Some of What's Holding You Back Isn't Even Yours

You didn't choose the patterns running beneath your confidence. But you can be the one who finally changes them.

My great-grandfather was arrested in the middle of the night.

It was the 1940s in Soviet Russia. He was taken from his small house in Siberia while his daughter watched, a twelve-year-old girl named Valentina. My grandmother-to-be, whose name I was given decades later.

Her father had told a joke. The wrong joke, in the wrong place, to the wrong person. That was enough to be declared an enemy of the state. He was executed. His family never saw him again, never got to say goodbye. His daughter Valentina, at twelve, was forced to denounce her own father to remain in school.

I can only begin to imagine what that does to a person. What it does to a family.

I was born forty years later, in a different city, into a different kind of life. I never met my grandmother Valentina; she had already passed. And yet something traveled. For years, I was perfectly comfortable teaching finance, coaching clients, speaking to rooms full of people, as long as the subject wasn't me. The moment I was asked to share something personal, something about my own life or my family, a door closed quietly inside me. Not a conscious choice. Just a closing.

I believe that was inherited. Not as memory, but as a body-level instruction: being seen is dangerous. Speaking about yourself has consequences. My grandmother learned that at twelve, with her whole life on the line. Epigenetic research suggests that this kind of trauma doesn't end with the person who lived it. It passes through the body, through the nervous system, for four generations or more. Her terror didn't need to tell me its story. It simply arrived in my cells.

I was fortunate. My family came to the United States. I built my adult life with freedoms she never had. And yet my nervous system hadn't received the update. Freedom in the world doesn't automatically mean freedom in the body.

It took real inner work to change that. Not affirmations, not reframing, not willing myself to be braver. Work at the level where the pattern actually lived.

Telling Yourself to Be Confident Doesn't Work

Most advice about impostor syndrome operates at the level of thought. Track your wins. Reframe the story. Remind yourself of your credentials. This advice isn't wrong. It's just insufficient, because it's aimed at the wrong layer. The shrinking response affects your thinking, but it doesn't live in your mind. It lives in your body: your breath, your shoulders, the way you move when you walk into a room that feels like it's measuring you.

Here's the distinction that matters: your mind can hold two things simultaneously: I know I'm capable, and I feel like I'm about to be found out. That gap between knowing and feeling is not a logical error. It's a nervous system response. And the nervous system doesn't take instructions from your thinking mind. It doesn't care about your promotion or the three months of work you deserve credit for. It only cares about survival. And if being seen has ever registered as dangerous, it will use everything it has to protect you, by making you smaller, in the exact moments that matter most.

Your Body Is Running a Much Older Program

The body remembers. Not only your own lived experience: what happened to you at five, at twelve, in your first job, in the marriage you eventually had the courage to leave. It also carries the emotional imprints of your lineage. Epigenetic research has shown that trauma doesn't just live in memory. It lives in the body's stress response, passed down through generations in ways that science is only beginning to map.

The young part of you that shows up in high-stakes meetings isn't sabotage. She's protection. She learned at some point, or inherited the knowledge, that being too visible, too much, too loud was dangerous. Her job was to keep you safe. She's still doing it.

The work isn't to silence her or override her. It's to meet her, and to let the adult woman in you offer her the safety she never had. When that integration happens, she doesn't need to run the show anymore. She becomes part of the team rather than the one at the wheel.

And once that shift occurs, it becomes remarkable how much easier it is to do the things you've always known you were capable of.

If you've ever felt like you don't fully belong in the room you worked so hard to enter, or frozen when it was time to speak up for yourself, that response may not even be entirely yours. It may be inherited. Something passed down quietly, through bodies, through generations, waiting for someone to finally tend to it.

What Becomes Possible

I share all of this because I've seen what opens up when women do this work, not just for themselves, but for the generations behind them and the ones still to come.

The goal was never just a better performance review or more confidence in meetings, though those things do follow. The goal is becoming free to inhabit your own life fully: to be seen without bracing, to speak without shrinking, to lead without the quiet weight of a pattern that was never really yours to carry.

That freedom is available to you. And it starts at the level where the pattern actually lives.

If this landed for you, there's more where it came from. I write about the inner work behind real professional change, the kind that doesn't show up in most leadership advice. Subscribe to my newsletter to receive new articles and be the first to hear about upcoming workshops, or if you want to look at your patterns head-on, message me to request a complimentary conversation.