Chapter One

1. Waking up in Prison

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.

—Marianne Williamson

Leslie was a recognized expert in her field. She had a vision to pour her talents and experience into building her own business, so Leslie joined a mastermind. She invested tens of thousands of dollars to be in that room, knowing it would support her vision. After her presentation, another member approached her with an opportunity that fit her skillset and the direction she wanted to grow her business. He needed consultation around a new product line, and he wanted to pay Leslie for her guidance—to the tune of $350,000.

Weeks later, Leslie told me this part of the story, and then quickly moved on to another topic. I stopped her and asked, “What happened with the offer?”

“What offer?”

“The consulting package that was offered to you.”

Leslie was silent. She was processing. Eventually she asked again. “What do you mean?”

“Well, the entrepreneur who asked you to consult for him for $350,000. What did you do?”

She paused and took a deep breath. “I thanked him. And then I forgot about it.” Leslie said. “I didn’t follow up with him. I didn’t do anything.”

I realized that she had not considered the offer as a real possibility, so quickly had she dismissed that her skills and expertise could be so valuable to another person.

This is how trauma adaptations operate. Leslie’s response to an offer that felt beyond her reach was to run away from it. In fact, she ran away while she was still in the room, still talking to that entrepreneur—she just checked out in her mind and disengaged completely, and later she forgot about it.

When trauma is triggered, it hijacks us out of the prefrontal cortex of the brain—our executive decision-making center, the seat of logic and reason—and drops us straight into the ancient hindbrain—focused on our survival—where words and notions don’t exist. Certainly six-figure offers don’t exist there. Leslie was so triggered that her prefrontal cortex barely registered the offer.

When triggered, a trauma response of fight, flight, or freeze gets activated to keep us safe. Leslie went into flight.

It would be a great ending to this story to say that Leslie went back to the entrepreneur and took the offer. After our conversation, she did indeed reconnect with him, and his offer was still on the table. Ultimately, she declined it. The offer to be paid handsomely for her talents was an acknowledgment of her worth—which caused painful dissonance with her wound of worth-less-ness, so her mind created lots of “rational” stories to get her to move away from the discomfort. He doesn’t know me that well, she thought. He will be disappointed in me. The work wasn’t exactly in her area of expertise, she decided. Each of these stories was the bar of a jail cell to keep her safe. Familiar equals safe. Even if the familiar is a prison.

I can’t help but wonder, had Leslie learned the jailbreak tools, if this story would have a different ending. We’ll never know. But what we do know is that most people would do what Leslie did. They would choose the prison over jailbreak, the safety of the status quo over the risk of new experiences, even if very desirable. And they will justify this decision and believe their justification.

Consciously, Leslie thought of herself and showed up as a confident woman, aware and proud of her talents and accomplishments. But her subconscious imprinted a different story—the story of ancestral oppression based on gender, race, and social class, where a woman’s power was a punishable offense.

No matter what we think, how much “mindset” work we do—the subconscious always wins. PSD wires it to sabotage our success and thriving to ensure our survival. Because survival is prioritized over success and thriving any day of the week.

As we’ll see, this inner prison comes in many forms. Each with a very rational story that makes logical sense. There’s a whole world outside that makes no sense at all, because it does not confirm the worth-less-ness wound of PSD—so the prison protects us from it.

The Prison Foundations

The prison of PSD is built over a pit that is the original trauma inflicted upon women by patriarchy—the wound of worth-less-ness. The millennia of patriarchy have impressed upon us, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that women’s bodies and minds are worth less than men’s. The pain of this core wound is what we’re trying to escape. We climb higher, and we build sophisticated scaffolding out of our careers, businesses, relationships, marriages, and families. We build up continuous achievements and milestones in our lives, but as we climb ever higher, we still don’t gain freedom.

Then the scaffolding collapses.

We find ourselves in crisis: We have a huge blowout at work, or we find ourselves on the brink of divorce, or we wind up in the hospital. We tumble into the pit we worked so hard to avoid.

Most of my clients came to work with me after a part of their scaffolding collapsed. If we have the awareness, the support, the guidance, and the right tools—this is the perfect opportunity to dig the tunnel out of the prison. When we’re on the prison floor, or have fallen through into the pit, we’re so much closer to recognizing and healing the wound of worth-less-ness and reclaiming the treasures that make up our authenticity and wholeness that our traumas had shattered.

I classify these traumas as ancestral, collective, and individual. As we define those terms, you’ll see that some of this trauma comes from personal events and experiences in your life that made you feel unsafe in your fullest authentic expression, while others were passed down to you from previous generations as survival instructions for a woman in a patriarchal culture.

Each trauma creates trauma adaptations—I refer to them as prison guards. Their job is to keep us safe. They accomplish it by keeping our bodies and minds in vigilant survival mode, despite our best efforts to thrive. Jailbreak is possible when we start to notice how these adaptations show up in our lives, when we understand the need for safety they are serving, and we create the experience of safety necessary for the prison guards to allow—and actually support—our safe passage to freedom.

Before we can dig, we must take a look around at exactly where we are. In the first step of your jailbreak, I invite you to explore what your own prison is made of.

Ancestral Trauma

The invisible inner prison was not built in your lifetime. You were born into it. The first layer of trauma that created it is likely to have been passed down to you in the DNA.

The new science of epigenetics has shown us that gene expression can and does change in response to environmental changes and experiences, and that these changes are inheritable. Increasingly, studies are showing that trauma adaptations can be genetically transmitted across generations as a part of our survival instructions.

A review of studies on combat soldiers with PTSD showed that their traumatic experiences had resulted in epigenetic changes that could be inherited by their offspring.3 Another study of women who were pregnant during the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda found that their children had inherited trauma-induced epigenetic changes.4 Other studies found that the children of Holocaust survivors had inherited traits associated with the stress response of their parents.5

An even more fascinating experiment on mice found that subsequent generations could be made to inherit trauma not in response to genocide or war, but to mild electric shocks paired with the smell of cherry blossoms.6

Researchers piped the smell of cherry blossoms into the cages of mice, and simultaneously, they zapped the mice’s feet with mild electric shocks. This conditioned the mice to have a stress response to the smell. They were then bred, and the offspring were raised without being exposed to the smell of cherry blossoms.

A look into the mice’s heads showed that the offspring had more neurons devoted to detecting cherry blossom smell in their brains and noses. When they were exposed to the smell, the offspring became anxious and fearful. The mice were bred again, and the smell of cherry blossoms elicited the same fear and anxiety reaction in the grandchildren of the traumatized mice. Neuroscientists discovered that epigenetic markers transmitted a traumatic experience across generations, shaping their behavior according to the trauma adaptations.

PSD is women fearing the smell of cherry blossoms. Being...