Hello and welcome to Inner Work, a spiritual growth podcast.

I'm your host, Josephine.

I have a PhD in English Literature and I spent 10 years teaching college

before transitioning to full-time spiritual work.

I'm a certified energy healer, certified Akashik Records trainer,

an intuitive business coach for healers and spiritual entrepreneurs.

I help you get clear and get visible so you can get clients consistently.

To learn more or connect with me, please visit www.josephinehardman.com.

Thank you for being here, and now, on to the show.

Hello, dear listeners, and welcome to a new episode of Inner Work.

Today we're tackling the topic of people-pleasing and being addicted to approval and external

validation. This is a major issue for many of us, I think, especially if we

are empaths or highly sensitive people. And right now is a time where we're all being called

to reclaim our inner authority, to take our power back, to stop listening to what others want us to do and make our

own decisions from an empowered, conscious, confident place within ourselves. But of course,

it can be difficult to do all of that if you're stuck in a rut of people pleasing behaviors

and addiction to external approval. So I actually want to set up

this discussion by talking a bit about the bodies and the brain's responses to trauma. I'm sure

you know already of the fight or flight response, which happens when you are triggered or when you come in contact

with a stimuli or a situation or even a person that reminds you in some way of a past trauma.

And here we could be talking about current lifetime trauma or even extending back to past

life trauma. So your sympathetic nervous system is also activated and goes into fight or flight when you sense danger in your environment,

...