What are you holding onto because having fifty percent feels safer than having nothing?

Maybe it’s a relationship you already know isn’t right. A situationship you keep returning to. A job that’s fine. A friendship you’ve outgrown. The “good enough” version of something because letting it go means facing the fear of what happens next.

Nine years ago, I was thirty-seven, sitting alone in a room in Maui, terrified I had missed my window for love.

Instead of distracting myself, thinking positively, or trying to make the fear go away, I let myself feel it all the way through.

And at the bottom of that fear was a question that changed everything:

Where am I in my own way?

The answer was a fifty percent relationship I was holding onto because having something felt safer than having nothing.

So I let it go, with no guarantee of what would come next, and made myself a promise:

I get to have one hundred percent now.

What happened next changed my life.

But this is not a “manifest your soulmate in two weeks” story.

The timing is not the teaching.

This episode is about what happens when you stop running from the fear, clear the space occupied by what you already know isn’t right, and hold the bar long enough for something different to become possible.

Inside the episode, I’ll walk you through three moves:

1. Feel it through.

Fear has a bottom. When you stop running from it, clarity can finally meet you there.

2. Clear the space.

The relationship that’s fine. The comfortable situationship. The safe job. The draining friendship. Sometimes you have to release the fifty percent before you have any proof the hundred percent is coming.

3. Hold the bar.

Don’t clear the space only to fill it with a new fifty percent wearing a different outfit. Maybe means no. Obvious is the standard. Peace, not anxiety. Reaching toward you, not keeping you guessing.

A line to take with you:

“Don’t be upset about the 50%. Get excited for the 100%.”

This episode asks you to feel the fear you’ve been avoiding.

And sometimes your nervous system needs support to feel safe enough to do that.

I created Cultivating Safety: A Guided Breathwork & Somatic Practice to help your body settle enough to stay present with what you’re feeling instead of running from it.

• Cultivating Safety: Guided Breathwork & Somatic Practice

If this episode landed for you, send it to someone who’s been settling and calling it realistic.

Follow The Way Back to You so you don’t miss what’s next. And if the show is helping you come home to yourself, leaving a rating and review helps another big-hearted human find it.

My friend Nikki is forty-eight. She drove hours to visit her mom and stepdad and walked into a house where she felt completely invisible. No questions, no eye contact, just "there's food in the fridge" and a door closing behind it. By the time she called me, she was crying like she was five years old.

In this session we follow it all the way back to one moment. Nikki at four, asking her overwhelmed young mom to play and being told no. She gathered up every stuffed animal she owned, set them in the back seat of the family station wagon, climbed into the driver's seat, and pretended to drive them all away. That was the moment she decided she was on her own. And she has been driving off first, leaving before anyone can leave her, ever since.

This is an episode about the filter we build as children and then see everyone through for the rest of our lives. About the people we quietly cast to play a role, a mother, a father, an ex, our own kids, and how we relate to the character instead of the person actually standing in front of us. And about what opens up the moment you take those glasses off, not to excuse anyone, but to stop missing the people who are still here while they are still here.

One gentle note before you listen. Nikki shares real and painful history, including childhood abuse and being rejected when she came out. If that is tender ground for you, go easy on yourself as you listen. Reframing the story you carry is never the same as excusing what was done to you, and we say so plainly in the episode.

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The Hidden Defense Patterns Quiz

In 1997, I found my ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend's phone number. I would block my number and call her. Not to say anything. Just to hear her voice. I did that for the better part of a year, and I was seventeen.

I promise you have your own version.

This episode is about why we keep looking when we know it's going to hurt. The midnight scroll. The drive past their street. The mutual friend you casually ask for information. I call all of it "driving by his house," and by the end you'll know exactly whose house you're really driving by, and why the person was never the wound.

I walk you through every man I did this with, Ross, Tom, Raffaello, Gabe, and Matt. Not because this is a memoir, but because every story is a mirror. The pattern is always older than the person you're pointing it at. And I'll show you where it ends, because it does end. Not managed, not white-knuckled. Gone.

Somewhere in the middle, we do a small practice together. Ten seconds. Bring yourself to it.

In this episode:

• Why we look when we know it will hurt
• The phrase that will follow you all week: "driving by his house"
• The proof that it was never about love
• Reading his email from inside the house
• Why healing is not a single moment
• The little girl standing in her father's office
• The one thing to try this week

A gentle note: This episode includes a brief, caring reference to self-harm used as an analogy for emotional avoidance. If that is something you have lived, please take care of yourself while listening.

Free practice mentioned in this episode:

Cultivating Safety: Guided Breathwork & Somatic Practice that teaches your body it is safe to feel what you have been driving past.

Want to name your own pattern?

Take the free three minuteThe Hidden Defense Patterns Quiz

If this episode cracked something open for you, share it with someone who has been doing their own version of this.

The Permission to Stop Abandoning Yourself — with Evelyn

Evelyn has done years of inner work. She meditates, she feels her feelings, she shows up. And still the exhaustion won't lift. Still the hollow feeling. Still the sense that no matter how much she gives to her mom, her son, everyone around her, she's falling short.

What we find underneath surprises even her.

This is a live, unscripted coaching session... the real thing. No highlight reel. Just a woman brave enough to lie down on her yoga mat, follow the thread beneath the pattern, and discover what's actually been missing from her healing.

What's missing isn't more work. It's not more meditation or more feeling. It's the two stages most of us skip: getting to the root of the belief, and actually reparenting the part of us that learned to abandon herself in the first place.

Evelyn grew up in a home where emotions weren't welcome. Dad said wait till we get home. Mom stayed quiet. And so Evelyn learned to hold it all together...in the car, in public, in life. She learned to show just enough, never all of it. She learned that other people's needs come first, that love and freedom have to be earned, that happiness might just not be for her.

She's been unlearning that. Slowly, steadily. And in this session, something breaks open.

By the end, she says something that stopped me cold: "I hadn't realized I was looking for permission."

That's it. That's the whole thing. And if you've ever felt it too...that quiet waiting for someone to finally say it's okay to choose yourself... this episode is for you.

In this episode:

• Why years of inner work can still leave you feeling hollow and what's actually missing
• The childhood scene that taught Evelyn to hold it all together (and how we rewrite it)
• What reparenting looks and feels like in real time
• The bamboo principle and why internal peace coming before external results is not a sign you're failing
• How to set a boundary with yourself before you ever set one with anyone else
• The one line that gave us both full body goosebumps

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If something moved in you today, that's little you tapping you on the shoulder. Follow that. Subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who's ready to find their way back.

What are your three memories with your father? Just you and him. If you can't find three, or they all have other people in them, this episode is going to explain more about your relationships than years of talking about them ever has.

Anat Peri tells the story of the phone call that cracked her life open: asking her father what he remembered of their time together, hearing the same three memories she'd found, word for word, and then his shaken question, "Was I a bad father?" What follows is the trail of a wound that ran her life for thirty years without announcing itself: the hundred days of dating herself that changed nothing, the ceremony grief that wasn't healing, and the man whose kiss felt like chemistry but was something much older.

• You'll learn: the ladder of healing (why awareness isn't healing, why willpower isn't healing, why even feeling isn't healing, and what actually is), how to spot a wound disguising itself as attraction, and the one question that reveals the blueprint underneath every relationship you've had.

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The Hidden Defense Patterns Quiz

Elissa came to this session carrying something so many high-achieving women know intimately... an incredible man in her life who wanted to love her, provide for her, and take care of her... and she couldn't let him in. She didn't know why. She just kept pushing him away, isolating, grinding harder, and burning out.

What we discovered had nothing to do with him and everything to do with a little girl who was never allowed to quit gymnastics.

In this episode:

• How the "do it all yourself" identity gets wired in early and why it follows us into adulthood, relationships, and business
• Why blocking receiving from one person means blocking it from everyone including clients, God, and the universe
• What it actually feels like in the body when an old identity begins to release
• The moment Elissa went from heavy and drowning... to feeling like she could fly

Sit with this:

Where in your life are you refusing to receive? And what identity is ready to be released in you?

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Learn more about Training Camp for the Soul

Free gift for listeners:

🎁Cultivating Safety: Guided Breathwork & Somatic Practice a free 17-minute somatic session to help your nervous system feel safe enough to receive:

You've done the courses. Read the books. Maybe you're the one everyone else comes to for advice. So why is that hollow feeling still there?

In this first episode, Anat Peri tells the story of the morning a voice told her to check her boyfriend's backpack, and how what she found exposed eight years of "doing the work" without healing a single wound. If your life looks right and feels wrong, if you've been calling your relationship or your career "fine," this episode will show you the difference between performing your growth and actually feeling your way home.

You'll learn: why insight alone never heals, what "fine" is actually telling you, and how to hear the part of you that already knows

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The Hidden Defense Patterns Quiz

Have you ever done all the work — the therapy, the courses, the self-help books — and still felt like something wasn't healing?

That's where this show begins.

The Way Back to You is a podcast about the patterns of self-abandonment that keep us stuck — in relationships, in love, in life — and what it actually takes to come home to yourself.

Each week, host Anat Peri shares raw personal stories and real coaching sessions that take you beneath the pattern, to the root.

This isn't about advice. It's about going deeper.

Follow the show and start from the beginning. The thread runs through all of it.

Discover your Hidden Defense Pattern — free 3-minute quiz:

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