The HARSH TRUTH About Fame, Money & Success NOBODY SHARES... | Steven Bartlett

And people hate that. The concept that the people that they've attracted into their life, the results they've attracted into their life, are a mirror of who they are. And I said to him, I think.

You gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really? Yeah. Please welcome Lewis Howes. In the last five, because you're about to be 30 later this year, is that right? Yeah. Still 29. In August, you'll be 30 in a handful of months. What would you say was the greatest lesson you learned from 25 until 30?

What matters in life? So at 25 I attained pretty serious wealth and at 25, well, at 25 I got an offer for serious wealth. A big company came to me and said, we want to buy your business. And that day I literally went home, I did the math on how much money would go into my pocket if I sold my company. And at this time we had about 400 employees and we were a big marketing firm all around the world doing the marketing for Uber, Amazon, Logitech, Apple. you know, across different markets. This is how much money would go into my pocket. 18 year old Steve, who was super insecure and thought money and material possessions would fulfill any concern or void he had in his life, showed up on that day. 18 year old Steve was sat there. This is it. Yeah, this is it.

This is the moment.

So I went on Rightmove that night, which is the website in the UK where you can buy houses, and I went on Auto Trader, two tabs open. I looked at what I could now buy.

Oh, it's the worst thing to do.

Before you get the money in the bank. Yeah, and I was sat there and I remember exactly which room in my house I remember what I was wearing, what I know was pitch black outside. And as I sat there on the floor for some reason looking into the screen, I was looking at a future life of emptiness. I could see it and it was this weird paradox of and this contradiction of knowing that if I bought these things, I would be poorer but not financially. Because then what I'm saying about my life is that these things are important, which means that the next thing needs to be a slightly better improvement. And the stoic people talk about that hedonistic treadmill you you find yourself in when nothing satisfies you. And realizing that, that I would be trading something of meaning, my company. People think, you know, companies are these like ugly corporations that spit off cash. But for me, what I realized in that moment is my company was actually my friendships, it was actually purpose, it was actually meaning. So I was trading friendships, purpose, meaning and community and connection, however you want to dice it. A Lamborghini, which would be uncomfortable to drive, that I didn't need anyway, 'cause I lived two minutes from the office.

Right.

And a mansion, an arrow way that would take me an hour away from my friends. I was trading connection for a lack of connection. And I spent, and I didn't know why I didn't want to press buy. And I spent the next six months of my life at 25 years old, honestly confused. Why am I doing this then? And that's ultimately where I realized that my business wasn't about Marketing. It was giving me community purpose, meaning all of those things. And that's a hard trade to make.

Did you buy that mansion?

It's funny. I bought a nice mansion just before that day and I tried it. And that's part of the reason I knew it wasn't it. So I'd been in, I had this seven bedroom mansion in the countryside with a tennis court at the bottom garden. It had downstairs It was about, I don't know, 100 square meters down on the bottom floor alone and it had a pool table, a full cinema, not like a cinema room, a full cinema in there. Full table tennis table. Had another house at the bottom of the garden that I never walked into. I never even opened the door and I was 23 at the time. Big 100 meter driveway that went wrapped down round in the countryside on the top of a hill. And I had a taste of the fact that that actually just removed me from my friends.

You were there for a couple of weeks and you're like, I wanna go back.

I wanna go back into the city. Yeah. I begged that owner to release me and he eventually agreed and I moved into a one-bedroom studio two minutes from my office. And then, but yeah, on that day at 25, it was one of the real catalyst moments of my life. And the other catalyst moment happened about six months later when I met a guy who was tremendously successful, who I'd followed in my city for the longest time, who had everything I'd ever wanted. He had the Lamborghini Aventador. I went to his house, I went upstairs in one of his rooms and he had a Louis Vuitton room, which is one of the spare, he had one room where he had every single trainer in every color, color coordinated, wrapped around the wall that I'd ever wanted. And he was so clearly the most miserable person I'd ever met. So, so clearly. And it's like looking at the guy you're striving to be in the face and getting to walk through his house and seeing that he's the only one there, no one else there, not a girlfriend, not a friend, only the security guards who were paid to be there. And he ultimately that night asked me to sleep in bed with him.

Wow.

He said, would you mind, this is a man that's almost, you know, 40. You wouldn't mind sharing a bed with me tonight?

No way.

I didn't flinch. I said, yeah, of course. But I knew what it meant. And that was me. I was looking at my future if I didn't change course and assess my priorities. So when you ask the question between 25 and 30, those were the two sort of catalyst events that made me think, oh, God, I've got it all wrong. And then the pandemic was a real affirm if I needed it, but by then I didn't think I needed it.

Wow. What do you think will be the biggest lesson from 30 to 35 that you'll learn and realize you wish you would have learned or maybe this is a big transformational step for you moving forward?

I think 30 to 35 will be about authentic true alignment and balance in my life. So I'm now in a relationship, which is a very surprising thing if you know my backstory.

Why is that surprising?

Well, because growing up, I'd see my parents screaming at each other every day for, like, seven hours, eight hours. My mom screaming at my dad, sitting there passively, and he just took it. So my dad would just be watching the TV, and in the left side of his peripheral, my mom would be screaming from two meters away in his face. And I used to watch that as a kid.

And.

And I used to say to dad, don't take it. Dad, do something about. Don't. Don't let her scream at you. And it wouldn't stop anything. And then. And then I think at seven years old he called me in and said, by the way, just so you know, me and my mum don't love each other. I don't love your mother and we're gonna get a divorce. They didn't. At 10 they called me in and said, I'm gonna get a divorce, by the way, we don't love each other. I've watched her chase him around the house with a knife and smashing him trying to defend himself with the doors. So the model I learned about love was that love was prison. And I didn't know I'd learned that lesson. And the fascinating things happened to me throughout my life and this kind of speaks to really understanding what your self-story is. At 14 years old, I pursued a girl religiously called Jasmine. I was obsessed with her. And then one day I won. She turned to me, Steve, after school, I remember where we were after school and she said, Fine, I'll be in a relationship with you. Let's do it. And I went, no, no, no, this is about, no, don't, don't, Jasmine, don't, don't. And I would, do not, I did everything in my power to dissuade her from that.

Never understood why I always did that.

At 23-24.

So, you wanted to be in a relationship with her, you chased her for weeks or months or years. For years. And then she said, okay, let's do it. Yeah. And then you sabotaged it.

You sabotaged.

Why?

Because in that moment, something inside me put myself in my dad's shoes, which was, you are in prison, you are a bird trapped in a cage, you have to run. And it was actually journaling, it was doing my podcast, it was that real, honest introspection at maybe 25 years old where I look at myself and go, why have you never had a girlfriend and always self-sabotaged? Where has that come from? And one good question is that feeling you had that day when you were 14 when Jasmine finally turned to you and said she loved you too and she wanted to give it a shot. That feeling in your stomach, where was the other time you felt that? Well, it was staring at your father watching him being screamed at by your mother. And then I had kind of managed to put together the dots. that my model of love, the one I learned first, was that as a man, love and a relationship is a prison sentence. It will inhibit your freedom. That's the story I believed. It was central to everything I did, thought, and how I formed my relationships. Equally, it didn't just impact romantic relationships, it was relationships.

So if someone said- Friends, business partners.

Someone said the word best friend to me. Oh, Steve's my best friend. Cringe. I would go, oh, that's so awkward. I'd feel something, my body almost like convulsed, like, oh. And they'd never know it, but I think, please don't. I had an intimacy problem.

Wow.

Because I thought intimacy was a jail sentence.

When did you learn that it wasn't a jail sentence?

Just like many months of work with my diary. What year?

How old?

24, 25. I never had a relationship until 24, 25. Really? Never, never.

Did you have one then? At 25?

No, my first relationship was when I was 26. But it was just trying to understand why, like what is it, what is it like, what is the belief that's at the core of my behaviour? And there's always a belief at the core of the behaviour. We are basically creatures living out the stories we told ourselves about ourselves and the world a long time ago. And having studied childhood psychology, fortunately, it's one of the things that I'm so happy I studied. I understand how formative that early 0 to 10 in your life is. I understand how I've seen the studies with the resource monkeys that they've done where one small thing, a lack of affection, one small defining incident or traumatic event on the playground can shape your self-story so much more than any preceding evidence does. So even though if at 15, 16, 17, 18 there's evidence in your life presented to show that that thing that happened wasn't true, that story you told yourself is invalid. It won't, it's not a stronger force than that zero to 10 period. That's where we learn how to survive. And some of the survival lessons are great. Put water in your mouth, put food in your body. But some of them, unless you unlearn them, will end up being the bane of your adulthood and the bane of your life. So this is what, you know, people think of self-development as this process of learning stuff. But there's two necessary things. Unlearn and learn at the same time if you can. And central to being able to do either, is being able to read yourself.

Yes.

As I always say, there's no self development without self awareness and you can read as many books as you like but if you can't read yourself, you'll.

Never learn a thing.

And I learned that the hard way.

So when you were 26 and in this first kind of, sounds like maybe relationship, kind of relationship, wasn't full relationship, I'm not sure. Yeah, yeah.

It was a relationship. How long was the relationship?

It lasted for one year before I sabotaged it.

Pretty much. Well, I just didn't, I was so.

Mature because of my first one, so I destroyed it.

Yeah.

So what was the thing you unlearned in that first year first year of that relationship, three years ago, by the way.

Yeah, do you know, sometimes it takes the right person, and I think you can relate to this.

Of course.

Sometimes it takes a certain person who goes maybe at a certain tempo, they give you a certain energy which counteracts the trigger. So my trigger was any impingement or anything that felt like it was touching the walls of my freedom. Then I would have a adverse reaction run.

I know that feeling, man.

I, you know, yeah, yeah, you know the feeling, right? One of the things that I really relate, I realized this was because when I dated someone previously, not a relationship, but just dated them, when they'd argued at me in a loud tone, I did what I always wished my dad would do. I get up, I got my stuff, I got in my car, and I drove away. They didn't even know I'd gone. And it was 3 a.m. and it was my house. It was that mansion I told you about.

Wow.

I got in my, she was, she, argued with me and I tried to talk to her. She actually shouted at me again saying the same thing. So repeating him. That was one of my triggers because my mum would do seven hours round and round and round to my dad. I got in the car, she didn't even know I'd gone and I drove off at 3 a.m. And I was, because I will never argue with anyone. Because my dad didn't either. It's never been productive. I've never seen the model of it being really productive to scream at someone, right? We have disagreements but screaming Screaming is.

Not acceptable for me. Like it's something that I experienced in my life as well, we've talked about this, you know, childhood stuff, but also in relationships, I attracted types of personalities that liked to scream and yell. And then I would just kind of sit there and try to like, okay, it's okay, you know, but then it's really hurting yourself at the end of the day when you allow that to happen and not create a boundary. You're abandoning yourself, you're abandoning the little child inside of you that experienced this pain. And so, so you just would leave at that point?

I would leave. And at 26, so the girl I met called Mel, she did not scream. She didn't have that commitment. She had really mature.

She was peaceful, loving.

She allowed me to have my independence. She wasn't threatened if I had to fly away and work. It was me meeting the person that could counteract that self-story I told myself about relationships. She was the opposite of my mother.

To show you it's possible. Yeah. It showed you, hey, you don't have.

To be trapped in a relationship. That's exactly. I've actually never thought about that before, but she is the opposite of my mother.

Wow. In every way. Because usually we kind of attract the, the parent that we need to kind of heal or fix the childhood wound. It's like we attract that person until we learn the lesson. No. Yeah.

I've never actually thought about that, but, yeah, my mother was loud, didn't listen, scream, would. Restrict your freedom. Mel is the opposite. She will talk.

She will.

I remember one day when I, she flew in to New York to see me where I was running the office out there. And the minute she landed, I get an email saying, you've got to fly to San Diego. We're a social chain. We're about to close a deal on this big company out here on this, on this coast. $50 million. Can you get on a plane now? Go to the airport now and fly? Mel had just, we'd not seen each other for a month and a half. She's just landed. She gets to my house. I know I've got to go out the door and I say to her, like, I'm babe, you know, I'm stumbling over my words to her because you.

Think she's going to explode. You've got the trigger, you've got the fear of the past.

Yeah, we've talked about this. This was my test. Whether it's right to test someone or not, but it's the test of whether I can be honest and true and open with you and not get scolded and yelled at and go back to, like, lying or something or being dishonest or having to end our relationship. She lands, she walks in, I say, There's this deal. I'm like, stuttering over my words because I'm like, She's gonna just be angry, like my last thing was. And my last relationship was, and she looks at me and she gives me a kiss on the cheek and she goes, It's okay, babe. It's good. You go do it, babe. You go do it. She goes, Woo, woo, woo. She's like, Woo, woo, woo. Touching my shoulder, she goes, Woo, woo, woo. This is so amazing. And then I literally had the conversation with her.

I was, I'm really surprised by your reaction.

I was expecting, and she goes, Babe, you having to go sometimes keeps spice in our relationship.

There you go.

And then when I came back from San Diego, maybe three days later, the exact same.

Peace, calm. How was it?

Yeah, exactly. And I was expecting the quietness, the- Passive-aggressive, the energy. Then I knew. Then I knew, but I ended up dumping her anyway.

Why?

Because we had our first issue in our relationship and I hadn't learned the lesson that I should be asking, Is this relationship worth it? instead of Is this relationship perfect? And I was asking myself because I've seen Instagram relationships so long, I've never had one and I've seen movies and everything else. I thought any sort of issue within a relationship was fatal and I'll be honest with you what the issue was, we had a problem in bed and I've never encountered that before and I think it's emasculating for a guy when your partner might not have the same interest in sex as you. You do.

Interesting.

And I think I was emasculated by it. I think I didn't understand it. And she probably because I wasn't creating a safe space, she did not want to talk about it.

Right.

And for me that felt at the time like a dead end. Like you've hit, like going through a maze and you hit a cul-de-sac as we call it, like a dead end.

What would a safe space have looked like for you to create?

Just honestly to ask some very thoughtful, unloaded questions and to listen.

You weren't willing to do that or you just didn't have the tools or the awareness. The tools.

I did not have the tools. I didn't know how to communicate. And communication is foundational to everything. It turns out most of the time, as I've seen in my life, whether it's when I dropped out of university, my mum didn't speak to me for three years, whether it's my business partner becoming an alcoholic and only finding out when he was downstairs lying on the floor as a drunk, or whether it's in that situation that we tend to all want the same thing, but we don't have the tools to communicate. So it sounds like we're pulling in different directions. And I think in that situation, again, it was one of the moments in my life where I learned the importance of mature communication and creating a safe space and understanding that what someone self-prescribes as their issue is not necessarily their issue. And sometimes people don't know what their challenge is. So someone might say to you, I don't like sex. And for you that again, it feels really binary. It's like, well, you either like it or you don't. And you're not willing to talk about it. So it's over. But things, as I learned in this case, are often much more deep and complex, and sometimes people can't self-diagnose what's going on with them. But if you create a safe space together, you can go on the journey to understand what that actually means. I wasn't willing to, so broke up with her. Wow.

I'm back with her now. Well, it's the same relationship. It's the same relationship.

It's her, yeah. I didn't know that.

Yeah.

Interesting. I thought she was a new relationship.

I will be, I 100% marry her. She'll 100% be my wife. Because it's, yeah, I mean, I've never.

Met a person like her, but.

Wow, so this is that relationship then.

And you ended it. How long did you end it for? A year. Come on. Yeah, I ended up for a year.

Were you in touch at all? Was a little conversation?

Not really. So the pandemic happened and she had some troubles in her life that she wanted to go and figure out. So she flew to Indonesia, she flew to Bali. And the longer time went on and the more time I had on my own, and I'll be honest with you, the more time I had to try all the wrong things and have them fail me.

Right, you were like, okay.

Yeah, I was like, oh, that was the one.

Oh wow.

That was the one. And I became sure and sure as the days went on that I would never find a love like that. I would never. And I was sure of it. I was utterly convinced I had made a mistake and that I was the problem. And although I didn't know the issue we had in our relationship would be fixed, I went to the airport, got on a flight and I flew 22 hours to Indonesia to more than anything apologize.

Wow.

Because I felt like I threw a good thing away for a bad reason and I hurt. I know I hurt her. and I knew that even though I didn't think she would be interested in me or take me back or anything like that, I knew that if I am to be the mature person I am, my apology, if it's not manipulation, should come without an expectation. Right. You see what I mean? Because when apologies come with an expectation, they are just manipulation. So I thought you just actually have to go there and say what you mean and leave it there and then come back.

Not try to get in a relationship with her, but just do it for the sake of you being a good person.

Exactly.

And owning up to your part of the street.

And then... Because then I could have another relationship with someone else and start the record personally in myself, that I am now the mature person who's willing to communicate and be humble and admit his own deficiencies. So I could then be the person I wanted to be for the next person. And it just ended up being go being a very, probably one of the most interesting moments of my life, how that situation played out. Because I got there, she was being very distant with me. Did she know you were coming? Did you tell her? Yeah, last minute.

So when I was in like the.

Doha airport, I said, oh, brother, I'm gonna be in Bali, so nice to see you. She was very distant with me. She wouldn't come near me. She was like sat quite far away from me when we met with some friends. And then as the days went on and on, she said, look, I don't know what the future holds. I'm gonna, I'm staying here. And And I could see it, so I apologized to her anyway. Then on the second, the next day, by the way, that was an ego blow. That was a moment where my chimp brain showed up and said, take revenge, play a game, try and get her back. But fortunately, by this time in my life, the other part of me that knew I had self-sabotaged myself with my ego for years and that the games had always failed me, manipulating someone has always failed me, abandoning my like character and integrity has always failed me, the chase and then... All of that had always failed me. So in that moment, which is I'm gonna stay here in Bali, super graceful and nice, thankfully. I see all of these things like a balancing act and it's like which force will win? You don't have to be a hundred percent mature, but if you're 60-40 and that's the words that come out your mouth, that's a good place to start. And fortunately, in that moment, my maturity won. The next thing is she sits me down the next day, He goes, I've been sleeping with someone since we broke up.

Zing! And I'm like, that pressure, how are you gonna show up with that pressure?

And again, my chimp shows up, it says, Finish her.

Oh, my god.

It says, Manipulate games, tell her off.

Make her feel like.

Oh, wow. That's my ego. It goes, Go on, Steve. But, fortunately, I, I gave her a kiss on the cheek. I was like, I understand. I understand. We can't, we're in a co-working thing. We carried on doing our work. By the way, at this point, we're not romantic.

Right.

I'm just, babe, it's okay, give me a hug. Thank you for telling me. You didn't have to tell me. And I literally looked her in the eye and I remember saying to her, you'll listen to this. I was like, I know that must have been hard to say to me. So thank you because you've told me.

You didn't have to tell me but.

You'Ve told me because X, Y and Z, we carried on working.

That's great.

Yeah. Next day, this is where...

But you ended it with her.

It's been a year. What's she gonna do? Yeah, exactly. Where's your ego? Yeah, of course. Your ego doesn't care if you ended it, if it was your fault. Your ego gets triggered, especially I think this is quite a masculine thing from what I've read as well. We get triggered in a different psychological way because of various prehistoric reasons which I won't go into. And then the last thing was I realized that she was going to stay here. She wasn't interested in me, so I was going to leave. And I sent her this really wonderful message and a voice note, which I've played before publicly on stage. And I said, I'm leaving Bali on Saturday, but listen, you're on your journey. It's been amazing to see you, etc. Etc. She responds, And she says, she's surprised, but she says, okay, okay, can I see you before you go? My ego shows up. Don't let her see you before you go. That's your last chance of getting a victory.

Oh no.

Do not let her see. Make her feel bad. Play a game.

Oh man.

You've got the power there.

She's giving you... She wants something. Yeah. You take it away from her.

Yeah, to take it away from her. That's one last ego restoring victory. And then reflection. asking myself who I am and who I want to be, what my values actually are and what has succeeded in film in the past, I said, sure, you can see me before I go. And in those three days, everything changed.

What happened?

She made plans for us over those three days. It was like, and I'm not sure if this is a karmic thing or a spiritual thing or whatever it is, but it was like she realized I'd finally learned how to love her. And it was like life had sent me these three tests to check. if I still had that ego, if I was still immature, if I was willing to hold a safe space. And because I passed those three tests, those last three days, everything changed. And we have been wildly in love ever since, to the point where I'm sure she's my wife, I'm sure we're gonna be happy. I could have ruined that on three occasions. There was three challenges like that.

She was testing you.

Whether she was thinking of a test or not. She would never think of it.

Right. She's too pure. She's too authentic. It's the human experience to say, well, I don't fully trust this. Okay, I'm gonna shoot, maybe not thinking, but it's just the body's response probably. It just comes out.

It taught me something about the nature.

Of the human body. She would have known if you would have reacted differently in any of those three, she would have been like, something's not safe here. She would have not trusted you to.

Be able to want to get back in a relationship. But is the world not doing that to all of us in all facets of our life? Of course. Is it not sending us tests, whether it's the barista who you might be rude to that day that turns out to be the daughter of the person that you end up going and trying to pitch business to in three years time, is life not testing us at all times to see what we're ready for and what we deserve? And that's kind of the broader picture lesson I learned was like, Mel never had to change. In fact, nothing externally needed to change for me to get the results I'd always been looking for in my life. I had to change. And then the world sent me things, and this sounds very woo-woo, and I'm the least woo-woo person you'll ever meet, the world sent me a different set of things. It said, because you've changed, we're going to mirror a different set of results. That old Einstein quote about doing the same thing and expecting different results. Yes, you've taught me this as well, because if you have a huge amount of self-responsibility when it comes to your relationships, you say, I did that. I said this to you last time we spoke. When you're talking about your past relationships that have failed, you said, but that's on me. And you say, because I picked them. And I think about that so much because I had my hairdresser come to my place in LA the other day and he walks in, starts cutting my hair, says, My girlfriend, she's not really interested in me. She's been talking to a lot of other guys and she's been going for this guy just because he's got money. And he walked in and when he walked in he had this $2,000 sneakers on, a Louis Vuitton bag dripping in diamonds and gold. And I thought, you,'ve got what you deserve. And people hate that. The concept that the people that they've attracted into their life, the results they've attracted into their life, are a mirror of who they are. I said to him, I said, well, what did she do? Oh, she's a hostess in a nightclub. Okay. And what, like, how did you meet her? Well, I was in, you know, I was at a, at one of the tables in the nightclub, and I was one of the big spenders, so they.

Put on my table.

So you're attracting from that space. Yeah, that's, that's what you've attracted. So if you did some work on you to figure out why you need to wear diamonds all the time, where that comes from, that need for validation or whatever it is, you could Drop the diamonds, you could stop buying the Don Perignon in the nightclub and you might end up in a different environment and attracting someone else for other reasons and values and it was the same with me throughout my entire life Until I did the work on me I attracted all the wrong people Really? Oh god of course Attracted all the wrong people that wanted me for all the wrong things that wanted me for the mansion in the countryside or the.

Range Rover or the car the car.

You have now is pretty sweet yeah, funnily enough I don't actually have a driving license so I have a driver oh wow yeah but I can't drive I lost my license I thought I don't need it anymore anyway so Yeah, and so, yeah, I think about that a lot now because I had to do the work to find the love I was looking for.

You can't blame others. You gotta take responsibility and ownership. And that's why I said with you, it's like for me, maybe there was things that I didn't like about these other relationships I was in, but I was the one choosing those relationships. I was the one staying after, you know, six months, 12 months, two years, when it wasn't working and things weren't shifting, and I continued to repeat the patterns that I was bringing into the relationship. So we all have choices, but When we blame others, it's really easy, but when we take responsibility, it's much harder.

What are you scared about in your relationship that you haven't fully healed from that might end up being fatal to your current relationship? What patterns do you see in yourself when you go, oh, I'm gonna address that before we go down the aisle?

I feel like, I mean, we are so, we talk about these things all the time, and I feel like because I have emotional accountability with my therapist, every two weeks. She has it with her therapist every two weeks or whenever she does it as well to work on these things. Like even last night we were talking about, you know, what's the thing that you think you still need to work on that you haven't talked to? Because we had this incredible vacation in Costa Rica and I was like, and we both had therapy last night different times and I go, I don't know what I'm gonna talk about. Like, everything's great. Like, what do you talk about when everything's great in a relationship? And for me, just like you were saying, there's different levels to my childhood, right? There is the zero to seven ages, which I feel like I've fully addressed and healed. And life has tested me, let's say, with different scenarios that could trigger me and would have triggered me from those things in the past. And let's say I passed the test, right? Most of the time. Or to a high level degree, I passed the test. I think everyone has a breaking point of something, you know, at some point, it's like, okay, let's move on from this, but. Let's just say I passed the test. We're talking about it. And with my therapist, I was like, you know, I haven't really talked about this phase of my life from 10 to 12. My therapist said, well, that's the next phase. You go through the different seasons of your life to meet up to where you're at in this moment. And you heal those different scenarios, those different ages that kind of shaped or split parts of your psychology to make you feel like you were masking something, you had to protect yourself, you're defending yourself, you were doing something that wasn't out of your most authentic self. your highest version of love, your joy, your light. And so that was a season of darkness, right? And I'm not stealing cars, there's levels to the darkness, but there was something in me that needed to steal something every time I went to a store. It was a rush, there was the challenge, the oh, I'm gonna get back at the system or whatever it was I was feeling. It was a pain inside that I needed to heal. And that gave me a feeling It was a coping mechanism to feel something better than what I was feeling. Just like we do with drugs or alcohol or sex or porn or whatever it might be, that was my thing and I haven't addressed or healed that yet. So I have on my phone, I showed you this. And she told me, I have on my phone, I've showed this before many times, on my phone, I've got a photo of myself from when I was that five to seven range, right? And it's funny because I talked about this on your podcast. which I want everyone to subscribe to, DirecTV, which is amazing. Some man posted a photo on his Instagram of his self when he was like five or six. And he said, Thank you for talking about that. I'm now working on healing that part of me where I was sexually abused when I was that age, where my parents were arguing all the time. That's made me kind of guarded in my life, right? From that period of time. And so now my therapist is like, Okay, Louis, I want you to find a photo of you when you were 11. And we're gonna put that on your screensaver, 'cause this has been on here for almost a year.

Really?

A year, every day, I look at this and I see this, and I feel like that season of my life, I've healed now. And it's taken a year of integrating the healing lessons and being tested by the universe, right? Relationships, conversations, you know, uncomfortable conversations, challenges to be like, am I still triggered? from that wound? Or have I opened the wound, looked at it, it's painful, and then allow it to heal fully so there's a scar, but it's going away every day.

Is it fully healed?

I feel like it. Again, if the universe tests me, the whole thing for me around that age was abuse. The sexual abuse made me feel like I was getting taken advantage of, right? So I would always feel taken advantage of in different scenarios. and I felt like I needed to defend myself. I don't feel the need to defend myself anymore. Like if people say nasty things about.

Me, I'm like, okay, that's their opinion.

Can you think of a scenario that might trigger you? If someone says a comment online or says something about me that I feel like, oh, they didn't get that right. Like they were, they don't know the whole story, they didn't get it right, or they're assuming something that's not true. That used to be the main thing. And I might see that today. I might have a moment of like, oh, I want to correct them. and tell them the full story. But I don't do that anymore. So there's a moment of like, oh, I'm aware of it. Okay. But I don't need to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And so it's an awareness. It's like, okay, maybe there's a moment of the trigger where you're like, I'm used, my body is so used to this kind of nervous system response, but I'm in a safe place. And I go back to looking at the photo and say, I got your back. So it's integrating the healing from the child psychology to the adult. and bringing the adult in the room.

Amen.

And so now it's, okay, let's go, let's see if there's things to uncover from ages 10 to 12. So I'm gonna put a photo, I gotta look for a photo, put it on here of that age range where I'm like 6'3, goofy, skinny looking, you know, being made fun of all the time. And I'm sure there's gonna be stuff where I need to open a wound. Be like, man, this is painful and I don't wanna have this wound here, but like address it, look at everything and then allow the wound to heal. Full recovery and then there'll be a scar but eventually the scar will go down and it's you know, it's more and more healed and it's stronger.

What's the process of finding out? So when you get that photo of you at what 16 is it?

10 to 12.

10 to 12. How are you gonna know what the sort of limiting self-stories are that you're still carrying from that time?

I'm not gonna know until my therapist does multiple different exercises.