How to Be the Love You Seek: Break Cycles, Find Peace, and Heal Your Relationships

Dr. Nicole LePera, a clinical psychologist and author of the bestselling How to Do the Work, builds her second book around a central thesis: To transform relationships with others, we must first transform our relationship with ourselves. Drawing on neuroscience, polyvagal theory (a framework describing how the vagus nerve shapes safety and stress responses), and her own personal history, she argues that most relationship dissatisfaction stems not from the failings of others but from unresolved childhood conditioning. The book presents a sequential framework for healing, moving from the body to the mind to the heart.

LePera opens by acknowledging that most readers are experiencing relationship stress. Over a decade of clinical practice, she observed that despite clients' use of popular tools like Dr. Gary Chapman's "love languages," categories for how people prefer to give and receive affection, most could not sustain the connections they wanted. Asking others to modify their behavior, she argues, often backfires because people cannot control others. She illustrates this through a personal anecdote: One Christmas, her then-partner Sara planned a thoughtful holiday, yet LePera felt the same disconnection she experienced in every relationship. Only gradually did she recognize that she was the common thread in all her unfulfilling bonds.

LePera traces this recognition through a series of romantic relationships in which she maintained emotional distance, from her first boyfriend, who described her as "emotionally unavailable," through several girlfriends, to her marriage to a woman named Vivienne. During post-doctoral psychoanalytic training, she began to see that she had been keeping relationships superficial by suppressing her emotions and prioritizing others' needs. Asking Vivienne for a divorce was the first time she prioritized her own desires, marking the beginning of her awareness that her self-sacrificing habits constituted self-abandonment rather than selflessness.

She locates the origin of these patterns in her childhood. Her older sister experienced life-threatening health crises, and her mother had chronic pain that was never openly discussed. The family bonded through shared worry rather than emotional connection, teaching LePera that her own needs were less important. Drawing on attachment theory, first developed by psychoanalyst John Bowlby in 1952, she explains that a child's sense of safety with parent-figures shapes the relationships they seek for life. She defines trauma broadly as any stress that exceeds a person's ability to process it emotionally, including chronic neglect and emotional abandonment.

LePera introduces the embodied Self, the integrated expression of body, mind, and soul, and argues that healing must follow a specific sequence. First, people must meet their physical needs, because a chronically stressed nervous system cannot support emotional growth. She recounts how she began eating nourishing foods, establishing a consistent sleep schedule, and practicing deep belly breathing. Second, people must develop mind consciousness by learning to witness the subconscious thoughts that drive up to 95 percent of daily reactions. Third, people must reconnect with their soul or authentic Self by tapping into the intuition that lives in the heart. She draws on research from the HeartMath Institute, an organization studying heart-brain coherence, to argue that the heart, containing approximately 40,000 neurons, sends more messages to the nervous system than vice versa.

The middle chapters explain the neurobiology behind dysfunctional patterns. LePera introduces trauma bonds, conditioned patterns of relating that mirror one's earliest attachments. She illustrates this through Dominik and Monique, a composite married couple: Dominik, raised by a hypervigilant mother, associated love with being monitored; Monique, raised by a depressed mother and an inconsistently available father, coped through hypervigilance and control. Their infatuation was driven by the familiarity of each other's stress patterns. LePera explains the autonomic nervous system's four stress responses, fight, flight, freeze or shutdown, and fawn, and argues that when these become a child's default mode, they persist into adulthood. She labels each: Eruptor mode (fight), Distractor mode (flight), Detacher mode (freeze or shutdown), and Pleaser mode (fawn).

LePera then introduces seven conditioned selves, roles rooted in the Internal Family Systems (IFS) method developed by psychologist Dr. Richard Schwartz. These roles, learned in childhood to feel safe, are: the Caretaker, who gains identity through meeting others' needs; the Overachiever, who seeks constant validation; the Underachiever, who hides undesirable parts to avoid judgment; the Rescuer/Protector, who is drawn to rescuing the vulnerable; the Life of the Party, who avoids conflict and uncomfortable emotions; the Yes Person, who agrees without expressing preferences; and the Hero Worshiper, who idealizes others and distrusts personal instincts. She identifies herself as primarily an Overachiever and illustrates the framework through examples including Diego, who was parentified (forced into an adult caregiving role as a child) and became a Yes Person. She argues these roles become harmful only when childhood wounds drive their compulsive repetition.

The later chapters shift to practical intervention. LePera devotes a chapter to body consciousness, the practice of sensing internal bodily sensations to regulate the nervous system. Techniques include deep belly breathing for calming fight-or-flight and the Wim Hof Method, a breathing and cold-exposure practice, for energizing a freeze state. Additional practices include grounding in nature, nutritional guidance for gut-brain health, Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) tapping (stimulating acupressure points while focusing on distress), and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy, a trauma treatment using bilateral stimulation. She then addresses mind consciousness, explaining how subconscious ego stories, narratives rooted in childhood shame, distort perception and drive reactive behavior. She presents empowerment consciousness, the practice of noticing ego-driven thoughts and choosing intentional responses, as a four-step process: witness the ego story, question its thoughts, reparent the hurt inner child, and rewire beliefs through affirmations.

LePera argues that the physical heart is the seat of intuition and authentic selfhood. She defines heart consciousness as a state of heart-based awareness in which one receives and acts on the heart's intuitive guidance, and explains heart coherence, a measurable state in which the heart and brain operate in energetic coordination. Her own journey began during a trip to Bali with her partner Lolly, where she read Gregg Braden's The Divine Matrix and encountered heart-brain coherence research. Through daily stillness, cold therapy, and intentional check-ins, she gradually learned to hear her heart's messages.

The final chapters extend these principles to relationships and the collective. LePera introduces co-regulation, the process of using one's regulated nervous system to help another person feel safe. She illustrates this through the composite couple Alejandra and Luca: When Alejandra stopped taking Luca's avoidance personally and remained calm during difficult conversations, her body sent Luca signals of safety that gradually allowed him to open up. LePera presents five steps to empower relationships: embody your Self, create nervous system safety, witness your conditioned Self, reconnect with your authentic Self, and cultivate empowerment consciousness. She argues that individual regulation and heart coherence can spread to groups, citing a 1993 study in which 4,000 meditators in Washington, DC, correlated with a 23 percent drop in violent crime.

In the epilogue, LePera reveals that she, Lolly, and Jenna, the first employee at The Holistic Psychologist (LePera's professional platform and online community), had been experiencing escalating tension despite their close working relationship. One morning, Jenna shared that she had romantic feelings for both LePera and Lolly. LePera and Lolly discovered they were both open to exploring an expanded relationship, and the tension dissipated almost immediately. LePera reflects that she and Lolly had been ignoring their heart's intuitive signals, and she offers this as a final illustration that the heart's messages, however unexpected, are worth heeding. She concludes by affirming that love lives within each person, and that reconnecting with the heart's compassion is how one becomes the love one seeks.