PDF Summary:How to Do the Work, by Nicole LePera

Many people engage in self-sabotaging patterns that prevent them from being happy. Despite their efforts to change, they end up reverting to their unwanted behaviors and feel powerless to adopt healthier patterns.

In How to Do the Work, holistic psychologist and bestselling author Nicole LePera argues that you can live a healthier, happier life by taking control of your self-destructive patterns. According to her, such patterns stem from unresolved childhood traumatic experiences. Therefore, the key to overcoming unwanted patterns lies in addressing these traumas.

This guide discusses LePera’s advice for overcoming self-sabotaging patterns. You’ll come away with the tools to:

• Understand the root cause of your self-sabotaging patterns
• Become more conscious of how childhood conditioning impacts your mental and physical health
• Develop positive patterns that improve your well-being
• Feel happier, healthier, and more in control of your life

Additionally, we’ll expand upon each of LePera’s ideas with research, advice, and actionable ideas from psychologists and self-improvement practitioners.

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Jay Shetty (Think Like a Monk) expands on how childhood conditioning prevents you from recognizing and fulfilling your needs. He argues that the degree to which you live in alignment with your values determines how satisfying your life experiences feel to you.

According to Shetty, who you really are and what you need to be happy can be summed up by your values. Your values are core beliefs that you choose to live by—they determine who you want to be and how you treat yourself and others.

However, childhood conditioning influences you to adopt values that conform to other people’s expectations to make them happy. Since other people are nicer to you when you make them happy, you unconsciously conclude that your happiness depends on pleasing them. This leads you to accumulate other people’s values and pursue things that you think will make you happy without considering if these values align with your own. As a result, you’re unable to understand or appreciate the meaning behind what you do, or to gain any real satisfaction once you get the things you’ve been chasing.

Negative Effect #2: You Unintentionally Replicate Dysfunctional Childhood Relationships

LePera argues that because you’re not conscious of your defensive childhood patterns, you automatically seek out and experience relationships that mirror the relationship you had with your parents.

She explains that your reliance on others to feel loved and secure doesn’t end in childhood but, rather, remains with you throughout your adult life. And the way you now encourage others to make you feel loved and secure echoes the way you learned to elicit these feelings from your parents. This inevitably re-creates the same relationship dynamics you experienced as a child.

For example, your mother was overbearing and difficult to live with. To elicit affection, you submitted to her demands and ignored your own needs. Because you learned this pattern as a child, you now automatically submit to other people’s demands in an attempt to win over friends and romantic partners. Your submissive behavior inevitably attracts people who want you to be submissive—thus creating the same relationship dynamics you shared with your mother.

Attachment Theory: You Unconsciously Replicate Child-Parent Interactions

Psychological research validates LePera’s argument that adults tend to replicate the childhood relationships they had with their parents. According to attachment theory, children form a specific “attachment style” largely based on parent-child interactions. The theory asserts that children carry these attachment styles into their adult relationships.

In Attached, Amir Levine and Rachel S. F. Heller note that this theory assumes children who were raised by supportive caregivers tend to develop a “secure” attachment style, while those who were raised by unsupportive caregivers develop “insecure” attachment styles. They describe two insecure styles: “anxious attachment,” defined by a constant need for reassurance from your partner; and “avoidant attachment,” defined by a desire to keep your partner at arm’s length.

However, Levine and Heller acknowledge that many factors in addition to the child-parent relationship play into the development of attachment styles. Additionally, they assert that attachment styles are not written in stone: While 70 to 75% of adults remain in the same attachment style category throughout their lives, 25 to 30% of adults shift attachment styles at some point in their lives.

This means that even if you were raised by unsupportive parents, you’re not predestined to become an insecure attacher. Likewise, if you were raised by supportive parents, there’s no guarantee that you’ll become a secure attacher.

Negative Effect #3: You Suffer From Elevated Stress Levels That Damage Your Health

Automatically engaging in defensive childhood patterns risks increasing your stress levels and damaging your health. LePera claims that feeling emotional distress as a child trained your subconscious mind to categorize many safe situations as threatening and misinterpret your environment. As a result, it now perceives threats where there are none and keeps your body in a heightened state of stress that damages your health.

She explains that each time your subconscious mind perceives a threat, it reacts as if you’re in physical danger and allocates resources to help return you to safety—by releasing stress hormones that provide a burst of energy and prepare your body to fight, take flight, or freeze. Reacting to real physical danger burns through these stress hormones and leaves no trace of them in your body. However, since the threats your subconscious mind prepares you for rarely put you in physical danger, these stress hormones don’t get used up—instead, they linger in your body.

(Shortform note: We’ve already established how your subconscious mind relied on your childhood emotions to identify what types of situations pose a threat. Further, research reveals that your subconscious mind makes decisions about how you choose to feel or act before your conscious mind even perceives the need to make a decision. This means that your subconscious mind reacts to threats before you get a chance to consciously assess them. For example, your fear of dogs as a child made your subconscious mind categorize all dogs as threats. Even if you’ve consciously decided that most dogs are safe, you’ll still feel the rush of stress hormones each time you see one.)

The more often your subconscious mind perceives threats, the more these stress hormones accumulate in your system and interfere with your body’s ability to regulate itself and maintain a state of balance. LePera argues that this imbalance contributes to a number of emotional, psychological, and physical symptoms:

• Emotional: Mood swings; feelings of anxiety, rage, or panic
• Psychological: Confused or overwhelming thoughts that make it difficult to think rationally or engage with others
• Physical: Digestion issues, autoimmune disorders, chronic fatigue, muscle tension or aches, insomnia or nightmares, and migraines

How Stress Hormones Damage Your Mental and Physical Health

Research validates LePera’s claim that chronic stress creates an accumulation of stress hormones that contribute to numerous mental and physical symptoms. Chronic stress affects your:

• Hormones: Leads to increased heart rate and high blood pressure

• Immune system: Makes you more vulnerable to illnesses and infections

• Sleep: Prevents your mind from relaxing

• Brain: Increases cognitive decline

• Digestion: Damages your gut (indigestion, vomiting, constipation)

Additionally, stress compels you to act irrationally: When you feel stress, your amygdala acts as if you’re in danger—it ensures that you respond automatically to threats by inhibiting the thinking part of your brain (the hippocampus). This makes it difficult for you to think objectively about what you’re experiencing—thus leading to irrational responses.

Continuing with the preceding example, while you consciously know that most dogs are safe, you’re unable to access the part of your brain that holds this knowledge. As a result, you give in to your instinctive fear and automatically carry out your “irrational” defensive pattern. This behavior is irrational because you consciously know that there’s nothing to fear.

Use the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) to Calm Your Automatic Stress Response

If you’re concerned about your stress levels, there are steps you can take to alleviate them and improve your health. Many self-help practitioners argue that you can overcome your automatic stress response if you find ways to deal with “threats” before you’re faced with them. EFT—otherwise known as “tapping” is an effective way to calm your response to stressful situations. The process involves:

• Accepting that you feel negative emotions and calming your body’s response to them

• Understanding why certain things feel threatening

• Releasing your fear and negative emotions

• Replacing your unwanted emotions with calm or positive emotions

Part 3: Replace Unwanted Childhood Patterns With Healthier Patterns

Now that you’re aware of how automatically engaging in defensive childhood patterns impacts your ability to feel satisfied with yourself, your relationships, and your overall well-being, let’s work on replacing these patterns with healthier ones.

LePera argues that the most effective way to overcome defensive childhood patterns is to consciously address the childhood experiences that caused you pain. According to her, the reason your defensive patterns hold so much sway over you is that you’re still using them to avoid feeling your childhood pain. And, because you didn’t consciously feel and process these painful emotions, they continue to live within your subconscious mind and influence all your behaviors.

Therefore, she suggests that you revisit the childhood beliefs and experiences that instigated your defensive patterns, acknowledge how they impact your current patterns, and create new beliefs that support healthier patterns.

(Shortform note: Tony Robbins (Awaken the Giant Within) expands on what LePera says here by claiming that the more you attempt to avoid painful emotions, the more likely you are to engage in behaviors that exacerbate your emotional pain. These behaviors include shunning situations that might trigger painful emotions—which means you miss out on experiencing positive emotions that these situations might elicit, and pretending not to feel your emotions—which means painful emotions become increasingly intense and eventually lead to irrational outbursts. Like LePera, he suggests that you can process your painful emotions and relieve your discomfort by acknowledging and accepting where these feelings came from.)

We’ll explore her advice for replacing defensive childhood patterns with healthier patterns in five steps.

Step #1: Establish a Daily Routine to Retrain Your Subconscious Mind

The first step toward creating healthier patterns involves establishing a daily routine to retrain your subconscious mind. According to LePera, committing to a daily ritual to consciously address defensive childhood patterns will improve your overall well-being and help you retrain your subconscious mind to adopt healthier, more positive patterns.

Though changing your beliefs and behaviors will create discomfort (Recall: your subconscious mind subverts attempts to change default patterns by creating mental and physical discomfort), LePera argues that this discomfort is a necessary part of overcoming defensive childhood patterns.

She claims that taking small steps each day to consciously address your beliefs and behaviors will provide two benefits:

1. Small daily changes will add up and eventually lessen your subconscious mind’s resistance to change.

(Shortform note: Rober Maurer (The Kaizen Way) confirms that small daily changes are more likely to bypass your subconscious mind’s resistance to change. Each time you introduce a new change, you’ll demonstrate to your subconscious mind that you are safe, and you’ll eventually train it to expect and adapt to these changes.)

2. Practicing daily conscious awareness will help you break free from the tendency to act on autopilot—thus, making it easier for you to choose your behaviors.

(Shortform note: Neuroscientists confirm that, while you can’t delete default patterns from your mind, practicing conscious awareness will help you weaken these patterns so that your brain no longer relies on them. The more you weaken these patterns, the easier you’ll find it to override them with new automatic patterns that align with your chosen behaviors.)

Additionally, incorporating a self-care ritual into your daily routine will help you tolerate any discomfort. LePera suggests methods such as:

1. Practicing mindfulness
2. Using positive visualizations and affirmations
3. Improving your diet
4. Exercising regularly
5. Sleeping well

Each Positive Change Sets Into Motion a Series of Subsequent Positive Changes

Scientific evidence confirms that each of LePera’s five methods offers a number of benefits that improve your mental and physical health:

• Practicing mindfulness: Mental health practitioners confirm that practicing mindfulness increases self-awareness, encourages positive thoughts about yourself, your circumstances, and others, and improves your mental well-being.

• Using positive visualizations and affirmations: Studies reveal that imagining a positive event impacts your brain in the same way that experiencing a positive event does—it creates pleasurable feelings that enhance your mood. Likewise, affirmations stimulate reward circuits in your brain that help you maintain a positive state of mind.

• Improving your diet: Research indicates that in addition to improving your physical health, eating nutrient-dense foods regulates serotonin levels in your body. This in turn improves your mood, enhances your cognitive abilities, and increases your energy levels.

• Exercising regularly: Neurobiology research shows that in addition to improving your physical health, regular exercise releases the neurochemicals GABA, serotonin, BDNF, and endocannabinoids. These chemicals help maintain a positive state of mind by stimulating cognition, regulating emotions, and enhancing self-esteem.

• Sleeping well: Regular sleep promotes healthy brain chemistry by flushing out toxins that impair the flow of information between neurons. While you’re awake, your brain and body burn sources of energy such as oxygen and glucose. This process creates metabolic waste that accumulates in your system and leads to feelings of fatigue, stress, and irritability. Sleep allows your body to flush this waste out of your system and restore your energy sources—thus improving both your mental and physical health.

Step #2: Define the Patterns You Want to Change

Once you’ve established a daily routine to retrain your subconscious mind, define the self-sabotaging patterns you want to change. To achieve this, you need to reflect on the unwanted circumstances in your life and identify how they make you think, feel, and behave.

LePera suggests that you reflect on the unwanted situations in your life. Then, write down what types of thoughts and emotions these situations trigger and how they influence your behavior. For example, each time your partner neglects you, you think about how worthless you are and feel pain. You attempt to suppress this pain by binge-watching TV. Thus, you identify two self-sabotaging patterns:

1. Thinking negatively—because it makes you feel more worthless and intensifies your pain.
2. Binge-watching TV—because it prevents you from taking action to change the way you feel.

(Shortform note: James Clear (Atomic Habits) suggests a complementary exercise to help you complete LePera’s exercise: Track your actions and emotions. This will take you beyond simple reflection to develop real-time awareness of your unconscious behaviors and their effect on you. As a result, you’ll find it easier to recognize all the ways self-sabotaging patterns show up in your life.)

Advice on Defining Your Self-Sabotaging Patterns

Psychologists expand on this step with practical advice for identifying your self-sabotaging patterns. They suggest that you should reflect on times when you:

• Blame others for your feelings or circumstances: You don’t explore how you’ve contributed to your issues. As a result, you don’t take responsibility for or learn from your experiences.

• Abandon your goals: Instead of making an effort to fulfill your needs, you allow setbacks and difficulties to convince you to walk away from what you want.

• Procrastinate: You lack the motivation to do what you need to do, are easily distracted, and suffer from self-doubt or feelings of overwhelm.

• Antagonize others: You undermine your relationships by provoking arguments, acting inconsiderately, or using passive-aggressive techniques.

If acknowledging your self-sabotaging patterns inspires self-critical thoughts, remember that the goal of reflecting on unwanted circumstances isn’t to judge or berate yourself for engaging in unwanted patterns, but to increase your awareness of what’s holding you back from the life you want. To overcome any self-critical thoughts, focus on self-compassion during this step. For example, acknowledge that you’ve been doing the best that you can, or consciously forgive yourself for any mistakes that you’ve made. By shifting your focus from criticism to kindness, you’ll be better able to understand your self-sabotaging patterns without falling into the trap of self-defeating thoughts.

Step #3: Reflect on Painful Moments From Your Childhood

Now that you’ve identified the self-sabotaging patterns you want to change, reflect on painful moments from your childhood. This will help determine the origin of the thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that underlie your self-sabotaging patterns.

LePera argues that parents trigger childhood pain by practicing at least one of six different behaviors. Therefore, you can identify the experiences that lie at the root of your self-sabotaging patterns by reflecting on how you felt and reacted if they engaged in any of the following behaviors:

1. Invalidated your feelings: For example, you told them your worries about something and they told you to get over it. This made you feel as if your feelings didn’t matter. As a result, you began dismissing your feelings and stopped expressing them to others.
2. Ignored you and made you work for their attention: For example, your mother was too focused on her to-do list to acknowledge your presence. You felt unwanted, and you forced her to give you attention by behaving in ways that provoked her anger.
3. Pushed you into being who they wanted you to be: For example, your parents frequently berated you for not being as good a student as your sibling. You felt like they didn’t care about your interests and you resented having to try so hard to please them.
4. Violated your personal space or privacy: For example, your father listened in on your conversations with friends. You resented him for invading your privacy, felt stifled, and found it difficult to trust others.
5. Fixated on how you appeared to others: For example, your parents criticized you for being overweight and restricted your diet. You felt ashamed of your appearance, resented your parents for not loving you as you were, and sought comfort in binge-eating.
6. Failed to express their emotions in a healthy way: For example, your mother flew into a violent rage each time you disappointed her. After each outburst, she would refuse to talk to you for a few days. You felt unsafe, unloved, and didn’t know what you could do to appease her. You withdrew into yourself and avoided any unnecessary interactions with her.

Three Negative Parenting Styles Trigger Childhood Pain

How exactly do these behaviors create emotional pain that carries through into adulthood?

Psychologists explain that psychological trauma results from situations that threaten your sense of emotional or physical safety. They argue that your subjective emotional experience of a situation determined whether you found it traumatic—the more powerless you felt, the more likely you were to feel traumatized by it. And, since you already felt powerless—because you were entirely dependent on your parents for emotional and physical security—even seemingly-innocent behaviors threatened your sense of safety.

Further, psychologists claim that there are three negative parenting styles that trigger childhood pain: authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful. While they don’t identify LePera’s list of six parental behaviors as the sole cause of childhood pain, they do acknowledge these behaviors within their descriptions of negative parenting styles. Therefore, you might find it easier to identify relevant childhood experiences if you consider these three parenting styles in addition to LePera’s list of parental behaviors.

• Authoritarian parents enforce strict rules, are emotionally unavailable or insensitive, engage in one-way communication, and demand unrealistic expectations. For example, if your parents invalidated your feelings or fixated on how you appeared to others.

• Permissive parents offer minimal guidance, avoid conflict by appeasing demands, and are inconsistent with rules and expectations. For example, if your parents' behaviors fluctuated—sometimes they pushed you into being who they wanted you to be, and other times they expected you to make your own decisions.

• Neglectful parents are emotionally unavailable, don’t provide emotional support or guidance, and take minimal responsibility for their children’s welfare. For example, if your parents ignored you and made you work for their attention.

Step #4: Categorize Your Defensive Behaviors and Pinpoint Your Beliefs

Once you’re aware of the experiences that triggered your pain, categorize the defensive behaviors you developed. This will help you pinpoint the specific beliefs that prevent you from changing your patterns.

LePera claims that defensive childhood patterns fall into one of seven categories. She suggests that you can discover the root cause of your self-sabotaging patterns by first identifying which category your behaviors fall into and then figuring out the belief that fuels these behaviors.

1. Neglecting your own needs in favor of pleasing others: Your belief might be: “To feel safe and loved, I must please others.”
2. Achieving success to earn approval and affection: Your belief might be: “To feel safe and loved, I must overachieve.”
3. Avoiding attention from others to prevent criticism: Your belief might be: “To feel safe and loved, I must remain invisible to avoid failure or rejection.”
4. Solving other people’s problems instead of facing your own: Your belief might be: “To feel safe and loved, I must help and protect others.”
5. Appearing happy and never revealing your pain or weakness to others: Your belief might be: “To feel safe and loved, I mustn’t reveal my vulnerable side.”
6. Acting “good” and engaging in self-sacrificing behaviors to prove your value: Your belief might be: “To feel safe and loved, I must appear faultless.”
7. Submitting to others’ opinions instead of trusting your own instincts: Your belief might be: “To feel safe and loved, I must follow others.”

Other Approaches to Identify Defensive Beliefs and Patterns

As yet, there’s no consensus on what defensive patterns children develop in response to painful experiences. We’ll therefore explore two approaches that other psychologists use to categorize defensive patterns. Reviewing this information in addition to LePera’s category list might make it easier to pinpoint your own defensive patterns.

According to Jungian psychologists, all defensive patterns fall into one of five archetypes of childhood trauma:

• The necessary hero: This refers to children who assumed an adult’s role and took over responsibilities beyond their age. A belief here might be: “To feel safe and loved, I must strive to be the savior for everyone except myself.”

• The jester: This refers to children who acted immaturely or used humor to camouflage their emotional wounds. A belief here might be: “To feel safe and loved, I must mask my true feelings.”

• The substitute: This refers to children who adopted a protective role in an attempt to create the security that their parents failed to provide. A belief here might be: To feel safe and loved, I must take responsibility for other people’s failures.”

• The wild child: This refers to children that resorted to impulsive or provocative behaviors to get the attention they craved. A belief here might be: “To feel safe and loved, I must make others see me.”

• The aimless wanderer: This refers to children who withdrew into themselves and attempted to become invisible. A belief here might be: “To feel safe and loved, I must isolate myself.”

Meanwhile, transformational psychologists argue that specific childhood experiences triggered corresponding defensive patterns. They categorize painful childhood experiences and the patterns they create into four broad themes:

Harming: Your parents attacked, judged, shamed, or violated you. These parental behaviors made you fear other people’s anger and influenced you to believe that you’re inadequate and have reasons to feel ashamed of yourself.

Manipulating: Your parents dominated, exploited, or betrayed you. These parental behaviors influenced you to act submissively, made it difficult for you to trust others, and compelled you to remain focused on your flaws.

Rejecting: Your parents neglected, abandoned, or ignored you. These parental behaviors made you feel unwanted and unloved, and they convinced you that other people would always reject you.

Undermining: Your parents degraded you and withheld affection. These parental behaviors made you believe that you were fundamentally flawed and unlovable.

Step #5: Create New Beliefs

Now that you’re aware of the specific beliefs that fuel your unwanted patterns, create new beliefs to support the patterns you want to adopt. Since behaviors are a natural extension of beliefs, it follows that new beliefs will inevitably lead to new behaviors (Recall: Your behaviors always reflect your beliefs about yourself). Therefore, LePera argues that acknowledging and changing your beliefs will train your subconscious mind to practice healthier behaviors.

She suggests that you follow a three-step process to create your new beliefs:

1. Choose a belief you identified in Step #4 that’s holding you back from the life you want to live. For example, “To feel safe and loved, I must appear perfect at all times.”
2. Write down what you want to believe. For example, your new belief might be. “I am lovable even when I make mistakes.”
3. Turn your new belief into a mantra and repeat it multiple times a day.

(Shortform note: In addition to improving your beliefs, mantras also help you think more positively. A recent study into the effect of mantras confirms that repeating a single word or short phrase quiets your internal critic. Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the brain blood flow patterns of people who silently repeated a mantra. The imaging showed a reduction of activity across the brain, primarily in the area of the brain that gives rise to internal thoughts—this is the area that generates self-critical and negative thoughts.)

How to Change Your Beliefs

According to LePera, adopting new beliefs will naturally lead to more positive behaviors.

Similarly, lots of self-help authors claim that you just need to improve your thoughts to improve your life.

For example, Louise Hay (You Can Heal Your Life) argues that you just need to “affirm” what you want to make it come true: Change the statement “I must be perfect” to “I’m perfect as I am” and repeat this multiple times a day. Eventually, you’ll come to believe this thought and your behavior will align with your new beliefs.

However, Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics) argues that affirmations are not enough to change your default patterns—he believes that your mind will automatically reject thoughts that don’t align with your established beliefs.

He claims that the only way to change your beliefs is to regularly use your imagination to visualize and feel yourself behaving the way you want—this is because your nervous system operates according to how you feel, not how you think. According to Maltz, this practice will train your mind to become more comfortable with the feeling of who you want to be, and it’s the only way to overcome old and unproductive beliefs. Therefore, as you repeat your mantra, imagine yourself as someone who already practices your chosen pattern, and attempt to feel what it’s like to live the life you want.