The Unspoken Rule Every Therapist Absorbs and How To Finally Outgrow It Ft. Dr. Nicole Nasr
-
The Unspoken Rule Every Therapist Absorbs and How To Finally Outgrow It Ft. Dr. Nicole Nasr
Farya: So, there is a version of every woman who arrives in my world that I never, ever forget. Particularly because of who she is on the edge of becoming. And when Nicole walked into my space a few years ago, she was already an accomplished and exceptional psychologist. Brilliant, deeply devoted to her clients and her work, but I could feel something even more powerful sitting with her.
So, this was a woman who was building her entire life from an identity that was just too small for her. I could spot that straight away. And I knew instantly that this is where your current self is running the show for you. However, your bigger self is already knocking.
And then in the following years that followed, through our work, through her courage, through every internal expansion that she said yes to, I watched Nicole outgrow her past identity and step into the founder, the leader, the CEO who built Journey.
And today, you're not just meeting a guest. You're actually meeting a living example of what becomes possible when a woman stops negotiating with her old self and finally becomes the one that her future self requires.
Narrator: Welcome to From Trauma to CEO: The Psychology of Transformational Success with Farya 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 turn lived experience into lasting, meaningful success. And now here's your host, Farya Barlas.
Farya: Welcome to From Trauma to CEO. In today's episode, I want to speak to you about a topic that each and every one of us, at some point in our lives, would have struggled with, and a topic that is often misunderstood. I'm speaking about visibility. We tend to treat it like a professional skill, like something that you learn, you refine, and eventually can master. But in reality, visibility is far more intimate than that, because to be visible is to be revealed. And for many accomplished, deeply capable individuals, that is precisely where the nervous system begins to negotiate.
And in my experience, the conversation around visibility has very little to do with strategy, or even with mindset, and everything to do with self-trust. With the internal permission to show up without needing to perform, without self-editing, and without abandoning parts of ourselves in order to be accepted. And that is exactly where today's conversation lives. I'm joined by Anna Holtzman, a licensed psychologist and a coach who helps high-functioning creative women and entrepreneurs move through fears of visibility and into a truer expansion of their work and their identity. Now, before this chapter of her career, Anna spent over 15 years in TV and publishing. That's exactly where—the space where visibility is constant, and performance is often rewarded. Along the way, she experienced firsthand how burnout, chronic pain, and repeated self-silencing can emerge when success is shaped more by pressure than by self-trust, or joyfulness for that matter. And her own healing guided her towards nervous system-informed tools that helped her reconnect with her voice and show up more authentically in her work. Now today, she supports people, individuals, in going through imposter syndrome and bringing their most authentic visions to life, and allowing themselves to be seen without needing to perform. She's also the host of the podcast How to Trust Yourself, where she explores the deeper understanding of internal authority and what it truly means to trust yourself and to be more visible.
Anna, I'm so glad to have you here today. Thank you for joining me.
Anna: Farya, I am so, so glad to be here with you today. Thank you so much for having me here.
Farya: It's my absolute pleasure. I am excited about speaking with you about all things visibility-related, but most importantly, I want to start with—I mean, we briefly touched on it, but I want you to go into a little bit of a detail as to what led you to this work you are doing now, helping sensitive creatives and entrepreneurs use nervous system tools to work through all the fears around visibility and how they can become more authentically themselves. I love to hear your journey and what led you to this kind of work.
Anna: Yeah, thank you so much for inviting me to speak about that. And before I go into it, I just want to start by saying I loved that you said, and I wrote it down, "To be visible is to be revealed." And I work with this stuff, not because I have no problems with visibility, I work with it because it's something that I continue to struggle with, and therefore have to really pay attention to and develop tools to help myself through, so that's why I love supporting clients with this. And it made me think of coming on to be on this podcast with you today.
I happen to have a lot of like chaotic stuff going on in my personal life at the moment, everything is like rushing here, rushing there. And when it came to sit down to log in to our recording, I had the thought like, "Oof, I'm going to be speaking with Farya on this podcast, and I wish I had my act together today. I wish I felt grounded and settled and all this stuff." And what that's really about, and I love the way you phrased it, is, you know, not wanting to be revealed. Thinking about visibility as, "I've got to put on my mask and be perfect and not show my messiness." And I think a lot of us instinctively think of it that way, or we're conditioned to think of it that way, and that makes it feel really scary. Because we are human and messy, and as you witnessed earlier, I had to go through the beginning of introducing you a couple of times because my mind was a little bit scattered and it took me a minute to gather myself, and that's exactly it, to appear as we are.
Farya: We are human and messy, and as you witnessed earlier, I had to go through the beginning of introducing you a couple of times because my mind was a little bit scattered and it took me a minute to gather myself, and that's exactly it, to appear as we are is somehow has been programmed that it's not okay, that it has to be the performative part of us. And in reality, and I'm sure you experience that on a daily basis, what really lands with clients, with the work that we do, is when you show up as your authentic self with all the messy parts and with everything, right?
Anna: It's what makes us feel connected, right? It's like, often say to clients that when we're dealing with interpersonal stuff, we humans, we're like tuning forks. We pick up and replicate unconsciously, each other's vibrations. And I know that when I'm masking myself and trying to hold it all together and be perfect and not show my messiness, everyone who's in my presence or who's listening to me feels that tension in their own body, too. And when I do the thing that my programming thinks I'm not allowed to do, and everyone will hate me if I just let the mess out, that's when everyone together breathes a sigh of relief and suddenly we're out of disconnection and into connection with each other.
Farya: Absolutely, yeah. I know that you had gone through your own process and of course like everything else, this is a kind of ongoing thing that we experience, especially as we reveal different layers of ourselves. What it means is that a new kind of fear of visibility, a new reluctance appears, right? And as you mentioned, you firsthand had gone through something that was so performative and exposing. So I love to hear a little bit about that process.
Anna: Yeah, I'd love to share that. So, I'll tell a version of the story of how I got to what I'm doing now, but highly embedded with metaphor, but this is a framing of how it really happened. So, my prior career to this was working in television. And yeah, before that, I worked in publishing, but for 10 of my years working in media, I worked in reality television, and I worked as video editor. And this is a very, extremely high-pressure world, you know? It's you need to be creative and think on your feet, but you need to be extremely fast. You need to do your creative work in front of other people, there's always eyes right over your shoulder staring Maya your work as you're working. It's just a pressure cooker, and it's an environment where you see people being fired at the drop of a hat on a daily basis, so you're always knowing that that could happen to you, too.
And in this environment, it's just natural, I was striving to be perfect, and nobody's perfect, but I managed to be very successful in this career. And that involved a lot of holding it together, like this visibility masking that we're talking about, trying to never make a mistake, never reveal what's going on inside. That can be extremely painful, right? And we can start to deteriorate in our health when we're holding all of that tension. And many people experience this in a wide variety of different ways, some are more easy to recognize than others, but it just so happens that my experience makes an easy metaphor, because on my literally very first day of work in that career, I experienced my first migraine attack. I had never experienced something like that before, it was not part of my health stuff, but on that first day of the job, I experienced such anxiety and I was striving to be perfect straight out of the gate, and so my nervous system just really freaked out and I got an extremely overpowering migraine headache.
So, this was something that then followed me throughout the 10 years that I worked in TV. And in the beginning, it wasn't something that was a big part of my life, it was just something I would experience periodically when stress and tension would build particularly at work. I would experience these attacks once in a while, and they gradually became more frequent. I would say as this tension became a more and more regular routine part of what was going on in my nervous system. After 10 years of working in this field—I always wanted to be a director, that was my goal, and I was striving for that the whole time, but after 10 years, the director career had not taken off, it wasn't happening—and I thought, "I can't spend the rest of my life editing reality TV, this was not my end goal, I need to do something different." And in the meantime, I had entered into therapy for personal reasons, not related to work. And I found it to be a very interesting, fascinating, stimulating process, and I thought television is about telling people stories, understanding human behavior, and therapy, although very different in many ways, has those elements, and maybe this is something that I could do.
So I eventually left TV and first got a life coaching certification and then finally went back to graduate school to become a therapist. And here's where things get interesting and unexpected: I thought, "When I leave TV, and I enter this field that's all about feelings and expressing ourselves and being in tune with ourselves, maybe the migraines will go away because the tension will decrease." But what happened in fact was the exact opposite of that. It wasn't until I was in graduate school that the migraines really took over my life in a scary way, where I was being like taken fully flat out, sometimes three days a week. I was not able to show up reliably for my classes or for my clinical internship, and it felt like life was closing in on me. And I didn't understand what was happening at the time, but looking back on it now, from the other side of all that, I think what was happening is that I thought I was going into a situation where I'd be expressing my feelings and in tune with myself and comfortable being seen exactly as I am. But in fact, graduate school has its own code of conduct, its own rules, its own particular ways of seeing things that were not always in tune with my way of seeing things or my way of expressing myself. And in order to achieve the grades and the degree, I had to or I felt I had to conform myself to the environment and keep my authenticity under wraps at times. And I think that being in an environment where I was like on the verge of feeling I could express myself but then retracted and masked it again, it just created this huge inner tension that, for me, happened to manifest as these migraine headaches.
So, yeah, I mean this is fascinating, because and also very much aligned with everything that we talk about, right? That fear of visibility, that being train to bring all parts of ourselves into the equation, it's something internal, so it would follow us wherever we go, right? So, you know, yes, some circumstances, some positions or jobs or situations would highlight that a lot more, but essentially that programming, whatever that may be, is internal, and I'm so glad that you pointed that out, because that is the thing that a lot of the times gets misunderstood, that, okay, keeping boundaries where you're not supposed to be visible in every situation, right? You're supposed to know exactly where it is safe—like, really safe, not just in our own head—to be visible, and where it really is not.
Anna: Yeah, absolutely, I totally agree with you. And it's interesting, I love having these kind of conversations because it always brings like a new layer of understanding for my own human experience as we're talking about these things. And what's coming to me now, so where my story took a turn is that because the migraines became such a life-interrupting thing during my grad school, I went in search of some kind of a solution, some way out of this, and fortunately in my search, I discovered this whole world of mind-body medicine for chronic pain, for working with the nervous system, and it was a body of work that I really deeply connected with, and it ultimately led me down a path out of the chronic cycle and into greater physical ease. And a big, big part of that process for me had to do with internal visibility. With recognizing what was happening inside of myself emotionally, which I thought I was already doing—I mean, I was in school to become a therapist, I had been in therapy for many years. But this work drew me into a much deeper dialogue with myself, where I was having inner dialogues, becoming my own therapist in a way, sitting with myself and truly listening, letting myself be seen by my own self, and bringing compassion to myself. So, it was that internal safety with visibility that had to be built before external visibility could feel safe for me, because looking back, what I was really unconsciously hoping for in grad school is that I would just dump all of my feelings and they would be held safely with compassion by whoever was around, without having those tools to first navigate that within myself.
Farya: Yeah, yeah. In my experience with my own clients and everybody that I work with, the fear of visibility is not usually about the fear of being seen, but it's about the fear of being seen for who we are, or who we believe that we are. So, that's when things can get tricky because, again, and I'm sure you come across individuals that are going, "Okay, well I am visible," most of the people that I work with are entrepreneurs or business owners, or high achievers in general, and on the outside they are very confident, right? And they go, "Okay, but I don't have fear around visibility. I do these presentations, I do this—I'm able to sell my services and all of that and be visible." But that's, I guess, the first and a little bit on a surface layer of visibility and exactly what you're referring to, that visibility is not just about being seen, it's about the fear of being seen for who we think we are, and that's when all the programming and everything comes into play, and then we get ourselves all worked up.
Anna: Yeah, I love the way you described it, and it made me think also like it's usually, like you said, it's not the fear of being seen, it's the fear of being found out. It's the fear of having parts of ourselves revealed that we have not developed love and acceptance for yet. And I'll share just like a little example of this from my own journey. So, when I finished grad school, and I was starting to recover from the chronic migraines, that recovery was just so impactful for me that I decided to make that the focus of my work. And for the first five years of my practice, I was helping people recover or experience a reduction of chronic pain symptoms. And I was still very much in my own healing process, and I was still very much experiencing flare-ups as I was going through it, and I felt that I needed to cover that up. I thought that in order to help other people, I needed to appear as though I was perfectly healed and recovered, which, of course, was actually creating a lot of internal tension and it was feeding into my symptoms and making them worse. And what I discovered along the way is that the work that I had to do was I had to develop love and compassion for myself while I was experiencing pain. I had to shift my mentality to like, can I be perfect and out of pain all the time to can I love and accept myself however I am and however I'm feeling in this moment. And if I can, not only does everything feel easier, but visibility feels safer because I love who I am in this moment. And it also made it safer for the clients that I was working with because now I'm modeling that self-acceptance, modeling that I still love myself even when things feel like a mess today.
Farya: Oh, absolutely, and also like pain is such an intelligent messenger. Yeah, when we go through some of the seemingly unexplained pain, I think that's when we need to really focus and really look at what else is happening in our lives. Now, you know, with your process, and I completely went through all different versions of that myself, as I think most people do, what do you believe your pain was protecting you from before you were ready to actually fully see it or listen to it?
Anna: Yeah, and those are the exact words I actually use in my journaling, which is no longer these days about physical pain, but it's about whatever emotional pain or fear is coming up for me now. But I would ask the pain, like, "Dear pain, what are you protecting me from?" And what I nearly always find is that tension, or pain, or fear, or worry, or smirking, or masking, it's trying to protect me from rejection. It's trying to protect me from being disliked, or misunderstood, or cast out of the group, or being in disconnection from other human beings. And the irony of it is, it's trying to protect me by keeping me separate from other people, from not revealing myself to other people, which prevents me from connecting with other people.
Farya: And by keeping you also small, right? I think I might have mentioned it in one of the podcast episodes, either in this one or when I was a guest, that when I was training—oh, this is many years ago—to be a psychologist, I remember being in the—in a class, and I never volunteered to have any kind of comment or anything. But it wasn't because I was shy or at least not how I understood it. To me, I just felt like anything I had to say was already obvious, everybody knew it, so it wasn't anything profound, right? So I always held stuff back because I was like, "Well, everybody knows this, like it's obvious, why would I want to say this?" And then as it turned out, every time I would talk about something, people would receive it and it would, you know, move something and then, obviously later in my work as well. So it got me thinking that, okay, this must be a very universal experience, because we all grew up in environments where there are other kids, go to school and there's always a know-it-all child at school or in your family, and I was thinking, this is not even considered trauma by any—but it's something that repetitively, when it happened, it meant that I had to constantly minimize and make myself small. Over and over and over again, because then I didn't want to experience that shame, especially in front of other kids, if there were other kids involved, that was like the end of me, I would be so embarrassed. And then I completely forgot about, because this is—this doesn't even sound like a traumatic experience as such, right? This is just kids growing up together and playing, and they were not being horrible or anything, it was just that they genuinely thought, and now looking back, of course, it would have appeared stupid to them. So, I carried that, and sometimes, believe it or not, I have to check in with myself even today, when I'm about to do a training, or speak to an audience, I have to check, and then over time, I get evidence against it, which helped me a great deal, it stayed with me all the way to my adult life and to when I started university, and it was only when I would whisper my insight or whatever to—to the person next to me and they would be so impressed that I felt a little bit safer, a little bit more brave to start voicing my opinions. But you see, it's like some—the smallest thing, something that found its way in our psyche, in our programming, and it just stayed there, and we never visited until we had to expose ourselves in a way.
Anna: I relate to that so, so much. I mean, I have a story that is so, so similar to that. And like you, it wasn't, I think it came out in a session with my own coach a couple of years ago, like, "Oh my goodness, this story is right there under the surface." And like you, it wasn't because it was a big trauma, but it's more just like an experiences get coded in the nervous system and they influence our reflexes. So I think about it like, when I was a young kid, I got stung by a bee, and it was not a horrible, traumatic experience, but it was unpleasant, and my body didn't want to experience it again, so thereafter, whenever a bee would fly by me, I wasn't even thinking about that experience, it's just more of a reflex, my body would flinch and move away. And I think it's the same process with these like visibility wound experiences. For me, the one that comes to mind that feels so similar, when I was in second grade, I loved raising my hand in class, in school, like, "Like, I know the answer, and it called on me." Like you said, I felt exuberant, enthusiastic, like I'm contributing something, I'm expressing myself, and that feels good and open. And then one day, my teacher, who I really admired, probably was in a bad mood that day, and she turned to me and she said, "Anna, nobody likes a know-it-all." Oh, so humiliated. Like, "This desire to express myself is bad, and I'm a bad person." It's just—so it wasn't a story that I thought about very often, but it was there under the surface doing these like reflex recoiling from participating.
Farya: Now you're hearing that, and you're able to identify with it on some level, I want to tell you that that's not ambition. That's a system that learned early on that movement equals safety, alertness equals belonging. I'm just giving these as examples, right? Staying ahead equals survival. So when life slows down, when the pressure lifts, when nobody is demanding anything from you, your body doesn't register that as peace. It registers it as loss of orientation. So, instead of dreaming, the system waits. Instead of imagining, it starts to scan. Instead of moving forward, it just hovers. And this is not because something is not working or anything is broken, but this is mainly because for the first time, movement is not being pulled out of you by necessity. And this is the line most people have never heard: This is not emptiness, this is unused capacity. Oh, I love that. Unused capacity.
So here is another moment that lands for a lot of people: Someone is forced with a decision that on paper is simple—say yes or no, take the opportunity or don't, say yes to this job or no, launch this product or don't, commit or pause. There's no obvious downside either way, and yet the decision feels just extremely heavy. You may think about it as you get on with your day, in your shower, in walks, you may think about it as you go through the day, as you're cooking, in the shower, on walks, late at night, and people tell themselves, "Just decide." But nothing moves. And it has nothing to do with the choice being bad or good, it has everything to do with the fact that nothing is forcing their hand. It's an option, it's a choice. And if you think about it, earlier in life, decisions were always made under pressure. And as I mentioned, that is definitely true for me, and I know it's true for many, many people—maybe it's financial urgency, maybe it's emotional necessity, or maybe it's attending to somebody else's needs. Now that the pressure is gone, and without it, the person realizes that something is unsettling, it feels unsettling. They don't actually know how to choose from desire alone. So this is where we are not choosing from pressure, we're not choosing from urgency, we want to be choosing from desire. And this is again another unfamiliar thing, right? Because you've never practiced moving without a push. And this is why some people confuse that and they think, "Well, it's—" they confuse maturity with stagnation. And what's really happening is that the old decision-making system has retired, and the new one hasn't been trained yet. So this is where sometimes cultural messaging can quietly harm people. So every January, we hear things like, "Well, if nothing changes, nothing changes. You have to want it badly enough," or "discipline is everything." Now, I don't have anything against these messages, but I want to gently also disagree with all of these messages because for many of you, pressure already did its job. It got you here, right? It helped you build a life, a career, reputation, sense of, maybe, stability. But pressure was never meant to be permanent. What people may not realize is that the pressure eventually stops working. And when it stops working, you might feel like, "Oh my god, I might be failing at something." That's not true. It's just that your system grows tired of being driven by tension. So when you hear motivational messaging or something—especially around this time of the year, people are getting all hyped up and all ready to come up with all their New Year resolution, goals, and everything—and again, I want to stress that I'm all for setting yourself goals and thinking about, reflecting on a year that's gone, and thinking about the year that's ahead. Nothing wrong with that whatsoever, in fact, I encourage that. But I'm talking about the different kind of messaging—the one that pushes you to make drastic changes, like turn your life around. So these are the kind of pressure that I'm talking about, that they will not be sustainable, they will eventually stop working. And when you hear these kind of messages, this kind of motivational messages, New Year goal-setting messages, something in you may not respond anymore. And I want you to know that it's not about laziness or even discernment, it's just that you're no longer willing to exchange your nervous system for progress. And this, my friend, is evolution. Again, many people don't recognize this, I had a client a couple of weeks ago that left me a message frantically saying, "Farya, you know, like nothing is urgent, don't worry, I just want to tell you that I'm kind of feeling oddly—" she explained it as lazy and not motivated, but when we looked at it together, what came up was, "Actually, you're doing everything right, you're just not willing to compromise your nervous system for progress." That doesn't mean progress is not being made because rest assured, we are all about progress and growth. And every work that I do is around growth because I do believe that we are on this Earth, we are living this gift that's a life, because we are supposed to be growing every single day. But the growth doesn't have to cost us our nervous system.
And I want to also tell you about this other thing that I see, again, around this time of the year when we are finally taking some time off, maybe for a holiday, maybe we have a lighter schedule around this time of the year, or maybe we have a few days with nothing planned. There is this funny meme going around on Instagram about how people look confused between Christmas and New Year, those couple of days when nothing is planned, you don't even know what day of the week it is. The other day, I woke up and I was like, "Is it Friday today?" It was Tuesday. And then, and then I was thinking, "Oh my god, when you're in between these two breaks, it can feel very unsettling because you don't know whether you're going or coming or what's happening." So this is the kind of moment I'm talking about, because I know that when this happens, you might have been craving it, looking forward to it, but yet, two days in, you might start having this agitation, maybe boredom, irritation, maybe this—it's restlessness. Or it's a feeling that comes up for a lot of people. You might start reorganizing things, you might check your emails, you might start planning what's next. And also it has nothing to do with you not enjoying rest, because many people like to rest, but because rest also removes the reason why you usually feel legitimate. Now I know it might sound a little bit heavy what I'm saying, but stay with me. For years, worth, your worth, our worth, was tied to output, to being reliable, to being on. So when nothing is demanded, the system doesn't feel free, it feels exposed. And obviously the new year, to me, it carries the same energy—a wide-open stretch of time with no immediate justification for who you are. That's not a motivation issue, this is a identity gap. So here's the reframe I want you to take with you, and I really want you to sit with this for a moment. I want you to know you're not unmotivated, you're just unwilling to be motivated by pressure. And that's not the end of growth, that's actually the doorway to a different kind of growth. This year doesn't ask, "How hard can you push?" It asks, "What happens when you move without fear driving the engine?" Or at least I hope that that's what this year is going to ask you, and that's what you should be asking yourself. Or that's what I hope that you'll be asking yourself. Most people have never tried, and of course it's going to feel unfamiliar, but unfamiliar doesn't mean wrong. It means you are between engines. So, if there's one thing that I want you to take away from today's episode, which is appropriate and it's being recorded for the purpose of New Year and all the New Year resolution and everything else, but I feel like this is applicable to any time that we come across a break or we feel like we want to expand but we don't feel that pressure, so it could be applicable to all of that. And I want you to just take this understanding that just because something is not feeling like how it always did, it doesn't mean that it's a negative thing. It just means that you're not where you were before, but you may not also be where you want to be, yet. And it's uncomfortable, I know, but it is also what is required when we go from one stage to another.
Now, I promised you a tool at the beginning of the episode, and this is it: So for the next few weeks, I'm inviting you not to ask yourself, "What should I do this year?" because you will be thinking about that, things will come up, and you go through life and you go through your business and work and your family life and everything, and things will pop up, so you will know what you should do. So that's not the question I want you to ask yourself. I want you to ask this instead, and notice the answer in your body, not in your head. And the question is: What inside of me tightens when I think about making this year count? So when you think about, "I need to make this year count," what part of your body, what part of your inside feels tighter or feels tense?. And then, what also softens when you imagine moving without pressure? So I want you to ask these two questions of yourself. That's it. There's no fixing, no forcing, because the tightening shows you where the pressure is still running the show. And the softening shows you where movement might come from next. And it's not about choosing immediately, it's all about let a different internal signal come online. And that signal is always quieter, but it's far, far more reliable. So I would invite you to focus a little bit more at your internal messaging by asking yourself these questions and watching and seeing how your body responds to that.
So, if you're listening to this and thinking, "I don't want another year of forcing or pressure," or "another year of setting goals and not necessarily meeting them, but at the same time, I don't want to give up either," then you're exactly where you need to be. You're exactly where you're supposed to be. Nothing important has closed, you haven't missed your moment. The year is still wide open, not just for the old way, but for the new way, for the way that is going to be more comfortable for you, is going to be more aligned with who you are and what your mission is in life. Now, if this episode resonated, I'd love for you to do two things. First, share it with someone who looks like they have it together but feel oddly un-pressured this year, if you know anyone. I know a lot of people—actually, a lot of people think that feeling un-pressured is a discomfort and a pressure in itself. So That gets also confused. And then the second thing I want you to do is stay close, because this year, my work is all about helping people move forward without pressure, but without also shrinking their lives, either. So This is all about expansion and growth without compromising yourself, your nervous system, and your health. And that's where real expansion begins. Pressure made you effective, but it was never meant to be permanent. And you can thrive, you can expand, you can grow, without the old programming, without the trauma response of pressure. Working under pressure and working with urgency is a trauma response. And it served you for the longest time, my dear, but it doesn't have to be that way anymore. It's not serving you anymore, and there is another way where you can thrive by reflecting on and by giving yourself permission to think about how good can my life get. If there was no limitation, no pressure, and no fear, how good would everything get—your life, your business? That's where I meet you here, that's where I want to meet you, that's where my work comes in, and that's what I wish for each and one of you. With that note, I'm going to close this episode by wishing you a new year that's going to be full of expansion, and full of you honoring yourself and honoring your needs, as well as honoring your desires. And I will be rooting for you.
Narrator: Thank you for listening to From Trauma to CEO: The Psychology of Transformational Success with Farya Barlas. Check out the show notes for more information on how to continue this work or explore more of Farya'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.
Series Architecture & Concept Map
Trauma-Led Success vs. Reparative Realignment
Across her podcast series, host Farya Barlas provides an analytical model mapping how childhood strategies designed for baseline survival can manifest as high professional velocity.
TRAUMA-LED SUCCESS REPARATIVE SUCCESS ┌───────────────────────────────┐ ┌───────────────────────────────┐ │ • Driven by survival impulses │ │ • Driven by genuine desire │ │ • Identity is tied to output │ ───► │ • Identity detached from work │ │ • Functions as a regulator │ │ • Built for sustainable joy │ └───────────────────────────────┘ └───────────────────────────────┘
The core components of this operational framework are defined below:
The Concept of Continuity Over Control: High achievers who over-prepare, micromanage, or struggle to delegate are frequently labeled as "control freaks". However, Barlas notes that these systems are actually driven by an intense craving for operational continuity. The nervous system equates hyper-alertness, pacing, and over-delivering with safety because those tools kept early environments stable.
The Trap of Functionality: High-performing individuals internalize a dangerous sub-rule: "If I am currently functioning, I don't need help; and because I don't need help, I am not permitted to ask for it.". Competence transforms from a temporary strength into an absolute, structural prerequisite for personal worth.
The Void of Open Space: When an engine built on structural pressure or intergenerational trauma suddenly faces open space (e.g., a quiet schedule, holidays, or a successful launch), it reacts with panic, agitation, or a somatic freeze response. The system misinterprets non-production as a direct threat to its identity.
High-Achiever Somatic Tool
To evaluate if your current motivation is built on clean strategic execution or an unconscious, trauma-led loop, use the following self-checks outlined by Barlas:
1. The Open Space Somatic Test
Imagine taking an extended, complete period of time off—not a weekend or a single day, but a prolonged operational freeze. Pay attention to the very first baseline reaction your body exhibits:
Relief & Physiological Softening: Indicates typical, healthy physical fatigue.
Agitation, Chronic Restlessness, or Urgent Problem-Seeking: Signals that your career is acting as a subconscious containment system.
staged 2. The "Making It Count" Pressure Check
Focus your attention internally and ask your body: "What inside of me tightens when I think about making this year count?" Observe the tight or tense regions of your chest, jaw, or stomach. Then ask: "What shifts or softens when I imagine moving forward without that pressure?" This physical shift reveals exactly where your system is trapped in survival architecture.
If you have another audio file or wish to shift focus into a different segment of the analytical model, tell me what you're working on and we can get started!
Episode Summary
In this deeply transformative episode of From Trauma to CEO, Farya Barlas sits down with counseling psychologist and founder Dr. Nicole Nasr for an honest conversation about identity expansion, self-belief, trauma, and what it truly takes to step into leadership.
Nicole shares her journey from therapist to founder and CEO of Journey, a growing platform supporting therapists, coaches, and wellness practitioners. Together, they unpack the emotional realities behind entrepreneurship, including fear, grief, impostor syndrome, perfectionism, and the challenge of building something meaningful when no one around you has done it before. This episode is a powerful exploration of what happens when women stop negotiating with old identities and finally allow themselves to become who they were always meant to be.
What You’ll Learn
Why self-doubt and lack of internal permission often stop high-achieving women from fully stepping into leadership and expansion.
How trauma and old identity patterns can disconnect people from their purpose, intuition, and vision for their future.
Why sustainable success requires inner alignment, nervous system safety, and deep self-belief rather than constant hustle.
The difference between building from ego versus building from soul-led purpose and genuine alignment.
How healing, spirituality, therapy, and identity work can become the foundation for authentic business growth and long-term fulfillment.
Resources
Free Diagnostic: faryabarlas.com/diagnostic
Method™: faryabarlas.com/services
Book a Call: Book with Farya Barlas
Journey Platform: Journey by Dr. Nicole Nasr
Journey Podcast: Journey Podcast
