It's Not You. It's the Lens You're Looking Through.

Summary: In this raw and deeply personal solo episode, Katie explores one of the most misunderstood patterns she sees in her clients and in herself: the way unresolved trauma creates behaviors that push people away, even when all we want is to pull them closer.

She shares her own story of finally seeing a toxic belief system that had been running beneath the surface for most of her life, rooted in a long-term emotionally abusive relationship she had not fully named until recently. With help from her friend and hypnotist Ryan, she came to understand that the painful belief driving her off-putting behaviors was never about the other person. It was her own deeply held conviction that there was something fundamentally wrong with her.

This episode is a reminder that you are not your patterns. And that the moment you can finally see what is running beneath the surface, everything changes.

Key Takeaways

→ There is nothing fundamentally wrong with you. There never was. The behaviors that push people away are coming from a trauma lens, not from who you truly are.

→ Whatever you think is the problem is often not the actual problem. The surface issue is usually a symptom of a deeper belief system running in the nervous system.

→ Toxic belief systems create behavior that proves themselves right. We unconsciously act in ways that generate more evidence for the very story that is hurting us.

→ Other people are not the source of the pain. They are a mirror. When someone keeps hurting you, the question is not what is wrong with them. It is what belief in you are they reflecting back.

→ The brain will not show you what you are not ready to see. Katie resisted looking at this pattern for years. When she finally saw it, she was ready. That timing is not a coincidence.

→ Fear of success can be rooted in punishment from the past. If someone important to you punished you for succeeding, your nervous system may be sabotaging your growth to avoid that pain again.

→ Once you see the pattern, it loses its power. You cannot unsee it. And that awareness is where the real change begins.

→ Authenticity does not push people away. It is the grasping, the over-helping, the approval-seeking that does. When you show up fully as yourself, connection happens naturally.

Resources

• Website
• Free Mini Cogno Mondays
• Learn more about Cognomovement
• Try Cognomovement for yourself!
• Book a call with Katie

Credit: Tom Giovingo, Intro & Outro, Random Voice Guy, Professional ‘Cat‘ Herder

Mixed & Managed: JohnRavenscraft.com

Disclaimer: Katie is not a medical professional and she is not qualified to diagnose any conditions. The advice and information she gives is based on her own experience and research. It does not take the place of medical advice. Always consult a medical professional first before you try anything new.

Transcript

Katie Wrigley (00:29)
Welcome back to the Catapult Effect Podcast. I am your host, Katie Wrigley. So I'm going to be doing a few different things with solo episodes here and sprinkling them in still with everything in mind to help create ease in the life of the entrepreneur. And the deeper I get into this life, entrepreneurial life, the more I'm around other CEOs, the more I'm hearing and seeing.

the importance of nervous system work. Which when we talk about nervous system work, who gives a shit, right? Like what does that even mean? And there's a lot of people out there who don't understand it. So what I want to do in these episodes is I want to really help explain the way that things are showing up and the importance of going into the nervous system to help shift these patterns that are in there. And now what we're going to talk about today is

Let me ask you a question before we get into this. Not to give you a cliffhanger. But has ever and anybody ever been kind of crabby to you or snapped at you and you don't think what's wrong with them? Maybe do, but you also feel kind of hurt and wonder what's wrong with me that they're treating me like this or

Why does it seem like they don't want to be around me anymore or being afraid to reach out or even maybe you were even told that you did something that was really off putting to someone. And I want to take a moment here. I don't want to tell you that it's not you. It's not you who is engaging in these off putting behaviors that are pushing people away. It is the lens.

that you're looking through this trauma lens that is creating this behavior that is off putting. Let me explain this a little bit.

A lot of times we think or we have this toxic belief system that I talked about on the last solo episode. This toxic belief system that can come out of trauma or even negative events that don't really classify as a trauma, but they were still negative in some way. They had some impact on you. And from that toxic belief system, we have different thoughts and emotions which create certain patterns and those patterns will continue to run and those patterns will continue to prove.

this toxic belief system. And it's not that we're looking for this. All of this is running underneath the surface. What we know is that it feels painful in our conscious mind. It feels like we're being rejected. It feels like we're too much or we're not enough or we're not enough and we're too much at the same time. That was one of the ones that used to run in my system. But here's the thing I want you to really hear.

There is nothing about you that is unworthy. There is nothing about you fundamentally that is wrong.

the behaviors that you may be choosing in large part due to the traumatic events you've had and that lens that you're looking through, that's what's making you act in ways that are off putting in time, but it's not you. It is the behavior that you're engaging in that I can pretty much guarantee you.

is coming from some sort of unresourceful pattern running in your nervous system. That behavior is what has people gone, don't know if I want to talk to them. But it is not you. It is not that there's anything wrong with you on any level, fundamental, conscious, there is nothing wrong with you. The truth about you is that there is nothing wrong with you and they're never

was. But until that is the belief system that is running, you're most likely going to be showing up in ways that are going to push people away. Let me give you some examples. Maybe talking over someone. Maybe stepping in and being completely just not reading the room and fully overstepping.

I'm going to give you an example from my own life because I just recently started to break apart this pattern and where it showed up for me in the past and I finally understood what that trigger was and where it was coming from in my life. Now I've known for a long time that I experienced childhood trauma and I have a ton of work to help neutralize that in the body and there are layers and one of the biggest most important layers was

shifted just earlier this year and it shifted fast in big part because I've already done a lot of work but I actually want to share that I was running from the work. So I was actually getting together with my friend Ryan who's a hypnotist and he was saying he's like okay quit the shit the stuff that you're talking about this is not your thing and Ryan and I have done a ton of trades together

done a lot of Cognum movement with him and then he's done some coaching and some hypnosis with me and the impact of both has been super super powerful and they actually work in very different yet similar ways and he's also really given me some really powerful reframes through his work and it's stuff that I would have found with Cognum movement it's just a completely different way about it and he is phenomenal.

at what he does. Absolutely phenomenal. He's actually the first person who's ever been able to successfully hypnotize me. And the shifts that came from that have been so powerful and I've processed with Cognitive Movement so much quicker than that. But I'm getting off course here.

And what's funny is in a previous session with Ryan, he had actually run away from me and it was a really like, holy shit moment for him. And it was really funny. I didn't actually ask his permission to share that. He has given me permission to share his name, to share some of the work that we've done together. And this one's going to highlight him with his exceptional work. So I know he's going to be excited to hear me mentioning him by his real name.

But we hopped on a call and he was trying to get me to look at that toxic belief system and where it came from. And I was squirming away with it like from it like I was being a cat held over a bathtub. Now if you've ever held a cat over a bathtub, please don't actually do this. Be nice to the kitties. But they are gonna arch away from it.

They're gonna do everything they can to like, no, no, no, get me away from the bathtub. Get me away from the bathtub. So if you haven't ever done that, and again, please don't be nice to the kitties, be nice to all animals. But you get what I'm saying. I'm doing whatever I can to avoid this. I did not wanna go down this path because it hurt to see. But as soon as I saw it,

changed everything yet again and that's a beautiful part of this work. There's been so many times I'm like it changed everything it changed everything and all of that is true because every time we peel back a layer we can change everything. The way that we show up, the way we interact, the way we sleep, the way we feel. It's beautiful. I was resisting this and then Ryan finally said no it is what like it isn't the thing and I don't want to share the thing because that's

something I'm not ready to talk about in public yet. But I have had a bully in my life, I'm going to remain nameless, who's been a bully for the bulk of my life. I've known them for a really long time. And they are actually one of my biggest abusers and it took me a really long time to see that because it wasn't any physical or sexual abuse. It was all emotional and mental.

and it really did a number on me. And I realized that I had still been seeking this person's approval to a point where it was even part of fear of success because this person had punished me for success in the past. And that came up in a Cognitive Movement session of this person had punished me for the success. And if I fail, maybe this person will finally like me.

I cried for hours after the sessions like how the hell is this still here and how is it so painful but I honestly wasn't ready to look at it until that exact moment in time and then once I looked at it I started to peel it back I did sessions around it and then in comes Ryan a couple months later he's like all right this isn't the thing stop thinking this is the thing this is not the thing and I want to point out this is so common

that whatever we think is the problem, it's not actually the problem. A lot of times it's something different. And so the problem wasn't actually this person and how they treated me and that they continued to hurt me. The problem was that I still had pieces of this toxic belief system running that said that there is something wrong with me. And I was even repeating that as I talked about this person to Ryan.

I kept saying like, it's like, they think there's something wrong with me. It's like, they think there's something wrong with me. He's like, no, you are the one that thinks that there's something wrong with you. This is just what they're bouncing off of. But it's the fact that you actually believe that there is something wrong with you. That is what is hurting you. That is what is creating all this angst, all the suffering. It is not them.

They are mirroring that back to you. But what is hurting you is your own belief system.

and I did not want to see it.

But then once I did, again, everything changed. Everything.

There is still a little bit of, if I feel rejected by this person, but it's not nearly the same. And once I started to see this, I started to go through lots of different layers pretty fast too, and had a lot of anger coming up, a lot. That's all behind me as well. But here's the thing that goes back to my initial point, and that is that

It was the behavior that was coming up. So what was happening with this pattern running from this toxic belief system that there was something fundamentally wrong with me was that I would actually engage in ways that would put people off. And an event comes to mind.

that I was very early in my Cognitive Movement days. I was what Liz Larson calls aggressively helpful and stepping in where I shouldn't. Very inappropriate time. It was someone's birthday. It was a big deal. I was around a bunch of strangers. Someone happened to mention they had a headache. I'm like, I can fix that with my ball. And they're like what ball? instead of letting it be a party,

actually jumped up and started to do a demo. It was totally inappropriate, totally the wrong time. I didn't have anyone's permission to do it, and the person whose party it was was actually forced to create more solid boundaries with me after the fact, and it was like, I felt like such a piece of shit. But here's the thing, this is what was coming up.

This is how that behavior came up in those moments. Whenever the energy matched that same situation that was so deep in my nervous system and I wouldn't know that this energy was there.

But it would get me into a place where I was really grasping for the other person's attention. I was desiring it so deep like, yes, please like me, please like me. I want you to like me. I want you to like me. Instead of just me showing up confidently being myself, 100 % Katie, who is not off putting it all. And I know this about myself. I know that when I'm being authentic, when I'm speaking from my heart, I have the ability to connect deeply. I have the ability to help people.

in deep ways and not just with my clients. I do this with my friends too and I'm not off putting. It's when that energy was mimicking it that was triggering the nervous system and so I was immediately going into behavior that was going to be off putting and there's that proof thing. So my friend was very loving interboundaries and we're still friends.

But the other people at the party, none of them want anything to do with me. And I can't blame them. Like looking back, I'm like, like I said, it was cringe-worthy. Like, my God, did I actually do that at a party? Yep, I did. It's four or five years ago now. Would never in a million years do that. I'm actually very reluctant to talk about what I do in social settings because I just want to be relaxed and socialize and have all the things and enjoy myself. I don't want to go into work in those as much as I love work.

I don't want to go into that when I'm in a social setting. have very clear boundaries in my life now. But I didn't at that time. so I was going into this behavior subconsciously that was going to be off-putting. That was then going to be more proof of the toxic belief system running. Because this funny thing we are as humans is we need to be right. And so, yep.

There is more proof that there's something wrong with me. That was the lens that was coming up from that bully. And all of that is fucking bullshit. All of it. And by that, I mean the things I was telling myself, those things going at that subconscious level. Like, yeah, are those people ever going to want to talk to me? Maybe, maybe not. I think it depends on.

Whether I can completely stay out of that behavior in the future, which I probably can. They're also probably not people I'm likely to come across again. But I can't blame them. I really can't. But the nervous system is such a funny thing. And so is the subconscious mind. So my takeaways from you, again in this episode, and I wanted to use my own story as an example of this because it was just such a hot mess. There is nothing wrong with you. There never was.

There is nothing that is unworthy about you. Could you be engaging in behaviors that are off-putting? Absolutely. Could you be subconsciously pushing people away when you really want them closer to you? 100%. Yes. You absolutely could be doing that. And if that is your experience, I really want to encourage you to reach out to me.

I'm going to have in every one of the shoutouts, there's a link to book a complimentary one-on-one call with me. And I really encourage you to do that so we can have a conversation. If it is a fit, we'll talk about work. So yes, it's a sales call. No, it's also not a sales call. It's a chance for us to have a conversation. Talk about where you see this coming up. What events, what people in the past may have actually led you.

into this behavior and then we can unwind it. And let me tell you, I went to an event in New York last week and I had a fantastic time. And a lot of times when I came out of these events, before I saw this pattern the way I did, any kind of events, one I wasn't comfortable in a big group and my Cognou family was the first place where I started to get comfortable but this room I was in with all these incredible

High-powered woman, six and seven figure CEOs, all just badass in their own regard. And I was in the room. So yay, I think that says something about me as well. But I wasn't self-conscious. And I didn't do anything that was off-penning. I felt comfortable to share. I felt comfortable to be vulnerable. I actually started to tear up about something that is ongoing in my life.

And it was a moment where I was like really proud of myself for being able to show up there as right now in my life, like I don't have a lot of margin, which is going to be a different episode. I'm going to talk about margin, but the shifts that I've had since seeing this and understanding now that any time if I ever feel that energy again, because at this point I'm going to consciously know it. I'm going to consciously know when I'm grasping at someone hoping that they're going to like me. I'm just going to know.

And I'm not gonna go into that pattern anymore. Because now my belief system is that there's nothing wrong with me. And there never was. But dude, I have been through some shit. So I really want to invite you to a call. If you want to talk about what you've gone through and how it's making you struggle, please go into the show notes, grab a call with me, and we're gonna have a chat.

And I thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode today. As always, I appreciate you being here. You have your choice of so many things to listen to on the internet. And I'm really happy that you are someone who is listening to something that can help you change your life for the better. So until next time, please be well.