801 Don't Let Your Past Define You

Knowledge is not enough. We can know what we’re doing isn’t good for us in the long run. We can know that we have weaknesses in certain areas. We can know that we have stored up pain and anxiety. But what do we do with that knowledge? You have to work through your past issues and trauma so that you stop repeating harmful patterns. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it. For this Five Minute Friday, I revisited a conversation I had with Neil Strauss where he shared how he went from being a “pick up artist” to someone capable of having a fulfilling romantic relationship. Neil Strauss is a seven-time New York Times best-selling author. In his latest book, The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships, Strauss dives deep into the worlds of sex addiction, non-monogamy, infidelity, and intimacy, and explores the hidden forces that cause people to choose each other, stay together, and break up. Neil says that learning humility was key to helping him grow as a person. He had to admit to himself that he was smart but didn’t know everything. Learn how to heal from your past trauma and keep evolving in Episode 801. In This Episode You Will Learn: What was driving Neil to become a pickup artist (2:00) The three things Neil learn in therapy (3:00 ) About Somatic Experiencing (4:00 ) Follow me on: Instagram @LewisHowes Twitter @LewisHowes Facebook @Lewis Howes Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is Five Minute Friday.

• 0:10Lewis Howes?

  Neil Strauss is a seven-time New York Times bestselling author. His books, The Game and The Rules of the Game, for which he went undercover in the secret society of pick-up artists for two years, made him an international celebrity and an accidental hero to men around the world. And both books topped the New York Times Bestseller list and were number one on Amazon. Now, in his follow-up book that came out just now, it's called The Truth, an uncomfortable book about relationships.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Sort of started to learn about, okay, what are the forces, unknown, unconscious, hidden forces operating on me that made me make this decision largely having a, you know, depressed, controlling mother and parents in a bad relationship. If that sounds familiar at all, you know, a dad, you know, a very meek dad who kind of gave up everything for, it's so similar, it's insane. And started to learn about that, but here's the crazy part. So I learned all about the fears of intimacy I had, the fears of being controlled, the fears of being smothered, the idea that I kind of have to take care of someone that I'd resent them for a choice I made, right? And, uh, but here's the crazy thing. And then when I told you that story earlier about her and I broke up because I thought monogamy wasn't natural, that happened after I learned everything about myself.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Like I learned it all and then I still did it. And the thing is, this stuff is so strong that the knowledge is not enough. It's like when somebody said, says like, oh, I'm going to stop dating jerks or I'm going to stop dating people like this. And then you're like, wait, you're in another relationship with the same person again. You know, it's a new version of the same person. And so I went through some super deep, that I highly recommend to everybody, kind of healing trauma, emotional work that really purged, that really sort of, let's just say, we can, those connections we were talking about in the box, those, those stories that we build up. And so I went through some really, really heavy, yeah. Well, first thing was humility. I had to accept that, like, as smart as I am, I know nothing because I'm just messing everything up. And, and just say, I know nothing, I let go.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  All my logic is not going to help me, right? You know, the second thing is just not blaming on anyone else. Like, you know, well, she's doing this and she's doing that. It's, I had to just accept all the responsibility. And then the third thing was to just treat, there's this thing I took out of the book, and I'll say it here, that I thought, like, whether we think of them as trauma, like a psychologist may say, or just variables that make you you. I think of all that stuff as like a, all that bad messaging you got growing up, you know, as a sort of like a cancerous ball attached to the heart by an elastic band. Right? If you get rid of that, you can actually see reality and get out of your story and be in a pretty accepting, happy place.

• 2:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  And so what I did was I just kept stretching with every therapy possible. I kept stretching that elastic band till eventually it just sort of, I won't say snapped, but got so weak that it has no pull over me. So there's something called somatic experiencing, which is about releasing, it's almost like if you think of, you know, someone dies in a house with unfinished business and they haunt the house, their business is finished.

• 3:11Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Right? That's like, that's like maybe the stuff in your body, that's a lot of, you know, whatever the stored up pain and sadness and anxiety. And again, seeing parents fight is not a good feeling to have, and that's all locked in there. And so they do things to kind of unlock that and release it after all this time. So that was good. There's a lot of programs that, where you'd sort of really unpack the stuff and do a lot of, let's say, just heavy emotional work through this stuff. And it's life-changing. Like, there's a moment when you can step outside of your own head, outside of your box, and see the world as it is, not as you think it is. Like, oh, it's a beautiful place, I just need to get back there.