🎙️ EPISODE 21: What If Your Past Was Training, Not Trauma?
Stop Seeing Your Past as a Problem
You’ve been taught to treat your past like baggage. Something to bury. Something to carry quietly. Something to blame when the voice in your head whispers, “See, that’s why you’ll never get further than this.”
But your past isn’t baggage. It’s curriculum.
Think about how you actually talk to yourself about your story.
- “I sabotage because of what happened to me.”
- “I can’t trust because of the people who betrayed me.”
- “I hold back because I’ve already failed once.”
You wear your wounds as labels: as though they define the limit of who you can be. You keep showing up with invisible disclaimers stamped across your chest. The failed business. The messy divorce. The betrayal that still burns. The breakdown no one knew about.
And so, without even realizing it, you walk into every new chapter negotiating with the old one.
You tell yourself:
“I’ll try, but I’ll probably collapse like I did last time.”
“I want love, but I can’t risk being hurt again.”
“I’ll step up in business, but I’ll never shake the chaos of what happened before.”
You reduce your entire future to the shadows of your past.
But here’s the shift you’ve been avoiding: your past wasn’t punishment - it was training.
The very things you’ve been calling baggage are the exact things that built your resilience. They sharpened your perception. They carved out your depth. They forced you to become resourceful, awake, precise.
Think about it. The woman you are today - the one listening right now - didn’t come from the seasons that were easy. She didn’t come from comfort. She came from collapse. She came from the nights you didn’t think you’d make it. She came from the seasons where all you had left was grit, faith, or sheer stubborn refusal to quit.
That’s not baggage, babe. That’s curriculum.
And the reason you keep feeling stuck is because you’re still labeling your past like it’s a scarlet letter when it’s actually the very foundation of your authority.
Let’s get brutally honest: you wouldn’t even have the level of discernment you do now without what you’ve been through. You wouldn’t know how to spot red flags if you hadn’t ignored them once. You wouldn’t know how to hold boundaries if someone hadn’t blown past every single one of yours. You wouldn’t know how strong you really are if life hadn’t forced you to the edge of yourself again and again.
You call it damage. I call it data.
The betrayal that shattered you? It taught you what trust actually looks like. The heartbreak that gutted you? It revealed your capacity to love and to rise again. The breakdown that humiliated you? It burned down the ego that was keeping you trapped and forced you into truth.
Your past isn’t proof you’re broken. It’s proof you were being trained.
And here’s what I want you to feel in your bones: if you keep treating your past like a problem, you’ll never give yourself permission to step into the purpose it was preparing you for. You’ll keep hiding, overexplaining, discounting, proving - all to cover the very story that actually makes you magnetic. And don’t forget that your tribulations and challenges in this life aren’t just for you. They’ve been given to you to figure out so you can help others with what you learned and help them move through that experience with conviction.
People don’t feel you when you’re perfect. They feel you when you’re real. They feel the weight of your authority because you’ve lived it. You can walk into a room and hold a level of power no book, no strategy, no certification could ever give you - because you carry lived proof.
But you keep shrinking it. Dismissing it. Treating it like something to get over instead of something to lead from.
So hear me clearly: stop calling your past a problem. It isn’t a weakness. It isn’t evidence you’re behind. It isn’t proof you’re unworthy.
It’s the very thing that qualifies you.
Every scar, every wound, every collapse carved capacity into you that the average woman will never hold. You are not behind - you’re actually built for this.
And the moment you stop apologizing for your story and start owning it as the curriculum that forged your authority, you stop playing small. You stop hiding. You stop disqualifying yourself from the very future your past was preparing you to claim.
Your past isn’t the reason you can’t. It’s the reason you must.
The Metaphysical Reason You Had to Fall Apart
Breakdowns collapse false identity.
You’ve been taught to call those seasons failures. To see every collapse as evidence that you didn’t have what it takes. But collapse wasn’t punishment. It was preparation.
Spiritually, destruction clears the stage so the real self can lead.
Because let’s be honest - the version of you that fell apart wasn’t the real you. She was the mask. The over-functioning, over-giving, over-performing version who was built to survive the rooms you were never meant to stay in.
And here’s the metaphysical truth no one tells you: when the mask can’t hold anymore, life will dismantle it for you.
That toxic narcissistic betrayal that broke you? It was life ripping away false loyalty. That failure that gutted you? It was life burning off the identity you had built on proving. That breakdown you thought would end you? It was life forcing you out of a structure that couldn’t hold your future.
Because your spirit will not let you drag a false identity into your real purpose.
Collapse feels like devastation when you’re inside of it. You think you’re losing everything. But what you’re really losing is the scaffolding of the self you built on fear. The self who lived for approval. The self who carried everyone else’s weight. The self who thought power meant exhaustion.
Breakdowns strip away what was never truly you. They dismantle the house of cards you built trying to prove you were enough - so that what remains is undeniable. Solid. Unshakable. Real.
Think of it like this: the forest doesn’t apologize for fire. The fire clears the brush, burns down what’s dead, and makes room for new growth. That’s what your breakdowns did. They burned down what could never last, so you could build something that actually can.
But because you’ve been conditioned to see breakdowns as shame, you keep carrying them as evidence you’re behind. You don’t see the spiritual truth: those collapses had to happen. They were the portal into the woman you came here to be.
Without them, you would still be trapped in a version of yourself that could perform, achieve, impress - but never feel whole.
So stop telling yourself you lost years. Stop calling it wasted time. Stop apologizing for the times you fell apart.
Because every collapse was sacred. Every breakdown was a clearing. Every “failure” was a portal.
You didn’t fall apart because you were weak. You fell apart because your soul refused to let you keep building a life on foundations that were never meant to hold you.
Reclaiming the Pattern as Purpose
You’ve told yourself a story that the patterns mean you’re broken.
Every time you found yourself back in the same cycle - burning out, choosing the wrong partner, over-giving, under-receiving - you took it as evidence that you were flawed. That something in you was defective. That you were doomed to repeat the same mistakes forever.
But here’s the reframe that changes everything: every repeated sabotage wasn’t proof you were broken. It was proof your system was begging for recalibration.
Patterns don’t exist to shame you. They exist to reveal you.
Think about it: if you’d learned the lesson the first time, you wouldn’t have needed the second. And if you’d learned it the second time, you wouldn’t have needed the third. The repetition wasn’t punishment, it was persistence. Life circling back, again and again, saying: “Look here. This is where you need to evolve.”
Every cycle you call failure was training.
Training your discernment.
Training your resilience.
Training your ability to finally say, “No more.”
The reason it stung so badly each time wasn’t because you were weak. It was because the gap between who you were being and who you were becoming grew too wide. And the wider that gap, the louder the pattern has to get until you finally face it.
Think of it like lifting weights. The muscle only grows under repeated stress. You don’t build capacity with one rep - you build it with repetition. The same is true of identity. The repeated patterns weren’t exposing your weakness. They were building your strength.
You say: “I wasted years in toxic relationships.”
I say: You built unshakable standards through lived experience.
You say: “I sabotaged every time I got momentum in business.”
I say: You were being trained to recognize the exact nervous system triggers that collapse your power, so you could one day lead with command instead of reaction.
You say: “I stayed small for too long.”
I say: That season carved the hunger in you that will never allow you to shrink again.
None of it was wasted. None of it was random. Every repetition was rehearsal for the role you’re about to step into.
The truth is, you were never failing. You were being forged.
Transmuting Wounds into Wisdom
You’ve been taught to treat your wounds as evidence of weakness. To hide the scars, to patch over the cracks, to pretend you’ve moved on.
But scars don’t prove fragility. They prove healing.
A scar says: I was broken open here, and I did not stay broken.
A scar says: This part of me has already survived the fire.
A scar says: I carry proof that I can hold more than I thought I could.
That’s not weakness. That’s wisdom. That’s POWER.
The woman who was betrayed doesn’t just know what betrayal feels like - she knows the cost of ignoring her own intuition. She knows how to hold standards that don’t bend for the sake of love. She leads from discernment, not desperation.
The woman who burned out doesn’t just know exhaustion - she knows exactly how to build without bleeding herself dry. She knows the price of self-abandonment, and she refuses to run her empire from a place of depletion ever again.
The woman who collapsed in shame doesn’t just know humiliation - she knows resurrection. She knows what it takes to stand back up when everything has crumbled. And she carries a presence that makes everyone around her feel safer, because she’s living proof that collapse isn’t the end.
Do you see it? What you called weakness was actually initiation. Every wound transmuted into wisdom. Every scar a signature of strength.
You keep trying to erase your past, thinking your authority depends on how clean your story looks. But the opposite is true. Authority comes from alchemy - your ability to stand in front of the world and say: This cut became my clarity. This collapse became my conviction. This betrayal became my backbone.
It’s not the woman who’s never fallen apart who commands the room - it’s the one who has, and who carries herself with the unshakable weight of someone who lived to tell the truth about it.
Your wounds don’t disqualify you. They distinguish you.
Activating Future Identity Through Spiritual Integration
Integration means you stop hiding the past. You stop apologizing for it. You stop holding it like a secret liability.
Instead, you fold it into your authority. You take the story that once made you shrink and you let it become the very frequency that makes people lean in.
Because the identity you’re building isn’t in spite of your story, it’s because of it.
The betrayals that once gutted you? They refined your standards so you no longer negotiate your worth.
The heartbreaks that once humiliated you? They carved a depth of compassion and clarity that makes your presence unforgettable.
The breakdowns that once embarrassed you? They ripped off the false self and left behind the real one - the one who leads from authenticity, not performance.
This is spiritual integration: nothing wasted, nothing lost. Every chapter becomes fuel. Every scar becomes a signal. Every collapse becomes part of your credibility.
When you integrate your story, you stop leaking energy trying to outrun it. You stop editing yourself to be palatable. You stop performing strength while hiding the very curriculum that made you strong.
And here’s the truth: the world doesn’t need another polished mask. The world needs the woman who has lived through the fire and still commands the room. The woman who has taken her own wounds and transmuted them into wisdom, who no longer separates the past from the present, but allows it all to flow into the identity she embodies now.
This is how you activate your future self - not by pretending she’s brand new, untouched, unmarked - but by realizing she was born through every single thing you thought disqualified you.
You don’t rise by deleting your past. You rise by integrating it. By standing in the fullness of it and saying: Every part of me is welcome. Every season has served me. Every collapse has crowned me. This is who I am now.
Because your future self isn’t waiting for you to become someone else. She’s waiting for you to finally stop rejecting who you’ve already been.
NEXT STEPS:
“You didn’t survive all that to play small. Your mission starts when you let the old story go. So if you liked this episode and you know someone who needs to hear this, please share it. Like it. Subscribe to the podcast. And please leave a review.