I hear this all the time from the women I work with: “Lisa, I know where this comes from. I’ve already processed this in therapy. Why am I still doing it?”

They’re self-aware, insightful, maybe years into their healing journey. They can explain exactly why they people-please, overwork, or struggle to hold boundaries. They understand their childhood. They’ve connected all the dots. They’ve even had breakthrough moments.

And yet—they’re still saying yes when they mean no. Still working until they’re exhausted. Still shrinking in conversations. Still apologizing for existing.

If this resonates, here’s what you need to know: the answer isn’t more insight. It’s not about understanding yourself better. The answer is that you’re carrying a core wound, and knowing about it is not the same as healing it.

What Core Wounds Really Are

A core wound isn’t something you simply decide doesn’t bother you anymore. It’s running your life at a level beneath your awareness.

It’s a deep emotional injury, usually from childhood, that created a fundamental belief about yourself, others, and the world. It’s not just a thought or memory. It’s an organizing principle that your entire nervous system, your body, and your energy field built themselves around.

Maybe you learned: I’m only lovable when I’m useful. It’s not safe to need anything. I have to be perfect to be acceptable. My emotions are too much. I don’t really matter.

You didn’t consciously decide these things. Your beautiful, tiny body absorbed them—from a parent who only praised achievement, from being told to stop crying, from watching your needs get dismissed while someone else needed more support.

Your entire identity organized itself around protecting you from ever feeling that way again. You became the high achiever to prove you’re enough. The accommodator to stay safe. The strong one so you’d never be vulnerable. The hypervigilant one so you’d never be caught off guard.

These weren’t conscious choices. They were survival strategies. And they worked—until they didn’t. Now that adaptation that protected you as a child is suffocating you as an adult.

Why Smart Women Stay Stuck

Here’s what keeps women stuck: you can intellectually understand your core wound and still be completely controlled by it.

This is especially challenging for women who got by with their intellect, who were “the smart one,” who ‘intelligented’ their way out of every situation. But core wounds don’t live in your thinking mind.

They live in your nervous system. In the tension patterns you hold in your body. In how your body automatically reacts to certain situations. In your hunched posture or shallow breathing when anxiety hits. In the constant bracing for what’s coming next. In how your energy contracts—like you’re clenching, trying to get as small as possible, trying to become invisible.

Most importantly, these wounds live in the false identity you built to avoid ever feeling that way again. You’ve been living with this for so long that you think it is you. But it’s not.

The Cultural Layer

Cultural conditioning makes this worse. The pressure on women—from social media, movies, social expectations—pours into that feeling you already had that who you are at soul level isn’t good enough.

Your worth becomes conditional on how you look, how thin you are, whether you have wrinkles, how much money you make, whether you have a partner. Perhaps you’ve achieved all these things you were told you were supposed to do, and you still don’t feel good. You’re thinking: “I’m proud of what I’ve achieved, but I feel like I have so much more to give. I don’t want to continue being the same person I pretended to be to get here. It’s too exhausting.”

Why This Feels So Scary

When you start to see your core wound, the fear you feel isn’t a sign that you’re a secret screw up. It’s evidence that you have a survival system trying to protect you.

Your nervous system knows that this false identity—the high achiever, the caretaker, the peacemaker, the perfect one—kept you safe. She kept you loved. Now you’re talking about dismantling that, and your system sees it as a survival threat.

Taking down the defense mechanism can feel like you’re leaving yourself open being rejected, perceived as too much, unloved, abandoned, and so on. It’s terrifying.

But here’s the reframe: think of fear as a messenger. It’s telling you that you’re really close to something real and powerful. The false identity was never going to make you happy. It was designed to keep you safe in an environment where being yourself wasn’t safe.

You’re not there anymore. You’re an adult now. You have choices. You have agency. And the woman you actually are underneath all that conditioning? She’s waiting. She doesn’t need to perform. She has nothing to prove. She just wants to be witnessed and given permission to return.

The Path Forward

Most approaches try to fix the false identity. They try to make the high achiever more balanced, encourage the people-pleaser to set better boundaries, tell the perfectionist to be kinder to herself.

But these approaches are still operating within the survival identity. We don’t want to improve the false self. We’re here to dissolve it so your true self can return.

Core wounds exist on multiple levels—psychological, somatic, energetic, ancestral, cultural. You can’t heal them on just one level. That means not just understanding your wound, but feeling it in your body. Seeing how it’s been a survival strategy. Giving yourself permission to grieve who you had to become—while acknowledging the powerful things you’ve accomplished. And then letting the survival mechanism – the wound – go.

When you can finally be with the wound—sit down and have coffee with it without fixing it, performing around it, or avoiding it—it loses its power. And the full you regains power.

An Invitation

The next time you find yourself in that familiar pattern—overworking, people-pleasing, shrinking—just pause. Don’t try to fix it. Don’t judge it. Just notice it and ask: What part of me is trying to stay safe right now?

You don’t need to answer. You just need to be with it. Look it in the eye. Wounds soften when they’re witnessed—not when you argue with them.

Core wounds were about survival. They’re proof that you adapted to threatening circumstances. But you don’t have to keep living from that place. You’re allowed to return to who you were before you felt the need to survive. You can stop performing and proving and being perfect.

You can just be the woman you are. And that’s enough.

 

Check out Lisa’s Don’t Tell Me To Calm Down podcast on core wounds here.

Dr. Lisa Petty is a wellbeing researcher and shamanic practitioner who helps you answer the big questions like “who am I?” and “what’s my (next) purpose?” through deep healing. Reach out for a Soul-Aligned Success Audit here to identify the next steps on your journey.