What if the reason you can’t say no isn’t weakness, but conditioning? From childhood, so many of us were taught that love had to be earned, that being good meant staying quiet, agreeable, and available. But somewhere along the way, that survival strategy became self-betrayal.
In this powerful episode, bestselling author and trauma recovery coach Lisa A. Romano reveals the truth about codependency: it’s not about needing others too much, but about forgetting who you are. She explains why guilt floods your body when you set a boundary and how healing begins the moment you realise your inner critic isn’t actually your voice—it’s an echo from your past.
This is a conversation for anyone who’s tired of people-pleasing, over-giving, or shrinking themselves to keep the peace. Because real love doesn’t require you to abandon yourself. It begins the moment you come home to you.
The Woman Who Broke the Cycle
Lisa A. Romano didn’t just study codependency—she lived it. Growing up with parents who were adult children of alcoholics, one highly narcissistic and the other deeply codependent, Lisa carried shame throughout her entire childhood. She believed something about her made it impossible for her parents to love her.
This pattern followed her into adulthood. She married a man similar to her mother, repeating the cycle of seeking approval and subjugating herself. After a severe breakdown and six therapists, she finally received the diagnosis that changed everything: codependency.
The tragedy that catalysed her mission came when her brother-in-law, also an adult child of alcoholics, took his own life. In that devastating moment, Lisa realised that if he had understood codependency and childhood trauma the way she now did, he might still be alive. She pushed past her fears of what her family would think and published her first book, “The Road Back to Me,” which became an Amazon bestseller overnight.
Today, as a certified life coach and leading expert in codependency and childhood trauma recovery, Lisa has helped over 5,000 students heal through her signature 12-week Breakthrough Method, blending neuroscience, trauma-informed coaching, mindfulness, and spiritual wisdom.
What Codependency Actually Means
“When you’re codependent, you don’t know that you’re codependent until your life becomes unmanageable,” Lisa explains. It operates completely below conscious awareness, a loop of childhood trauma disguised as personality.
Codependency isn’t just people-pleasing. It’s people-pleasing from a loss of selfhood. It’s cleaning the house but needing your husband to walk in and pat you on the back. Making his favorite meal but requiring him to make a big deal about it. Watching your sister’s kids but expecting her to watch yours in return without having to ask.
“With codependency, it’s an emotional enmeshment,” Lisa reveals. “I lose my sense of self and I’m emotionally reliant on someone in a very unhealthy way, and I don’t even realize it.”
The dangerous part? Codependents often think they’re “the good one.” They’re the fixers, the caretakers, the ones always willing to listen. But beneath that giving is resentment, unmet expectations, and the victim mentality that comes from abandoning yourself while trying to avoid being abandoned by others.
Why You Can’t Say No: The Childhood Programming
The guilt you feel when setting boundaries isn’t random. It’s precisely programmed survival wiring from your first three years of life.
“Your needs aren’t being served, your ego-based needs from zero to three,” Lisa explains. “You’re in a theta brainwave state, which is a hypnotic brainwave state.” During this critical period, if your narcissistic needs—the healthy developmental need to matter, to be seen, to have your feelings validated—go unmet, you don’t develop a solid ego boundary.
Between ages three and five, children are supposed to be “little narcissists.” The adults around them should be managing what shows up inside them, helping them emotionally regulate, and teaching them that their feelings matter. When this doesn’t happen, children learn that they don’t have the right to feel, and therefore don’t have the right to set boundaries.
“If I say no, I might get abandoned or criticised or judged or shamed or banished from the kingdom,” Lisa describes. “That’s all stored.” The brain creates a predictive model: saying no produces guilt as a way to prevent abandonment. You’re abandoning yourself to avoid outer abandonment.
Operating Below the Veil
“Below the veil of consciousness, we’re just operating on a loop,” Lisa says. “We’re operating on childhood trauma. These are belief systems. They’ve become habitual thoughts. It becomes part of our persona.”
The subconscious mind is 500,000 to a million times stronger than the conscious mind. Most of your daily interactions are products of subconscious beliefs you’ve never questioned. You’re not living authentically—you’re recycling thoughts and patterns downloaded in childhood.
“It’s hard to be yourself when you were taught that yourself was not worthy of love,” Lisa reflects. “How do you love a self that your childhood conditioned you to believe was not worthy of love?”
The terror of being authentic becomes greater than the pain of being inauthentic. So you stay small, you people-please, you anticipate everyone else’s needs, and you resent them for not reading your mind.
The Deep Questions That Activate Healing
Lisa believes the gateway to transformation is uncomfortable self-inquiry: “How happy am I? How excited am I to get up in the morning? Do I really like my partner or do I resent them?”
These are the questions we avoid by going to yoga and drinking Starbucks, she says with a laugh. We go through the motions in our relationships without examining how we’re showing up.
“Do I say yes when I mean no? Do I race to solve other people’s problems with the intention for them to see me and find worthiness in me? Am I taking care of everybody else at the expense of myself? Am I secretly resentful?”
These self-inquiring questions activate metacognition—the ability to observe your own thoughts and patterns from a higher state of consciousness. “There is no healing without metacognition,” Lisa emphasises. Without engaging your prefrontal lobe and neocortex, you’re stuck operating from the amygdala, hippocampus, and brainstem—pure thinking, feeling, and reacting with no space between stimulus and response.
Stepping Out of Ego to Find Your True Self
Lisa’s breakthrough came when she stopped identifying with her ego and recognised it as a product of her five senses and childhood downloads. “That’s my ego’s language, but that’s not my true identity,” she explains.
She uses a powerful metaphor: “If I was in the middle of the ocean hanging onto a log, and the ego was that log, I’m not letting go until I see a raft. And I’m not jumping off the raft until I see a cruise ship.”
Her life raft was this realisation: “These are all false beliefs. I am enough. If I had been born to a healthy mother, I wouldn’t think these thoughts.” The “I’m not enough” narrative was contingent on what happened to her, not who she actually was.
“My divine essence is I’m an extension of source,” Lisa says. “Whoever and whatever created this entire cosmos created me. My inner child was always worthy, always worthy. I was just born to unhealthy dynamics.”
Every flower leans toward the sun. Why should you stay in the shade?
The Power of Meditation: Slowing Down the Loop
When Lisa realised her negative self-talk was just reverberations of her mother’s constant criticism—not her actual thoughts—it terrified her. “Who the hell’s steering the ship?” she wondered.
Her solution was meditation, sometimes for four to five hours a day. “I knew I had to empty my mind of this crazy self-talk that was so self-sabotaging and focused on what’s going to happen next.”
The results were almost immediate. After 40 minutes to an hour, she could sit up and observe. If the monkey mind returned, she’d lie back down and do another session. Each time, the chatter slowed further.
“Once I emptied the mind, it was like the observer within me was born. That’s metacognition. Now suddenly I’m outside of my mind observing. Now I can catch a negative thought. Now I can catch a codependent thought.”
Healing Relationships Without Cutting Everyone Out
One of the most common questions Lisa receives: “How do I heal without cutting people out of my life?”
Her answer: surrender.
“Surrender to this idea that I’m doing this deep healing work. Surrender that just because I’m doing this work doesn’t mean my partner is going to be doing this work. I surrender to their confusion about who I’m becoming.”
The reality is nuanced. Some people shouldn’t stay in your life—those who are aggressive, manipulative, or actively exploiting your abandonment fears. When you try to assert yourself and they bash you for daring, that’s a sign.
But other relationships can evolve. Lisa’s been with her second husband for 15 years. “He doesn’t believe in everything that I believe, and I freaking love that as a recovering codependent because I can tolerate that. I don’t need his approval. I don’t need him to agree with me.”
He supports her completely even though he doesn’t fully understand her work. “That’s unconditional love,” Lisa says. “Why does that person have to change to make me happy if that person has goodwill towards me?”
Expecting your partner to think exactly like you? That’s still codependency.
Breaking Generational Trauma
“Nature has no other recourse but to create by default unless the human being awakens,” Lisa explains. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. You’re 75% more likely to become an alcoholic if your father was an alcoholic. It’s biology, environment, emotion, vibration—everything you were around.
“Nature will create through default patterns until you awaken, until there’s a cycle breaker in a generation.”
Lisa sees her clients as unsung superheroes. “What you have done is you’ve halted this trauma into future generations. You have changed the collective matrix in which we all bathe in. The natural thing is to remain unconscious and do what was done to you. Not the healthiest, not the most fulfilling, but the most natural and innocent.”
Her 12-week program moves through three phases: understanding what happened to you (the inner child’s wounds), moving into gentle accountability (it’s still your subconscious mind now), and ascension (how do we manage and emotionally regulate from a higher state).
“You can’t fix a hole in the wall that you don’t see,” she says. Once you develop compassion for yourself, that trumps shame. Only then can you offer your parents compassion—but not before you develop self-empathy.
Three Golden Nuggets for Your Healing Journey
Golden Nugget #1: Find the Space Between Your Thoughts
“One of the most powerful things you can do on your journey is to find the space between your thoughts,” Lisa emphasises. The mind runs on a loop, a consistent stream of what we assume is consciousness, but it’s mostly from the subconscious mind.
“If you could practice finding the space between your thoughts, you could activate metacognition. It slows everything down.”
Golden Nugget #2: Feelings Aren’t Facts
“A big reality check, narcissism check, self-righteous check, arrogance check is: wait a minute, my feelings aren’t facts. They’re just opinions.”
Your beliefs have probably changed over the past 25 years. But when you believed something 25 years ago, you thought it was a fact. This awareness creates humility and openness to growth.
Golden Nugget #3: Emotional Neglect IS Trauma
“Brain scans prove that children who grow up feeling ignored and invisible, their brain on a brain scan is similar to a child that has experienced domestic violence and physical abuse. It’s the same.”
The hippocampal volume is smaller. The amygdala is lit up. Because feeling ignored is akin to death for a child. The same trauma responses, cortisol responses, and nervous system wiring are activated.
Understanding what happened in your first three years of life is crucial. If you struggle with codependency, low self-worth, or boundaries, your nervous system was wired for survival during that period. You developed an aversion to abandonment and became sensitised to it, which fuels codependency and unhealthy emotional dependence.
“Being emotionally neglected is trauma. Understand why. If you relate to anything we’ve shared today, you might be able to trace it back to those early developmental years.”
About Lisa A. Romano
Lisa A. Romano is a bestselling author, certified life coach, and leading expert in codependency and childhood trauma recovery. With over 5,000 students healed through her signature 12-week Breakthrough Method, she blends neuroscience, trauma-informed coaching, mindfulness, and spiritual wisdom to help adult children restructure their subconscious programs, build emotional resilience, and manifest intentional lives.
She is the author of multiple books including “The Road Back to Me” and has built a global community through her online programs, YouTube channel, podcast, and social media presence.
Key Takeaway
You are not destined to repeat the patterns programmed into you as a child. The guilt, resentment, and self-abandonment you experience aren’t character flaws—they’re survival strategies from a nervous system that learned love was conditional. When you activate metacognition through meditation and self-inquiry, you can observe these patterns from outside the loop. When you step out of ego and claim your inherent worthiness, you become the cycle breaker your lineage has been waiting for. Coming home to yourself means releasing the belief that you must earn love by abandoning who you are.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube
Find Out More About Lisa A. Romano
Website: https://www.lisaaromano.com
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