknowledge that neglect is abuse, and emotional abuse is still abuse.

Once we do that, we can start looking at the symptoms of abuse that still need to be repaired within ourselves, so we no longer unconsciously neglect our emotional experience the way we were taught to.

“He rarely asked about my life,” turns into: “I am aware of my own needs in my life.”
”he doesn’t celebrate my accomplishments” turns into: “I will learn how to celebrate myself.”
”He struggles to show affection and say I love you” becomes: “I will learn how to unconditionally love myself.”
And his pattern of “rejecting your emotional experience” becomes the journey of reclaiming your own emotional reality and being an unwavering advocat of your own emotional wellbeing.

I’m not saying it’s easy…. But one day you’ll look back and realize that everything that was taken from you led to the journey of your own self resourced power.

And that… is the victory of it all.

Becoming the father you needed. Becoming the masculine support of stability you crave. Becoming the attuned nurturer within.

You are worthy of reclaiming that.

I hope you enjoyed this post. And if you feel called to share your experiences in the caption, I’d love to hear your own story.

xox

Lauren Eliz Love

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If you didn’t read the first two articles….

Part1

Part 2

And now part 3.

Wow. I can’t believe we are arriving at the completion of this three part experience. I feel so grateful to share this with you, and I am so grateful so many of you have followed along.

Last time in Part 2, we left off talking about the importance of listening to your needs to identify the resources best suited for your healing journey or manifestation path. In part 2, we also acknowledged the hard truth that most of the personal development and manifestation industry neglects the fact that trauma survivors have a really hard time with identifying what their needs even are in the first place.

Then, we closed our part two article by speaking light to the reason why manifestation, personal development practices and mainstream “inner work” are so challenging for survivors. Simply put: We have a hard time attuning to our needs, because throughout our trauma history, we learned the untrue belief that our needs do not really matter.

Again, if you haven’t read along:

This is Part1

This is Part 2

And now we are on our final leg of the journey: Welcome to Part 3.

Let’s start with the basics.

No matter what the model of practice, and no matter what the strategy is… when it comes to healing and manifestation, we are doing it all with one purpose and one purpose only: To GET something that we desire.

Whether you are on your manifestation path trying top call in a beautiful fancy new home…

Or you’re building a business trying to reach a big income goal…

Even when you set the intention to “become a more confident person.”

You desire something.

Maybe you’re trying to heal so you can stop yelling at your kids so much…

Or you’re trying to find true love…Or…. a new designer handbag (if that’s your thing.)

“I want something” is where the journey always begins.

But I’m so curious…what did your trauma teach you about wanting?

Did you learn it was wrong? Did you learn it didn’t matter? Did you find yourself believing that what you wanted wasn’t really what you wanted? Or that you weren’t worthy of wanting it?

Did you ever believe the story that “I am someone who never get’s what she wants.” ?

Trauma will do that to you. And it’s up to us to break the cycle.

Desire turned disappointment:

I want you to be mindful as we go through this article: Your desires aren’t wrong. But because of your trauma history, you may not even know what they truly are. Or, you have a really difficult time connecting to them.

I can tell you from experience having mentored thousands of women in the last 11 years that trauma survivors often hyper-fixate on goals outside of themselves for a sense of safety, purpose, and significance. They want to feel a sense of peace, or confidence… and so they tell themselves a story that these outcomes they desire will make them feel that way once they get them.

Survivors turn into “personal development devotees” because they believe that becoming “better” and achieving, accomplishing, receiving, and experiencing will make them feel better inside.

They are chasing a feeling.

And manifestation/personal development are the path that will get them there! (so they believe.)

Here they go! Off to the races and down a rabbit hole of devotion to their inner work journey.

I know… because I’ve lived and breathed it.

”The more I worl on myself, the more successful I can become,” I thought.

And there isn’t anything wrong with this approach per-say…

Truthfully, I actually do believe that inner work is the doorway to the things we want in life.

And going after what we want is a good thing.

It’s when all the inner work and manifestation turns into a “lost Alice in Wonderland” situation that we should be concerned:

Chasing a feeling of arriving somewhere… and never actually getting there.

And unfortunately that’s what happens with a lot of trauma survivors.

Working on developing a greater sense of self concept and emotional development within ourselves is so important. But often times the rules of manifestation tell us to “think positive” and “keep our vibration high” so we are only left shaming ourselves for the navigation of our difficult trauma responses instead of creating healthy self inquiry and learning how to regulate our nervous systems.

Instead of developing our self love, we focus on trying to get our “manifestation right” and “master the rules of self healing” to do it the way we “should” to make it work.

“Let me do everything right so I can finally receive _______” (doesn’t that sound familiar to your trauma history?)

This path… I’m sorry to tell you… is a dead end.

I can say it… because I’ve lived this lie for many many years as a trauma survivor. I believed that manifestation was the golden ticket that would get me out of my pain in the present to create something different in my life.

“I want a million dollar business.” I decided.

“I want a new house” I declared.

“I have a goal of reaching x amount of instagram followers”

and “I want to travel 4 times this year to 4 different places,” I wrote down on my manifestation list one year.

I never stopped running…

So let me ask you… that thing you want….

…. do you really?

In my years of mentoring women I have had many clients who realized they were chasing goals just to feel significant and worthy within themselves.

When they got that million dollar business, that fancy car, or that big instagram following, they didn’t actually feel the way they wanted to feel.

So they set new goals.. they kept chasing bigger things… they didn’t stop trying to get somewhere… and they just kept running.

The truth is our trauma makes us run and never stop.

Until we get to the end of the road and we feel disappointed.

Packing on the Disappointment:

It is my belief that manifestation practices left in the hands of a trauma survivor will often create a resurfacing of the unprocessed story: “Me (myself) and my life, are a project that need to be fixed,” because deep down: “I have a trauma in my past that I wish I could fix.”

Our trauma has left us in solution-based thinking and also solution-based perception of self. To “get out of pain,” we believe we must “fix” our identity. Instead of learning how to sink into life and experience the joy of our own growth and development, repair our boundaries, and refine our attachment styles, we chase things and make ourselves our best personal project to attempt to achieve things to feel things that are so sadly not yet cultivated in our nervous system.

“That thing will make me feel the way I want to feel,” we believe.

But then it doesn’t. And we are left with a painful questioning of our own self. “I wanted this thing… and this thing didn’t make me feel how I wanted to feel. What’s wrong with me?”

The damage doesn’t stop there:

There is another issue with Manifestation and Personal Development at the hands of a trauma survivor that we have to talk about: These practices don’t ever address our need to repair the wounds of our own relationship to desire.

And there are some serious wounds there.

Let’s be honest: Some of us have a really hard time even knowing what we want.

We are cut off from our intuition and we are over analyzing ourselves to make sure we “make the right choice” to avoid getting hurt.

“I want this but am I sure?”

“What if I want this, and this is the wrong thing to want?”

“Is this really actually the right decision for me to decide?”

How many times have you had a hard time finding your inner knowing?

I know for me, the entirety of self doubt that I carried came from my trauma history. I was gaslit, love-bombed, abused, and personally violated with no escape in childhood and teenage upbringing.

When I was on the other side, I did the same thing to myself. I love bombed my goals. I shamed myself for wanting more. I even violated my own boundaries just to achieve something “important to me.”

Do you know what you want?

How can you manifest what you want in your life if you are constantly doubting yourself for wanting it?

How can you clearly go after your goals if you aren’t clear on what it is you truly long for?

And then layer that with the painful voices of the abuse we carry in our unconscious:

“What you want is wrong.”
“You shouldn’t want anything.”
“What I want is not important.”
“Wanting things makes you selfish.”

I know I can recall a ton of experiences like this in my life. And if you can too, I’d say we are kindred spirits looking for a new way.

So what is the answer:

Yesterday I saw a beautiful comment from a reader of this series.

Dr. Nicole Mirkin

Psychologist Interrupted

A lot of people don’t realize how much self-doubt gets reinforced when every method is framed as something that should work if you’re doing it “right.” If your body is reacting with fear or shutdown, that’s not resistance, it’s information. The problem is people keep trying to push through that instead of adjusting the approach, which just deepens the belief that they’re the issue. The focus on identifying your own needs instead of following someone else’s formula is where things actually start to change. And once you start paying attention to that, it gets harder to hand your authority over to every new technique that promises a fix

Honestly, I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I think this is it: We just need to start remembering that deep inside of us is our own internal compass. And the whole point of healing and inner work is to bring that compass back. And nothing outside of you can ever replace that. No list of “5 must things you need to do to manifest” and no guru who has “all the answers.”

Only you do.

I hope you enjoyed this series. And I hope you continue along for the journey of Trauma Dump Me.

If you’ve been doing inner mindset work around money and need some support with a new way, here’s my instagram account recoding wealth. I hope to see you there.

And thanks for being here.

If you didn’t read the first two articles….

Part1

Part 2

xo

Lauren Eliz Love

(Note: If you didn’t read part 1, you can read it here.)

In part one of this reflection series, we ended our time together with me writing this little statement:

When we identify our needs, and hear the communication of the needs within our body, we can more clearly find the resources we truly need to heal.

And then I shared 3 simple truths from part 1 as a summary. I’ll share them here again to catch you up:

1. If something didn’t work or resonate with you on your healing journey - there is nothing wrong with you.

2. We need more trauma informed facilitation for all of these practices, modalities and development studies.

3. Sexual Trauma survivors need different. Case and point

But now I’d like to segue us into a deeper more inner and personal direction in this conversational part 2…. one where we piggyback off that first statement and start being honest with ourselves and take personal accountability for why these healing practices and manifestation rituals don’t work.

When we identify our needs…

Yes… but do we know how?

….and hear the communication of the needs within our body,

Yes… but do we know how?

we can more clearly find the resources we truly need to heal.

We. Don’t. Know. How.

So let’s sit with that for a minute shall we? We can’t just say “these manifestation practices and self healing protocols don’t work for me because I have sexual trauma.”

We have to say… “yes… AND…”

These practices don’t work because I have sexual trauma, and because of that, I cannot properly identify my needs or communicate effectively with my own body.

And acknowledging this is the first step to repair.

This isn’t about claiming a disability and sitting in devastation because of what happened in our past.

This is about having self compassion as we realize that none of these things work because we haven’t learned the most foundational important elements of self healing:

How to identify our needs, and how to communicate with our body.

You may think you know, but you probably don’t.

In our history of sexual trauma we unconsciously learned two things that continue to hinder our growth in the present.

One: that your needs do not matter. (So you might as well not learn them)

and Two: That the communication in your body needs to be ignored to be safe. (So you might as well not learn how to communicate.)

I can recall through my own sexual trauma history (and I’ll place a trigger warning here for you all) that when I was violently violated (yes I use the word violent) I had to contort and distort my own lived experience for survival.

And because I had two big experiences of sexual trauma, one at age 13 and one at age 19, I ended up stacking different trauma response behaviors onto each other (which is common. Most women have more than one incident in their history.)

My trauma patterns that formed were:

-Fawning and pretending everything was fine even when it wasn’t just so that I could be safe.

-Separating myself and disassociating from my body’s cues and signals to “get through” things.

And these two patterns led to a life where I continuously unconsciously repeated these cycles within myself.

I ignored my body when I was hungry because I learned “what my body says doesn’t matter. (like how I learned it didn’t through my trauma.)”

I stuffed down my needs in relationships because “how painful would it be if my needs weren’t met after speaking up (like when I said stop and he didn’t all those years ago.)

Not speaking up when the massage therapist was digging into my back in a way that didn’t feel good because… “I don’t want to make her feel bad (because saying no made things more violent in the past.)” ….

These repeated patterns live everywhere in all the unconscious subtleties of our life.

And they have EVERYTHING to do with manifestation and self healing.

Because if you have spent your entire life never advocating for your needs, you probably have no idea what they are and you probably aren’t communicating them to others effectively (or to yourself in a healthy way, which we will get to in this post.)

And let’s just remind ourselves that manifestation happens in this body of ours. So if you are telling yourself that your body’s cues don’t really matter, how can you possibly call in a sense of safety to expand into what you want?

The great thing about this is that healing, which was once a very complicated and overwhelming process, can now become a very simple task. We just have to learn what our needs are, and we have to learn how to restore healthy communication with ourselves and with our bodies.

External to internal violence:

In the 1960’s, Doctor Marshall Rosenberg founded something magical called Non-Violent Communication (NVC). It was a form of dialogue that increased empathy and was rooted in conflict resolution. His belief was that under everything we communicate in life, there is always a need, and identifying those needs is the first step to finding that magical peace we all want to experience in life.

While originally NVC was for conflict resolution of interpersonal relationships (people to people,) It also applies to our self to self relationship of conversation and inner dialogue.

In my decade long experience of healing, I can honestly say that embodying this language of communication within myself was the key to discovering a healed life. And I’d like to share a bit of it with you today.

Rosenberg’s theory is that all communication falls into one of two categories: it is either violent, or not violent. He also refers to these categories as either life-taking or life-giving. If you’ve ever had a conversation with an “energy vampire” you might know what I’m talking about when I say “life-taking” but I want to give you a little more clarity here so you can start thinking about this as it relates to yourself and how you communicate in your self to self relationship.

You have been probably been violently communicating with your own self as an unconscious pattern caused by the violence that was externally placed on you.

Life-taking communication is language that depletes us, controls us, and hurts us. It creates comparison, forms of judgement, denies responsibility, and implies an absence of choice. These are violent forms of communication because all of them create a sense of guilt, shame, control and separation.

“I should” and “I have to” are two of the most violent forms of communication we place on ourselves.

“I should be healed already…” Violence.

“I have to make this change I haven’t made yet…” Violence.

It is violent because we are trying to control ourselves. It implies a lack of autonomy and blocks compassion. And compassion is the doorway to healing.

It is not lost on me that majority of the inner dialogue my clients experience is rooted in should’s and have to’s. They feel ashamed they haven’t arrived where they want to be in there life and feel guilty that they haven’t been able to create the change they want in their world… whatever that change is.

“I should be farther along,” They say.

But if we trace that language back… isn’t that the control we were born into? and Isn’t that how we were raised?

Maybe.. but it doesn’t make it right.

Like.. “be a good girl you should do xyz…”

and “you have to blah blah blah in order to receive yadada”

Religion, Politics, the Global Climate… It is all about using violent forms of communication to create separation, good and evil, right and wrong.

And we wonder why there is so much violence in the world.

But let’s bring it back to you.

I’m wondering what this brings up for you and how it relates to the communication that stemmed from the abuse or trauma you experienced.

Did any of these thoughts happen in your trauma history?

“I have to keep this a secret because ….”

‘I should be okay with this and not make it such a big deal….”

“I have to pretend like …..”

“I should act like….”

These patterns of internal thought need to end. Because without healthy internal communication we cannot heal, create wealth, or find true happiness in our life. All we do is keep suffering in a cycle of continuous violent communication.

Let’s invite a new way.

What if you allowed yourself to be real with what was real?

What if you acknowledged what was happening in your body more honestly within yourself and with others?

What would your life look like if you replaced every “should” and “have to” with an awareness of what you were truly feeling?

And what if from that awareness of the pain, you started to acknowledge the true needs?

“I am feeling guilt… I need more compassion.”
”I am feeling tired… I need more rest.”
”I am feeling angry.. I need to be witnessed expressing this.”

Let’s start being real about what is happening in our bodies.

I want to leave you here with those simple questions. And you can subscribe for a part 3 coming soon.

xox
Lauren Eliz Love

p.s. if you didn’t read part1 here it is again.

I have so much to say. And it might not come out eloquently. Some of it may feel harsh and some of it you might not agree with. But if I don’t say it, I’ll never forgive myself.

Because I wish someone said these things to me in the early days of my healing journey. And 14 years later, I am speaking up.

In 2012 when I started my healing journey, I was just trying to build a more authentic life on the other side of trauma. I wanted success, true empowerment, and a deep sense of fulfillment that I never seemed to find in the traditional “play by the rules” path of life my parents raised me to prioritize.

Schooling, corporate career milestones, and the American Dream weren’t really cutting it for me. So after a few years of slowly waking up to that truth, I finally quit my job and started to pursue my own soul’s purpose path as an entrepreneur.

That’s when I found Tony Robbins events, money mindset books, and personal development. It felt like I was learning a new language, and the studies I started immersing myself in opened the doors for me to try and believe I could transform my life into something I wanted it to be.

But as I went further into my path, I started to notice something: Transforming my life into something I “wanted it to be,” wasn’t as easy for me as it appeared to be for everyone else.

I was unclear in my vision. I was constantly doubting myself. And for some reason, I was always terrified of being a complete and total failure (no matter what I was doing.)

My body started to exhibit signs of chronic stress, my thoughts felt scattered and overwhelming majority of the time, and I felt this inherent unworthiness and lack of self trust that I just couldn’t shake.

This, I see now looking back, was the resurfacing of all my unintegrated sexual trauma.

No one told me I’d be gaslighting myself.

At the time, no one was talking about trauma informed personal development. I didn’t have language for this lived experience that was constantly creating stress in my world. All I heard from the “experts” was “think positive,” and “focus on what you want, not what you don’t want,” and my personal favorite: “just change your state.” ….which now I can see, felt like gaslighting to my nervous system that was alerting me to the sexual trauma I had experienced was still living in me.

My body felt unsafe in the unknown because the unknown was where my trauma happened. I didn’t know how to surrender, trust and open up to a new reality because my sense of self trust and opening up was robbed from me in my trauma history. I didn’t know how to listen to or accept my body, or create a sense of safety for her. Not because there was something wrong with me, but because I was still holding onto unprocessed wounds within my system.

Think about it: How would you feel if you were told to just focus on the positive during a sexually traumatic experience? That’s how we are unconsciously communicating to our bodies when we use this language of traditional mindset work.

It doesn’t work because it wasn’t designed for you.

Let me break it down for you:

Whether it’s manifestation practices, money mindset techniques, EFT tapping, personal development seminars, or any other type of modality out there that promises you a rewiring of your subconscious mind and a shift into a more powerful life, we need to understand that a history of sexual trauma can make these modalities obsolete.

Sexual trauma can sever our relationship to self trust, intuition, desire, and action… the very same internal tools that we need to harness in order to create change in our life.

These complex experiences of our past often live in our present. They burden us with unprocessed shame and dis-regulated nervous systems. They shift us out of the neurotypical mind and place us in a new world where emotion and identity are blended… a world where we struggle to feel separated from the emotional burdens we carry and feel hindered by trauma patterns.

Simply put, sexual trauma creates a pattern of internal shame, one where we personalize the wrongness that was done to us and see life through a lens of “what’s wrong with me?”

Personal Development cannot work when we are taking everything personally. And unfortunately, that’s what happens when we are holding onto unprocessed shame. We feel like everything that is wrong, is a reflection of something wrong with us.

But the barriers don’t stop there.

• EFT and EMDR practices can cause emotional flashbacks.

• Holotropic breathwork can push our bodies into more of a fight or flight response.

• Ecstatic Dance practices can reactivate unprocessed shame.

• Yoga practices can feel triggering to our freeze response and make us disassociate.

• Psychedelic ceremonies can retraumatize our fragile nervous systems when facilitators are not trauma informed.

• Shadow work can feel abrasive.

• Inner child work can make you cringe.

• The list goes on and on.

And while all of this may feel sad or disheartening to read, it’s not the end of the road for your healing process, I promise.

My path to empowerment started with acknowledging the truth.

It took me a long time to acknowledge these truths within myself. And if you think you’re alone, maybe you can see yourself reflected in my own personal experience.

-When I was in a 9 month healing sabbatical in Sedona, I went to an ecstatic dance ceremony on Cathedral Rock and my body literally froze. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak, I just kept sobbing wondering, “what is wrong with me that I can’t do what everyone else is doing?”

-For years, whenever a friend recommended I join her in a breathwork session, I immediately felt sick to my stomach and questioned myself. “Am I just resisting my own personal growth? Everyone else seems like they love this, so is it just me?”

-The idea of going to a somatic retreat where I screamed and raged and shook out my body felt completely terrifying to me for many years because I couldn’t find a facilitator that felt like she was a “safe space” for me. “Is this just a trigger that I have to look at within myself?”

-When I was in an Ayahuasca ceremony I had so much deep trauma coming up in my womb that I immediately went into a full blown trauma response - one where I felt crazy and couldn’t understand what was happening to me. When I kept asking the facilitator to help me understand what was happening to my body, he told me, “just breath through it,” and I felt like I was being traumatized all over again. “am I just projecting?”

To be clear, nothing is inherently wrong with these modalities. We just need more trauma informed facilitators of this work.

• Your body may need to break out of long form poses and move more intuitively in a yoga session.

• You may not want to breath intensely to push out all of the heavy energy at once in a breath-work session.

• Your mind may need to talk through what’s happening in a psychadelic experience to comprehend and understand the experience you are moving through.

• You may not need to tap and move your eyes back and forth to pull out and repair things in this current season of your healing journey.

While you may relate and feel seen by these experiences I shared , I want to just remind you, theses moments were not the end of the road for my healing path. This didn’t mean I couldn’t create a successful life or become the person I truly wanted to be in my world. These experiences were the first steps illuminating me to the truth of my body: I needed a different approach to meet my different needs.

But what did I truly need?

And if you think about where you are in your healing path, do you know what you need right now?

You need to know your needs.

Sexual trauma survivors struggle with identifying their needs. Through our complex history of rejection, abuse, neglect, and shame, we have learned to embody an untrue unconscious belief that our needs simply do not matter. And when we enter the world of personal development, money mindset, or spiritual enlightenment, we can find ourselves reenacting that same unconscious belief all over again.

We give our power away to gurus who tell us, “this is how you get the result you want.”

We trust every influencer who tells us “this modality will change your life.”

We explore every technique and practice out there chasing one thing after the next without ever really validating how our body responds to it .

And slowly, over time, we stack all of these experiences of failure onto each other to form an even stronger support system to the unconscious untruth: “something is wrong with me, because none of this is working.”

It’s true that the door to our healing journey opens when we first have the awareness that something from our past is continuing to create disfunction in our current reality. Whether it is your relationship with money that feels blocked, intimacy with your partner, or your business that feels stuck in a frozen state. All of it is the door of your healing journey opening to say. “hey, you might want to look at this thing that happened to you.”

But the only way we can actually walk through the door of that healing world is by first being aware of what our needs are and declaring a devotional practice of attuning more deeply to our needs on a regular basis. If we don’t truly know our needs or how to define them, walking through that healing door can feel like we are Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole.

When we identify our needs, and hear the communication of the needs within our body, we can more clearly find the resources we truly need to heal.

So all of this to say a few things:

1. If something didn’t work or resonate with you on your healing journey - there is nothing wrong with you.

2. We need more trauma informed facilitation of all of these practices, modalities and development studies.

3. Sexual Trauma survivors need different. Case and point.

I’m going to pause this article here, and let you know that there will be a part two to this article soon. In that part two I’ll be sharing education, action steps and practices you can use to start shifting into healing the sexual trauma that has been creating frustration in your current life. Be sure to subscribe.

If you’re ready to read part 2…. click here

And let me know your thoughts in the comments of this post if you feel so called to share.

Thank you for being a reader of Trauma Dump Me. I look forward to sharing more soon.

xo

Lauren Eliz Love

This past week I was facilitating our Ayahuasca retreat in Costa Rica, when a patient of mine in the space blurted out with strong emotion: “I am so disillusioned with the coaching space.”

And my first thought was: “Good. I know babe. Me too.”

Last night I was getting more clear on this awareness within myself, scrolling social media and noticing my body’s response to the content creators who market their success, big income, and wealth status.

“Look how much money I made teaching people how to make money.”

“Look how successful I am you can be just like me.”

And yes.. I am guilty myself, having done this many times to celebrate that fact that my business had two million dollar years in a row.

But is this what we really actually want to hear? Is this really as glamorous as we think it is? Are those women really happy?

When I look at them celebrating, speaking on stage, being loud in their fancy disco ball outfits and high heel pumps dancing and owning their truth, I ask myself: “but is that my truth?”

“Do I resonate with that as the version of woman I am today?” And the answer, quite honestly… is no.

Maybe this is because I am in my grounded era of being human, and these days, what brings me joy and fulfillment is deep authentic personal conversations with women in their vulnerability…

Maybe it’s because my inherent nature is more soft than loud.

Maybe it’s because I am more introverted and attuned to the inner frequencies of my own personal needs than the expectations of outward performance.

Maybe it’s because I am maturing in my age of 37, shifting into my 40s where I realize that life is so much more than that…

Maybe.. it’s just because it doesn’t resonate with me. And there’s no explanation needed.

I wonder sometimes where I would be if I made those things important and front facing like so many entrepreneurs and coaches do. I wonder, if I kept chasing high status and rubbing elbows with big leaders, would I be more happy?

No.. actually, as I write this, I know it is not the path for me.

But it’s an interesting thing that happens in your late 30s. Your hormones start dropping as you enter perimenopause and suddenly all the things you went through as a young teenager when your hormones were at that low level start to resurface again in a new way.

“I dont’ want to do what everyone else is doing, I want to be different… but am I allowed to be?”

“I know people tell me those things are important, but they are just not important to me.. so… what IS actually important to me?”

“I know that the popular girls all do that, but I don’t want to be like that.. but can I still have the happiness I think they have?”

Sound familiar?

Maybe the disillusion is actually just the illumination of your own identity coming into true form.

Maybe you’re breaking away and feeling like things don’t resonate because there is some truth of who you are that is wanting to come through.

Perhaps maybe breaking away from what other people are doing to find what you want to do is truly the answer.

And if you didn’t get a chance to do that as a teenager, now you are here gettin a second chance to do things YOUR way.

Unapologetically.

So the lesson here is … don’t conform.

Find your own way.

When I was 13 years old, I got my braces off over the summer and decided that I was going to become popular without my metal mouth.

I watched legally blonde on repeat to study her popularity codes, and decided to invent myself in her image. (as best I could for a Long Island Italian girl.)

I got blonde highlights, a jar of Skintimate shave gel (strawberries and cream scent) and a knock off Tiffany heart necklace from one of those island stands at the mall and executed my mission. I played Perfect Day" by Hoku on repeat and made it my mantra to become as popular as Elle Woods.

(If you don’t know this iconic opening scene of Legally blonde… look it up, it will all make sense.)

I decided after many years of incessant bullying in my Catholic school, 8th grade (my final year) was going to be my year of reclamation. I was going to make friends, become popular, and have the social status I always wanted before going off to high school with a new found confidence.

So when my plan led me to a seat at the popular girl’s cafeteria table, I felt like I was actually getting somewhere.

I started ordering the same lunch as them, even if I didn’t like it.

I watched the television shows they liked, even if I didn’t enjoy them.

I wore my hair the same, even though it wasn’t my style.

And I started gossiping and agreeing with every trash talking comment they made about other girls in the school.. even when I didn’t agree with it. Even when I thought, “was I once one of the girls they used to talk about?”

I became a world class gymnast. A contortionist. A sculpture molding myself into anything and everything I believed I needed to be and do and say just to belong.

But there was still one thing missing…I needed a boyfriend.

Yes it was something I always wanted, but what I really wanted didn’t really matter anymore. What mattered was that these popular girls went out every Friday on couples dates and I needed to be in that group to be a part of the gossip conversation every Monday at lunch… so it was time for phase 2: Get a boy friend, so you can go to all the group dates after school with the popular girls.

I’l get to the point: My quest led me to a magical kiss with a “already taken” boy at the water fountain… and that began my downfall of popular to pariah.

When everyone found out, I was immediately shunned, outcast, and shamed by every single one of those so called “new friends.” Letters flooded my locker in between periods… one from each and every girl telling me how horrible of a person I was, how much of a slut I was going to grow up to be, and how worthless of friendship I always was.

And after that, I was alone. No couple date Fridays. No seat at the cool cafeteria table. No more belonging. No more gossip circles. No more popular me.

While the story wasn’t exactly a “rinse and repeat” narrative of my life, I did go through many experiences where I lost large groups of friends almost overnight. It happened in high school a few times, again in College, later when I left my corporate life in television news, and… I’m not kidding…. when I was 33 years old it happened again.

And every time it was extremely painful.

Large groups of “love” and “connection,” gone overnight.

And whatever the reason or story was for how those experiences happened, the illuminating truth was always the same:

“You are so lost and outside of yourself Lauren. Don’t you see that?”

When I look back on every loss of community, I can see how the finding of my true self wasn’t really going to happen with those people in my life. I can see how letting go of the attachment I had to fitting in and belonging was really what made me find healthy attachment within myself. And I know that even though it was painful and hard to feel alone and isolated, it kind of makes sense why those relationships were things I just wasn’t able to hang onto or sustain in my life.

I was grasping too tightly to the people outside of myself, because I didn’t know how to feel like I belonged to my own self.

My relationships were the permission slip to feel worthy within my own being.

The connections I had externally determined my value internally.

How deeply I belonged in the world around me dictated my sense of safety within my own self.

And I think sometimes the Universe breaks these chains in a really abrasive way to remind you that this path of attachment is not a road you are meant to walk down long term.

In every example of friendship loss… I can see the truth now. When I separate myself from the old grief-filled storyline that I was a person unworthy of love, I can see clearly:

All my friends were mean because I was mean to myself.

All my friends left me because I was always abandoning myself.

All my friends couldn’t stay connected to me because I was unable to connect to myself.

Time and time again, whenever my friends broke up with me it was because there was some pattern deep within me that I needed to acknowledge and break up with to become who I was meant to become.

And if this happened to you, maybe you can see that same experience within yourself.

xox

Lauren Eliz Love

Starting this Substack feels like I am a cat sitting in front of a big bawl of yarn trying to get to the starting point of a big jumbled chaotic mess.

There are so many twists, turns, knots and kinks… I am not sure how to find the beginning for you all. So maybe, I’ll just start with where I am right now.

I’ve been diving deep into a new book called Fawning by Ingird Clayton. And I have to be honest… it’s creating a whole new outlook on my trauma history.

Fawning, if you don’t know, is a trauma response. Yes we know about fight, flight and freeze, but fawning is also an adaptation we use to survive in complex traumatic experiences. But honestly, of all the responses, I think fawning is the one that shapes our identify the most and is the hardest to untangle from.

High functioning co-dependency, Over functioning, and People pleasing all kind of stem from the fawning patterns we learned in our childhood.

Ingird has a great section at the start of the book where she names the pattern clearly with some very relatable bullet points:

• Give your uncle a kiss.

• Say you love the gift when you don’t.

• Don’t talk about dad’s drinking.

• Don’t make others uncomfortable.

• Be the “better” person.

• But she’s your mother.

• Present more white/affluent/sexy to stay relationally safe.

• Be a team player.

• How bad do you want it.

• Just go with it.

• Repress it.

• Ignore it.

• Smile.

This isn’t respect. This is a fawning pattern.

In our upbringing, some of us are generally conditioned to become fawners, while some of us have these really really big traumatic experiences where fawning is a literal solution for a life or death situation.

And in my case, I have walked both sides of the fence.

When I was 13, I met my first predator. He was 17 years old and was the first person who taught me to fawn for survival.

One night when I was babysitting my sisters and my parents went out to a movie, he and six of his friends biked to my house, broke in, and violated my sense of safety.

I don’t remember all of the details..

but I remember putting my sisters in the basement closet to keep them safe.

I remember watching in freeze as they put my mothers’ jewelry in their pockets drinking beer they stole from the fridge.

And I remember pretending to be okay with how they touched me, and took off my clothes.

There was 1 boy of the seven who actually spoke the words “guys stop.” But I never said a word.

I didn’t freeze. I didn’t fight. I fawned.

For all of you wondering, if you ask google what the difference is between a freeze pattern and a fawn response, this is what you get:

Fawning and freezing are both trauma-based survival responses designed to keep a person safe, but they differ primarily in their approach to the threat: fawning aims to appease the threat through people-pleasing, while freezing aims to avoid detection through immobilization and dissociation.

Basically.. when you freeze you disassociate. When you fawn, you mask and find a way to say, “this is fine,” even when it isn’t.

I fawned because I was afraid that if I said no, fought back, or disassociated, I would end up dead.

For years I carried so much shame around that experience. Followed by guilt for not doing better for my body.

“I pretended like it was okay. Did I really think it was okay?”

I masked my true nature response with an energy that said, “I’m comfortable with this. I’m along for the ride” even though I wasn’t.

But deep inside my body was screaming no.

I learned years later that this is fawning at it’s finest, and it’s often why so many sexual trauma survivors process elements of guilt or responsibility in the crimes and violations committed on their body. We “please and appease” situations and mask our true feelings in order to control the environment and the people who are threatening us. We are literally doing everything we can to be the “good girl” for the person who is doing harm.

If you want a great (and maybe triggering) example of this, watch Anna Kendricks’ first directed film, “Woman of the Hour.” Every woman in that movie is fawning for survival, or dying because they don’t.

I, like many trauma survivors, took on an overwhelming amount of responsibility for my trauma history. And this experience I am sharing about my own personal life is unfortunately just one of the many violations I experienced as I continued to unconsciously re-enact my trauma patterns over the years.

I felt like it was my fault, because I pretended it was okay in order to survive.

Even when a week later, this 17 year old boy’s mother was driving him to my home to apologize to my father and return the jewelry, I lied and pretended I “threw a party.” To me, taking responsibility for what happened felt safer than speaking up about what really took place.

I was grounded all summer.

I went on to be a life long fawner. My role in life became “pleasing others,” and “making my parents proud.”

I spent years over functioning as a survival tactic. I spent decades distracting myself with productivity.

I harbored guilt, and worry, and fear of my own safety. And it manifested in all the different relationships and life experiences I attracted in the years that followed.

But somewhere along the way… I started healing and unraveling that big ball of yarn to get to the truth: I was doing the best I could to protect myself.

And if you relate… so were you sister.

xox

Lauren Eliz Love.

When I was in my Sophomore year of college in 2010, I transferred schools and couldn’t make any friends. Maybe it’s because I was overly medicated with antipsychotics at the time, or perhaps it was because I buried myself in school work… but honestly? I think it was because I was telling everyone about the traumatic experience I had just been through a year earlier at another school.

Looking back, leading with, “I was raped, attempted suicide, and diagnosed with a mental illness,” wasn’t exactly the connection point I had been hoping for. But honestly, trauma was my entire identity back then. Because my trauma took my true identity from me.

That isolation and disconnect from the world around me continued on for years. I had a hard time building relationships, struggled to feel close to people, and couldn’t find a safe space to unravel who I really was underneath all of that unprocessed pain. After all, our identities are formed in the interpersonal connections we develop with others. But those relationships didn’t exist for me after my trauma. Who would understand what I had been through? And who could possibly relate to what I had been carrying around in my backpack of “past trauma-drama?”

It felt so isolating to be me to be me.

Growing up, my mother conditioned me to never really talk about the sensitive, vulnerable parts of myself. “Don’t share so personally with others,” and “why do you have to tell people so much?” were phrases I heard often as a child.

But something happened in 2015 when I found my voice online and started sharing a blog about my trauma history and self healing journey…the more I talked online and shared my stories, the more I found other women who had gone through similar things who found solace in my self reflection.

Women heal when we share the shameful stories in safe spaces. It’s like we can find ourselves in the mirrored reflection of other people’s experiences. And suddenly, we don’t feel so ashamed anymore.

I want this Substack to feel that way for you.

Consider this corner of the internet a soft landing pad where I can share, and you can relate.

“Trauma Dump Me” felt like the right name. Since my journey of life the last 11 years has been about breaking up with the old relationship of my trauma to form a new and empowered perspective of those past experiences, I figured I would share the continuation of my unraveling with you all.

Because… let’s be honest… the work is never really done.

“Trauma Dump Me” also felt like an invitation for you to share too. To comment, reflect, and be open about your own experiences in the comments of each post.

“Yes I relate” and “this sounds so similar to my story” is often the first step in recognizing that part of us deep inside that needs to be witnessed, acknowledged, and recognized for what she has been through.

And… most importantly… have the power to transform from it.

I hope you enjoy the journey. Thank you for being here. And I look forward to growing along side you.

xox

Lauren Eliz Love