What if the behavior you’re trying hardest to get rid of was once the very thing that helped you survive?

Carol Look is a psychotherapist and founding EFT Master who has spent decades helping people understand the emotional patterns underneath self-sabotage, and why lasting change often begins with asking what the behavior is protecting us from.

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Carol and Lisa Lacy explore the idea that the problem was once the solution. Addiction, procrastination, people pleasing, overworking, staying invisible, and even creating chaos can serve a purpose when the nervous system believes they are keeping us safe.

Carol explains why we are wired for safety before success, and why someone can consciously want more visibility, healthier relationships, greater success, or a completely different life while unconsciously pulling themselves backward when the next level doesn’t feel safe.

Lisa shares her own experience of appearing highly successful while privately unraveling, using alcohol to avoid painful emotions, and later discovering how uncomfortable peace and stillness could feel after years of chaos. They also talk about functional freeze, grief, hypervigilance, the importance of mentorship, learning to regulate reactivity, and what becomes possible when we stop asking, “What is wrong with me?” and start asking, “Why am I doing this, and what is it protecting me from?”

Carol also shares how growing up in an alcoholic family shaped her tendency to take care of everyone around her, how that survival skill eventually became an asset in her work, and why learning to extend that same care toward herself changed everything.

In this episode:

• Why self-sabotage may actually be a protective response
• Nervous system regulation and why safety comes before success
• Fear of success, visibility, and “up-leveling”
• Why procrastination can have an emotional payoff
• Addiction as a way of anesthetizing difficult emotions
• EFT tapping and Emotional Freedom Techniques
• Trauma responses, hypervigilance, and emotional patterns
• Why peace and stillness can initially feel uncomfortable
• Functional freeze and appearing capable while internally checked out
• Grief, emotional avoidance, and learning to feel again
• People pleasing and taking care of others as survival strategies
• Why changing your own reactivity can change your relationships
• Gratitude, emotional well-being, and Carol’s Yes work
• The value of mentorship and support in personal growth
• Why healing doesn’t mean life stops being difficult
• The power of stillness, space, and finally hearing yourself

Learn more about Carol Look and her work:

www.carollook.com

Learn more about Lisa Lacy and Notes From the Edge:

www.lisalacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

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How much longer are you willing to wait for someone else to validate what you already know happened?

Lisa Lacy is a trauma educator and relationship advisor exploring one powerful idea: sometimes closure is not something another person gives you, it is something you create by trusting your own experience.

In this short solo episode, Lisa shares what she learned from waiting for accountability, explanations, and validation that never came, and why healing began when she stopped requiring someone else’s version of the story to confirm her own.

In this episode:

• Closure after betrayal
• Rebuilding self-trust
• Letting go of the need for an apology
• Boundaries without agreement
• Why unanswered questions keep us attached
• Moving forward without validation

Connect with Lisa:

https://www.lisalacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

Welcome to the Edge.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What happens when everyone needs you to be okay, but you’re barely surviving yourself?

Hollywood screenwriter and producer Lee Ehlers spent years learning how to survive rejection, but nothing prepared him for the loss of his wife, Erin, or for discovering that sometimes the strongest thing you can do is stop pretending you’re okay.

Lee’s professional breakthrough and personal devastation collided when his feature film EXES was finally being made as his high school sweetheart and wife of twenty years was dying from breast cancer. Suddenly widowed with children who were just 10, 7, and 5, Lee found himself trying to grieve while becoming the person they still needed every day. We talk about the private cost of performing the “strong dad,” the period when alcohol became the only way he could sleep through overwhelming grief, and the moment he

finally admitted, “I’m not okay. I’m struggling.”

In this episode:

• Grief after the death of a spouse
• Widowed fatherhood and raising children through loss
• Performing strength when you’re falling apart
• Depression, isolation, and asking for help
• Self-medication and coping with acute grief
• Why grief doesn’t follow a predictable process
• Supporting someone who is grieving without prescribing how they should heal
• The strange collision of happy memories and devastating loss
• Starting over after losing the person you built your life with
• Identity after loss
• Persistence through rejection and uncertainty
• Nearly two decades of pursuing a Hollywood career
• Screenwriting, creativity, and finding your own writing process
• What repeated rejection can teach us about survival
• The making of EXES
• Why saying “I’m not okay” can be the beginning of getting help

Watch Lee Ehlers’ film EXES on Amazon:

EXES on Amazon

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Lisa Lacy | Notes From the Edge:

https://www.lisalacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

Welcome to the Edge.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.