Living can feel overwhelming. We get emotionally cluttered, we feel trapped just trying to maintain the semblance of a happy life-all the while, feeling like we are failing. But Dr. Tracy Thomas, author of The Method. believes there is a practical path to moving into a fulfilled state of being.

Tracy holds a PHD in psychology and has spent more than 20 years helping other people maximize their performance and potential. After working with thousands of high profile clients in New York and Los Angeles, Tracy has developed a reputation for fully recovering the most challenging cases of addiction.

Her clients pay her an average of $20,000 per month for guidance through her method and that’s what you’re going to get in today’s episode. If you’ve heard self-help gurus tell you to love yourself but you’re still struggling with how to do that, this episode is the missing piece of the puzzle.

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Dr. Tracy Thomas: Back in 2005 as it was turning into 2006, I was going through yet another breakthrough with a boyfriend who was one of the many people that I dated while living in Manhattan.

It was really stressful. I was full of anger and frustration about it because this person had been lying to me and had been cheating on me. It was really painful.

I was at a stage in my life, in my young 30s, where you want to meet the one, you want it to go forward, you want to get engaged.

I was really in love with this person.

When I figured this all out and we needed to break up, I was really grieving about it and trying to figure out and full of tremendous anxiety like “How am I going to figure out how to do relationships? Why does this always happen to me?”

All of a sudden, in this moment, this amazing epiphany moment, I realized the part that it was happening to me. The concept of me being this real revelation that this was about me and how I was showing up in the world and the way that I was collaborating in life with people.

Becoming Authentic

Dr. Tracy Thomas: I had this great moment of clarity, which was that the very things that I had ever been frustrated with anyone else about in a relationship-which are often the causes of the stress that lead people to do other kinds of coping mechanisms like overeating or drinking…When I really looked at it, I thought, well, he was lying to me and cheating on me but let’s really look about myself. Is there anywhere that I’m doing that?

Because if that’s showing up in my life, then it’s about me.

It was really easy to find where I was, essentially, a liar without really ever telling myself that. I was in a way cheating on other people in my life because I wasn’t being authentic.

I was performing a version of myself.

Doing a job that I was successful at, it was lucrative, I was highly regarded and I made a great contribution. But I was never satisfied with it and it was a job instead of me really living my life’s purpose and feeling authentic and true.

I really looked at how out of integrity I was and where that was its own form of cheating on somebody. You’re ultimately pretending a whole landscape of things within jobs and often with people in your life.

It really just occurred to me that I was experiencing things in my life that were painful, that were all about the areas that I needed to develop for myself.