In 2017, I Was Like You - Stuck Despite Doing All The Work

My name is Stela Murrizi, and I'm the Guardian of the Vision for the WEL-Systems Institute.

I've spent almost a decade facilitating transformational experiences for women who've done all the work but still feel trapped in familiar patterns. I've guided tens of women through the deeply intimate process of decloaking so they discover how to stop surviving their cultural conditioning and thrive in their truth.

But let me tell you how I got here, because it matters.

When I met my first CODE Model Coach, Sheila Winter Wallace, I had tried everything. A decade of therapy, psychiatry, pharmaceuticals, drugs, Buddhism, Narcotics Anonymous, yoga, retreats -- if it promised transformation, I tried it. I'd spent a decade in addiction recovery, earned multiple degrees, worked in policy with the federal government, and volunteered in spaces that helping women begin healing from trauma (I was particularly interested in domestic and sexual violence – I bet you can you guess why).

I knew all the tools. I understood trauma. I could help others understand their trauma and hone in on resources. But when pressure mounted in my own life? I'd spiral right back into the same familiar loops that trapped me into a reality that felt profoundly disconnected from anything that matters.

I knew better, in my head, but I couldn't live it, in real life. And I was exhausted from trying to manage my self-destructive habits instead of changing the undercurrents that ran the show of my life. 

The moment that brought this to light was when I found myself under a bridge, getting high with a coworker in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, knowing I'd have to look my husband in the eye that night and lie about where I'd been.

On paper, my life was everything I'd wanted — but something in me was hellbent on destroying it. I felt more than discouraged. I felt terrified. I knew if I kept going down this path, I was going to lose everything - my marriage, my career, my life. I had to find something different, but I'd already tried everything. Or so I thought.

That's when I discovered Decloaking, created by Louise LeBrun and learned about this life altering process that would change the trajectory of my life forever. For the first time in a decade of seeking, something finally made sense, not just in my head, but in my body and in real life.

After engaging in the experience, I understood why nothing I tried had stuck. My patterns weren't random chaos that needed to be managed. They were predictable structures formed preverbally. 

My history would not lend me to this position today. You see, I was born into Communist Albania in 1987 as the totalitarian system was collapsing around us. Food was scarce, fear was abundant. When I was just two or three years old, they arrested my father for marching for democracy and threw him in the most violent federal prison. In our home, we lived with domestic violence as the chaos trickled down from state to family. This upbringing, despite the love my parents had for me, is where my nervous system learned that survival meant hypervigilance, people-pleasing, and trying to fix everyone around me.

By seven, like you, I was fully programmed. The Jesuits knew this: "Give me a child until he is seven, and I'll show you the man." Those survival strategies that kept me alive then were the same patterns keeping me trapped as an adult — even in Canada, even after all the therapy, even after I "knew better."

But here's what Decloaking taught me how our mind works and how to interrupt the patterns as they happen. It taught me the futility of asking “what am I going to do?”, or “how am I going to live better?”, or “why am I like this?”. 

Round and round, exhausting yourself asking the same questions that can't be answered at that level.  To interrupt your patterns, you must learn when to intervene and what types of questions to ask that are rooted in your emerging authentic self. Real choice lives at the top, above all your programming. To find answers, you ask "Who am I capable of becoming?" instead of "Who have I always been?"

This single shift in thinking gave me what decades of other approaches couldn't: a way to interrupt the patterns in real-time and choose from my emerging identity instead of my seven-year-old survival programming.

Now, as the Guardian of the Vision for the WEL-Systems Institute, I facilitate Decloaking for women like you -- women who've done the work but still feel trapped inside patterns that no longer serve who they're becoming.