Why I Built The Method™ , And Why Nothing Else Was Enough
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Why I Built The Method™ , And Why Nothing Else Was Enough
Fariya Barlas: She sat in front of me, multiple six-figures, strong team, strong reputation, and the first thing she said was, "I think this is all my fault." Now she had tried many different strategies. Every high-end coaching program, every mindset tool available to her, she had implemented, she had shown up, and she was still capped at the level she knew was not her ceiling. And what I found underneath was not a strategy problem or confidence issue or even a visibility or any kind of fear. It was, in fact, an inherited program she had never been told existed. And it was running her decisions, her visibility, her capacity to receive without her knowledge. And not a single thing she had invested in before was designed to find it.
Voiceover: Welcome to From Trauma to CEO: The Psychology of Transformational Success with Fariya Barlas. This is a space for cycle breakers, leaders, and visionaries who are ready to rewrite old patterns and rise into their fullest potential. Each episode explores the emotional, psychological, and identity-level shifts that turned lived experience into lasting, meaningful success. And now, here's your host, Fariya Barlas.
Fariya Barlas: Hello, and welcome back to From Trauma to CEO. Today I'm going to tell you what I was seeing for over 2 decades that nobody else was naming. Why I stopped waiting for somebody else to build what was needed, and I'm going to tell you what actually happens when the work goes deep enough to reach the place where the pattern was made. And if you've been listening to me for long enough, you know, I'm all about the inner architecture. So, at the end of the episode, I'm going to reframe something you might have been telling yourself for a long time. And once you hear why that's not actually the problem, you'll stop looking and start asking a very different question. And if you're already feeling something land, you can always find me through the show notes. Something is opening very soon that was built for exactly this. Keep listening because what I'm about to share is the part that no approach has ever touched. I was trained across eight different therapeutic modalities, from CBT to psychodynamic to person-centered existential, integrative, gestalt, mindfulness, and different modalities with to do with trauma healing. Now, I'm saying all of this, that's not a list I share to be impressive, although as I'm saying it out loud, I'm thinking, "Oh my god, I spent a lot of time doing different modalities and going through different training." But actually, it's the context of what I'm about to tell you. Because over all this time and over all this work that I've done, and across all the training, there was one thing that I kept seeing that no single modality could fully address. And that was always my own frustration, because for my own personal process, and I'll go into that in a minute, what I saw that the people who had done the most work were often the ones that were still stuck. And it had nothing to do with the fact that they were not aware, self-aware, or they hadn't done inner work or they know all the things, right? But the problem was that none of the work was ever designed to take them where they actually wanted to go. The people sitting in front of me over these years were particularly the high-achieving founders, leaders, and entrepreneurs. They were not coming to me because they were broken. In fact, I have a very strong opinion around viewing people who are going through something or have gone through something as broken or as if there's something broken inside of them. And I know that a lot of people don't identify with that. I personally don't, myself, and I have gone through my own traumas and my own stuff. So, they these people were actually coming because they wanted to expand. They wanted to grow. They wanted more in business, in leadership, in relationships, in visibility, and generally in life, in how much they allowed themselves to receive. And it was always a cap, a very real, a very costly gap between what they wanted and where they were. And what I found was coaches could give amazing strategy accountability, even momentum, which by the way is very important. But when a client hits an invisible ceiling where, you know, their bodies are pulling them back from the very thing that they say they want, the coaches don't necessarily have the tools. Especially if it's related to trauma and I know that a lot of people are afraid of that word and I know within the coaching industry, a lot of coaches won't go anywhere near trauma or the trauma work. Although, thankfully, they're becoming there is a movement around becoming more trauma informed, which I welcome any day. So, the problem is that the coaches would have had the tools, some tools, but what was happening was not really strategic, so they had the tools for a strategy, but what was happening was had all to do with identity level and somatic and sometimes even intergenerational, and you cannot a strategize your way out of a inherited program that lives in your nervous system. Also, I have trained and worked and supervised many, many therapists over the years. And I could tell you that therapists could work with the wound or with what they call trauma or with the presenting issue that comes up. Actually, good therapists could work with the wound. I need to differentiate also. And they could help a person understand their history, process their pain, develop insight. But, here is what therapy in most models does not do. It does not say, "Now, take that work, take that inner work, and go build something with it. Now go and lead. Now raise your price. Now stand on that stage and let people see all of you." Now, the problem with the inner work alone is that it doesn't advocate for action, and the problem with action alone is that it doesn't advocate for inner work first. And when they're disconnected, one of the two things usually happens. Either the person taking action would end up taking it from a dysregulated place, and the success they build will cost them everything, or they go so deep into the inner work that they just stay there. They become fluent in their wounds, they become insightful, self-aware, and still living smaller than they're capable of. I kept thinking both of these things have to be combined. And not one after the other, but actually together in the same room at the same time, and nobody was doing that. How do I know? Because I was looking for myself, because I wanted more. I didn't want just my own past to I didn't just want to process my own past. I wanted to process it, and then move forward, and I wanted to take action, and I wanted to create more in my own life. And on top of that, most of the clients that I was working with, they would get to that point as well, where, "Okay, now that I am self-aware, I understand my trauma, I understand what's happening underneath, now what?" And that's where the method began. It wasn't a program, and it wasn't a product or anything like that. It was it actually began as a frustration for me that nothing that already existed could hold the full picture, and I'm all about the full picture. So, this is where it all kind of began as in my own work, in my own, sort of, process. And then I, without knowing, without neces- not without knowing, without intending, I, or I wasn't intentional at least about it. I started applying it to clients. And I will tell you about the woman that I started this session with. Now, she she ran a health clinic and multiple six-figure, she had a very strong team, strong reputation, and when she came to see me, she had already invested in a lot of strategy, programs, and different kind of kinds of programs that were available to her. And she had done a lot of work. She was very determined, and to be honest, she was doing all the things that you're really supposed to do. And she was still hitting the same ceiling. And this is important because when she came to me, the first thing I did was not the most what most people might expect. I didn't ask her about her background or childhood or about her trauma. I started somewhere that most approaches skip entirely. I first reality tested the prob- problem. Because most clients arrive with something in their own mind about what's wrong. It's either somebody else's input or diagnosis, or a coach might have told them to okay, that they need to raise their prices, or a program might have told them that they need more visibility, or a mastermind would have told them that they're not thinking big enough. In fact, I had one person [laugh] that came with the same issue that she thought was the problem. And sometimes those things are true, but often the stated prop- problem is not the actual problem. And if you build your entire intervention around the wrong question or the wrong struggle, then you can do a lot of beautiful work that doesn't really shift anything. So, I asked her, "What does growth actually mean to you, and not what your coach told you that it should mean, but what does it actually, really mean to you? And where does it stop?" So, as she started talking, I what I did here was gather all the information because I pulled the thread outside of the business entirely, because the business problem is never just a business problem. It's a life pattern expressing itself through their people's businesses or careers or even relationships. And where she was holding herself back, we kind of went into it, where she was censoring herself, in relationships, in friendships, in her family. So, I didn't really start with her business issue. And what I found was that the pattern was everywhere. She was minimizing herself across every area of her life, not just in her clinic, but everywhere. And that's when I knew that this is bigger and older than her business. This is why surface tactics didn't work. And the pattern was taking charge of her business entirely. This is only one example. What I found across thousands of hours of this kind of work is that every block operates on three layers at the same time, and most approaches only touch one, if that. And that's important, I say if that, because I'm talking about the approaches that actually go deep and they look for the source, not the approaches that are only touching the surface. But even with the deeper approaches and some trauma-informed coaching, they manage to usually just touch one at best. So, the first layer, I mentioned three layers. The first layer is usually personal. It's your own direct experience, what happened when when you advocated for yourself, when you were seen, when you asked for something, when you succeeded. So, this is all to do with your own history and your nervous system built its current operating rules from that data, from your own experiences, but also not just from one experience, but from repeated data points over years. So, this is the first layer, and this is where most people gets stuck in. However, there is a second and a third layer. The second layer is intergenerational. So, these are the patterns that you would have inherited from your parents, your grandparents, your ancestors, your family system, the unspoken rules, who was allowed to have money, who was allowed to be seen, what happened to the people in your family who wanted more. These are beliefs that were placed on you without your knowledge or even consent for that matter. And a person can have zero personal negative experiences. So, this is where sometimes people come in and say, "I've never experienced any trauma in my own life" and I say, "That's fine, but you might have not experienced any negative sort of trauma, whatever, or negative experiences with visibility, but you could still carry a deep inherited conditioning or programming." And then, we have the third layer, which is collective. Now, what it means culturally and historically for people, I'm talking specifically for this client, for woman to earn and to hold, to be seen, to lead, to have power, what does what did it mean culturally? Or in your community? Or historically, even? Did it mean loss of relatability? And this applies to everyone. Or the fear of outgrowing your partners, or going above what was available in your family system or in your community? So, there is a lot of collective patterning that takes place. Most clients are completely unaware that this layer also exists. And then, this layer could be running in a background. But it is, and it shapes what your system will permit. Most practitioners or coaches address one of these levels, again, as I said, at best. My work addresses all three. Because I went searching, and this was personal to me. This wasn't about my work, and it wasn't about even my clients at that point. This was personal. I needed to know and find out a way to grow in a way that was true to myself, and in a way that I did not have any templates for. So, then I went searching. [laugh] And that's why it's so important for me to always address all these three layers, because you can do extraordinary personal inner work or healing and still be running on intergenerational program underneath. Because you can do extraordinary personal inner work or healing and still be running on intergenerational program underneath it, or you can resolve the intergenerational piece and still be carrying a collective weight that you have never named, or you didn't even know existed, so for that matter. And the ceiling is not going to fully move until all three layers are seen. And this is exactly what happened with the client that I started the session with. The only successful woman in her family had never been married. And the family narrative, although it was never spoken directly, but it was more absorbed, embodied, and coded into every interaction, was that successful woman costs love. And if you become too visible, too powerful, too successful, you end up alone. Because that was the only framework or template they had in their family. This client of mine, she never actually consciously thought about this, she would never have said it out loud, but her nervous system had picked that up completely. And every time she was about to expand, book a bigger summit, pitch for a sponsorship, or raise her profile, something in her would pull her back, and she would unconsciously censor herself, minimize herself, find reasons not to go all in. And you cannot renegotiate a contract that you haven't even read. And that's what a lot of people miss, because they try to override a program that they haven't even identified. They try to upgrade an identity that was built before the person even chose it. And they try to, in a lot of the coaching programs that I've seen, they try to install a new belief on top of a foundation that will reject it. Because the person is not going to build that belief on top of this foundation. And then they end up blaming themselves: "I'm not disciplined enough, oh, I'm self-sabotaging." Oh, this is my personal favorite, because I heard it so many times. Not to mention, I, for the longest time, thought that I was self-sabotaging or something was wrong, but nothing is wrong, the work just has not reached the level where the patterns were initially built. So, this is really what led me to build the method, the way that it's structured. And it has four layers, in and they go in a specific order, because if they're not worked in this order, the work will collapse. So, we go through the first layer, which is the belief, but we don't aim to change the belief or swap it for the better one or what the mainstream kind of CBT work is, or that's cognitive behavior therapy. They try to change the belief or change it for the better one. That's not what I do. I work with the belief to find out what it actually first is and where it comes from, because if you change a belief without understanding what it's protecting, then you're just overriding it. And the next layer that I work with is identity. How does those beliefs that we identified in layer one, how do they how do they shape the identity that the person think that they are now, okay? Whatever identity they have: the strong one, the capable one, but it's important because this identity was not chosen. So, this is very different. Here's where my work departs from what you'll hear everywhere else. Most identity work says, "Upgrade your identity, step into your next-level version, become the seven-figure CEO." I mean, trust me, I know that's very seductive, and I would love it if that alone worked. [laugh] Unfortunately, it doesn't. So, the way that I work with identity is that I say that identity was never yours, it was a survival adaptation. And the real identity, the one built from desire and not necessity, it has been buried underneath it all. So, the work is not to build a new self, really. It is to come back and give permission to what's underneath all this programming, to come back. And layer three is trauma and inherited patterns. So, that's working with identity at the level where it was initially formed. And layer four is aligned action and leadership, and this can only be applied only after transitional layers are identified and addressed, because confidence without capacity collapses under pressure. And you can affirm that you're powerful all day, but if your nervous system hasn't metabolized the fear of being powerful, you will then self-correct back to that familiar kind of ground for yourself every single time. And true leadership, and by leadership leadership in your work, in your business, in your career, in your life, it cannot come from overriding your nervous system with motivation. And the word that I keep coming back to is lasting, lasting change. That's what this is for. Because a lot of other modalities or approaches, they may create changes quick changes, if I may say so, but lasting change requires these layers to be addressed. So, what actually changed for the client that I was seeing and why it was very life-changing for her? Because when we identified the inherited program running underneath her ceiling, you know, the one that success for a woman being costly and costing love, we did not try to think our way past it. And I didn't even challenge that thinking. We worked, actually, with her body first, so we found the exact somatic point of collapse. And then we started working with that, shifting it, and then, as that took place, she stopped unconsciously censoring herself. And she was able to actually work with these patterns on a deeper layer, on an identity layer, understanding, not through her thinking, but actually through embodiment, that identity or that narrative never really belonged to her. And that she was to create a whole new template, not just for herself, but her whole family and her whole lineage, for that matter. So, she ended up booking one major summit that I know that she was really excited about, and she secured a few sponsorship deals that she needed, and generally speaking, she expanded her business in ways that had felt impossible only a few months before. And then, she started dating. Because when the program, the underneath program that was running the show, said that success costs love, expanding the business and opening to partnership were the same problem. They were the same contraction, the same inherited belief, and once the root was found, not just managed or overridden, but actually found and worked with with all the three layers I explained, both areas moved. So, we never worked on her dating life, but as she work she went through this process for her business, other areas of her life also started to shift. Now, I'm going to be honest with you. I didn't set out to build a methodology. I didn't wake up one day and think, "Oh, okay, I'm going to create something new." It happened, as I said, firstly because of what I needed, and then because I kept sitting with people with the same problem, and they didn't fit neatly into any single framework. And I kept combining, pulling from one modality here, there, using my own clinical training and my lived experiences, and my own instinct. And I had to create my a whole new model and framework and the methodology that works not just on inner work, but actually how to use inner work, how to actually identify your trauma pattern for expansion, for success, for business growth. And I can personally identify with so much of what my clients go through, and the method really exists because I needed it too. I just happened to also be the person who could build it, myself. [laugh] And what I know now is that I didn't fully understand in those early years, especially, that the process is never linear, right? Growth always triggers old material. In the middle of expansion, the original wound or something that you completely forgot about can resurface. And that, by the way, is not a setback, that's the work spiraling deeper. You return to the source but from a new point. And each past goes further than the past. And that's what I built the method to hold. Not just the first breakthrough, but the ongoing unfolding, because if you do this work properly, you don't just shift once. You develop the capacity to keep shifting, keep expanding, keep becoming more of who you actually are. So, I want you to understand what this work is actually for, because it's not just about fixing what's broken, as by now you identified, and I know I'm sure I must have mentioned it because I have a thing about that word, because nothing is broken. Nothing is wrong. This is just about moving from trauma-led success, which is a success built through proving, pleasing, controlling, earning belonging through performance, all the things that we had to do to succeed. It's about moving from that kind of success into reparative success, which is a success built from integration, wholeness. And achieving the results that we want without self-abandonment, leading without performing a defensive identity, receiving without panic, being visible without fragmentation, not just the parts that we are comfortable with, and creating wealth without recreating the pressure that built you. That's what the method was built to create, and that's what's also opening next. So, if you've been hearing yourself in this episode, if you've done inner work, therapy, coaching, mindset program, nervous system regulation work, and you still feel capped at the level that you know is not your ceiling, then this is what the method was built for. It wasn't built from a template; it was built from 23 years of sitting with people exactly like yourself and finding the part that nobody else could read. The method is opening soon, and if you want to be in the room, you can find everything through the show notes and also my own website. Now, I mentioned at the beginning that I'm going to provide you with a reframe that and I'm going to leave you with this. The reframe is for the discomfort that you've been calling self-sabotage. Now, self-sabotage, I can't even tell you how many times a day I hear that word. However, self-sabotage assumes that you're working against yourself and that you're sabotaging yourself. But, what if the part of you that keeps pulling back is not sabotaging, is not broken; it is just loyal? And what I mean by that is what if that part is loyal to an identity that was built before you chose it, loyal to a set of rules that once kept kept you safe? And that is not self-sabotage; that's a protection system doing exactly what it's supposed to or what it is designed to do. That is your system, your protective system working brilliantly. So, the question is not, "Why do I keep doing this?" The question should be, "What does this part of me believe will happen if I stop?" Now, sit with that this week and not to fix it, but just to listen, because the moment you stop treating it as sabotage and start treating it as information, the relationship you have with it will change completely. So, that's it for today's episode of From Trauma to CEO. If this landed, share it with someone who has been doing all the work and quietly wondering why nothing has moved. And remind them that they are not imposters, they are loyal, and that's a very different problem with a very different solution. I'll see you in the next one.
Voiceover: Thank you for listening to From Trauma to CEO: The Psychology of Transformational Success with Fariya Barlas. Check out the show notes for more information on how to continue this work or explore more of Fariya's teachings. If this episode resonated, please follow, review, and share it with someone who needs this message. And we'll see you in the next episode.
Episode Summary
After more than two decades working as a psychologist, Farya Barlas recognized a gap that traditional therapy, coaching, and mindset work often leave behind. In this episode, she explains how she developed her own methodology to help high achievers break through invisible ceilings by addressing the personal, intergenerational, and collective patterns that shape success. If you've done all the inner work but still feel stuck, this episode explores why the missing piece may not be more strategy, but a deeper understanding of the subconscious programs driving your decisions.
What You'll Learn
Why therapy, coaching, and mindset work each provide valuable tools, but often fail to address the deeper patterns limiting long-term growth.
How inherited family beliefs and collective conditioning can quietly influence your success, leadership, relationships, and ability to receive more.
The three layers that shape every success ceiling: personal experiences, intergenerational programming, and collective beliefs.
Why lasting transformation requires working with the nervous system, identity, and subconscious patterns instead of simply changing your thoughts.
How moving from trauma-led success to reparative success allows you to build a business and life without relying on proving, people-pleasing, or self-abandonment.
Free Resources:
Want personalised support breaking through the internal bottleneck you’re facing at this level? Book a private 20-minute Breakthrough Conversation with Farya, and together you can identify what’s currently constraining your capacity, and what needs to shift for sustainable expansion.
Find out if your success is trauma-led or reparative using this FREE short diagnostic checklist to uncover whether your drive/success is coming from pressure, survival patterns, so you can have a clear next step toward reparative, grounded growth.
Check out her Website faryabarlas.com for resources and programs.
CONNECT WITH FARYA:
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