Rewriting Your Love Story: From Old Wounds to Healthy Choices
How do you rewrite your love story to choose a healthy partner this time around? Spoiler alert: heal your trauma!
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How can you rewrite your love story so you end up in a healthy relationship? Owen Smithyman works with self-aware people who have done significant work on themselves – talk therapy, somatic work, plant medicine, coaching — and still feel something running in the background, making decisions for them or making life difficult. As a Peak States Therapy Practitioner, he helps clients resolve emotional wounds permanently, relate more authentically, and live a more vibrant life.
In this episode:
- How past trauma shapes our choices in dating and relationships
- The relationship between beliefs and trauma
- What are peak states, and how are they relevant in dating?
EP 728: Owen Smithyman – Rewriting Your Love Story: From Old Wounds to Healthy Choices
Join Sandy Weiner, THE dating and relationship coach for people over 40, for this inspirational show about attracting and sustaining healthy relationships in midlife and beyond. Learn the most effective tools for transforming the way you date, mate, and relate. Listen to interviews with top experts and cutting edge authors, plus LIVE coaching sessions to help you go on your LAST FIRST DATE!
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How can you rewrite your love story so you end up in a healthy relationship? Owen Smithyman works with self-aware people who have done significant work on themselves – talk therapy, somatic work, plant medicine, coaching — and still feel something running in the background, making decisions for them or making life difficult. As a Peak States Therapy Practitioner, he helps clients resolve emotional wounds permanently, relate more authentically, and live a more vibrant life.
In this episode:
- How past trauma shapes our choices in dating and relationships
- The relationship between beliefs and trauma
- What are peak states, and how are they relevant in dating?
Connect With Owen:
- Website: https://optimize-consciousness.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/optimizeconsciousness/
- TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@optimizeconsciousness
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@optimizeconsciousness
- IG: https://www.instagram.com/optimizeconsciousness
- Free Gifts: A 5-minute guided somatic process to eliminate resistance to change, to make self-care, diet, exercise, and engaging in the dating scene easier and a 30-minute guided, self-paced healing process to resolve fears around dating, relationships, or self-worth https://gift.optimize-consciousness.com/
►Please subscribe/rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts http://bit.ly/lastfirstdateradio or Spotify https://tinyurl.com/lfdradio
►If you’re feeling stuck in dating and relationships and would like to find your last first date, apply for a complimentary 30-minute breakthrough session with me https://lastfirstdate.com/application
►Free Facebook for women https://facebook.com/groups/yourlastfirstdate
►Get my books: Becoming a Woman of Value; How to Thrive in Life and Love https://bit.ly/womanofvaluebook , Choice Points in Dating https://amzn.to/3jTFQe9 and Love at Last https://amzn.to/4erpj7C
►Submit your dating dilemma to be answered on my podcast https://tinyurl.com/datingdilemma
►Group Coaching: https://lastfirstdate.com/the-woman-of-value-club/
►Website https://lastfirstdate.com/
► Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lastfirstdate1/
► TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@lastfirstdate1
►Get Amazon Music Unlimited FREE for 30 days at https://getamazonmusic.com/lastfirstdate
Highlights of this episode:
Why people get stuck in healing
- Cognitive/verbal work often creates strategies but not deep resolution; symptoms keep returning (analogy: repeatedly pumping a tire with a slow leak).
- Awareness/insight alone frequently isn’t enough to change unconscious bodily associations or attachment patterns.
- Some issues are subtle or multigenerational (epigenetic/generational trauma) and increase fragility to stress.
- People sometimes unconsciously recreate familiar trauma (diathesis-stress model) or avoid happiness because chaos feels familiar and “safe.”
Trauma patterns in dating & relationships
- Family-of-origin dynamics often replay in adult relationships (e.g., attracting overbearing partners when a parent was overbearing).
- Associational trauma and projection: unconscious associations make people feel familiar/safe with unhealthy dynamics; projections make partners seem to possess traits that actually originate in the observer.
- Common behaviors driven by trauma: provoking untrustworthiness, seeking drama for dopamine, attempting to “fix” partners, and expecting others to fill unmet internal needs.
- Rewiring attachment and attraction is possible by resolving the underlying bodily trauma rather than only applying cognitive strategies.
Therapies, methods & practical steps
- Somatic-focused approaches (e.g., EMDR, NARM, EFT, Peak States Therapy) target trauma in the body and use nervous-system modifiers (bilateral stimulation, tapping, regression) to allow safe discharge and integration.
- Peak States Therapy: described as a toolbox-oriented somatic method attractive to both analytical and experiential minds; useful for complex or generational trauma, projections, and attachment patterns.
- Simple in-session practice: say a limiting belief aloud → notice the emotion → scan the body to locate the trauma sensation → apply an appropriate somatic trauma process.
- Practical self-care steps: prioritize bodily care (sleep, movement, nutrition) to reduce baseline distress and clarify relationship issues.
- Try multiple modalities and practitioners to find what truly resolves the stuck patterns.
Watch this episode on YouTube here:
Connect With Owen
- Website: https://optimize-consciousness.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/optimizeconsciousness/
- TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@optimizeconsciousness
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@optimizeconsciousness
- IG: https://www.instagram.com/optimizeconsciousness
- Free Gifts:A 5-minute guided somatic process to eliminate resistance to change, to make self-care, diet, exercise, and engaging in the dating scene easier and a 30-minute guided, self-paced healing process to resolve fears around dating, relationships, or self-worth https://gift.optimize-consciousness.com/
Please subscribe/rate and review the podcast here.
Send me your dating dilemmas to be featured in an upcoming episode: https://tinyurl.com/datingdilemma
If you’re feeling stuck in dating and relationships and would like to finally find love, apply for a complimentary 30-minute love breakthrough session with Sandy https://lastfirstdate.com/application
Join Your Last First Date on Facebook https://facebook.com/groups/yourlastfirstdate
Get a copy of Sandy’s books, Becoming a Woman of Value; How to Thrive in Life and Love and Choice Points in Dating; Empowering Women to Make Healthier Decisions in Love and Love at Last: True Stories of Falling in Love Later in Life
