Why You Feel Disconnected And How To Restore Purpose

If you’ve ever felt lost, numb, or silently asked yourself “Why do I feel so disconnected from life?” — this episode was made for you.

Lisa A. Romano breaks down the root of disconnection through the lens of trauma, neuroscience, and spiritual awakening, revealing that the real crisis isn't outside of us — it’s the illusion that we are separate from our true self.

From childhood abandonment to social media comparison, our brains are programmed to seek meaning outside of us. But the more we chase purpose externally, the further we drift from the one place it has always been — within.

Transcript

Welcome to Breakdown to Breakthrough,

The podcast that empowers you to transform your life by awakening to your true,

Authentic self.

I'm Lisa A.

Romano,

Your host.

As an award-winning author and certified life coach,

I've dedicated my life to helping others understand the incredible power of an organized mind.

I believe that true empowerment begins with awakening to our false self.

My mission is to support you on your journey toward mental and emotional regeneration through conscious and deliberate awakening.

In this podcast,

I'll share insights,

Tools,

And transformative stories that illuminate the path to healing and self-discovery.

If you're struggling with meaning in life,

This session is for you.

I think that we've all struggled with meaning and with purpose.

If you're human,

Chances are that at one point in your life you've struggled with these concepts like what is it all about?

Why am I here?

People who have faced their shadows and who continue to walk through the many veils,

The many illusions of what it is to be a human,

I feel these are the people that we should be asking the questions of,

Like what is the purpose and what is the meaning of life?

From my perspective,

I would like to offer those of you who follow my work some of the ideas that have really helped me find purpose and find meaning.

In the short run,

The answer would be the entire purpose of life is in the now.

It is integration.

It is the war has stopped in my mind that has me chasing something outside of me for a sense of purpose.

The internal battlefield is now governed by a sense of peace,

A sense of surrender,

And a sense of acceptance and a sense of calm.

So the rat race in my head has been silenced.

Now here's the thing.

If we get too philosophical,

We bypass quantum science,

The observer effect,

And you are ultimately the only observer that you should really care about in what it comes to your worldview because you are the observer and there is an observer observing what the observer inside of you is observing.

So if we go too philosophical,

Then we miss out on the quantum science.

We also miss out on the neuroscience.

If we go to,

If we tend to just think about mental health,

Then we get too far in the rabbit hole of a DSM and we start labeling people.

And again,

All this really does is chop us up into little pieces,

Which I believe is the existential crisis.

I'm separate from myself.

The answer is how do I merge with myself?

How do I bring all of these little pieces of me back into some cohesive understanding of a higher self?

And how do all of these lower aspects of self,

How the heck do they all get along and play in the sandbox without,

Without conflict,

Without,

I shouldn't feel that way.

Yeah.

Well,

You feel that way.

I shouldn't have done that.

Yeah.

Well,

You did do that.

That type of thing that happens in our head.

How do we integrate in such a way that we can appreciate the now and find meaning just in being?

How do we do that?

Well,

I think if we're looking outside of ourselves,

That's fine.

As long as whoever you're listening to points you back to the self and says,

You are the way that everything that you seek is within you,

That the battle is not outside of you.

It is your perception of self.

It is your first,

The first veil you have to break through,

In my opinion,

Is the illusion of separation from your highest self.

So that's the first lie that we're all,

That we all are born into,

That we're somehow separate from self.

And I,

In my opinion,

That happens when we have trauma,

When there's abandonment trauma,

When we come from toxic homes,

Where our parents are terribly emotionally dysregulated.

They're so busy trying to take care of us,

Or they're so busy worrying about world events that they missed the mark and they can't balance their energy and they can't help us ground.

And our little tiny neurological fibers in our brain are very,

Very short.

There's no landing place.

There's no moment of harmony or consistent harmony that a child can ground to so they can get out of their limbic brain and develop activity in the prefrontal cortex or the neocortex.

It's just,

In lots of cases,

It's just a mess.

And so we have this disconnect in childhood.

We're disconnected from the two beings that were intended to ground us.

So if they're not grounded,

We don't get grounded.

Ah,

There's the first separation.

I'm separate from mother,

Mother is separate from mother,

Father is separate from mother,

Father is separate from father,

And so on and so on.

These separate beings can't connect to me.

And if I can't connect to them,

I can't connect to me.

Boom.

So there's the first illusion of separation.

Before we came here,

We were one with everything.

There was no concept of separation in our mother's womb.

But we're born,

Umbilical cord gets cut,

And we are freaking separate.

We're getting smacked,

Lights,

Camera,

Action,

Let's go.

And I think this is what happens is we take on this persona and the persona that we believe that we are becomes integrated into this brain map that we carry,

Which becomes a personality and identity that we as human beings never question.

And again,

That's the psychological piece,

But it is an illusion.

Your personality is an illusion.

Your personality is the product of what has happened to you and the meaning that you have given the things and the experiences that have happened to you.

I see a snake,

You see a garden hose.

I see a tree,

You see a monster in a forest.

It's all about your perception and your perception,

Your unique perception is determining what you see in the field.

And so if you're tortured by your story,

Then you're not going to find meaning because you're still in this dark forest.

Think about Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.

She was asleep and she was in this terrible forest.

All of these scary characters were in this forest.

You can't find meaning when you're still in the forest.

And that's why I always advise people to start meditation and start meditating and get into a mindfulness practice because you will be,

Your mind will slow down,

Neurologically your mind will slow down and consciousness,

Well hopefully consciousness will awaken and metacognition will come back online.

Your nervous system will calm down and you will be able to activate more skillfully the observer within you who is now observing the way you think versus reacting to the way you think.

This is when we can use separation to our advantage.

Like oh wait,

I'm not my thoughts.

No,

You're not your thoughts.

Oh wait,

I'm not my career.

No.

Oh wait,

I'm not my Instagram page and all my followers.

Hell to the no.

Oh wait,

I'm not my nails,

My extensions.

No.

I'm not my beautiful wedding up on the hill.

No.

I'm not all my planning.

I'm not all this neurotic planning.

No.

I'm not my face.

No.

You're none of it.

You're none of it,

None of it,

None of it.

Let it go.

Stop it.

That's silly.

That's ego stuff,

Right?

Your ego is going to fight you on that.

It's going to cling to whatever identity.

Now you could cling to an identity that in terms of superficiality,

You presume,

Again,

It's your ego presuming that,

Oh,

Everyone thinks I'm great because I have this great Instagram page or I'm so sexy and I'm so rich and I'm so whatever.

Look at me flying to Dubai.

You could think that's everything.

Your ego could also identify with the opposite end of the scale where nothing works out for me.

My life sucks.

Nobody has it worse than me.

Do you know what happened to me?

Like I'm not doing that.

I'm not going outside.

I'm not trying that thing.

I'm not doing that.

Your ego can also cling to that end of the spectrum due to trauma.

And you wouldn't be wrong because those were your experiences and those experiences did shape your perception of the world.

And of course your experiences,

What's downloaded into your brain says the world is scary and bad things happen.

And that would all lend itself again to neuroscience,

This idea that the brain is predictive machine.

Now your brain is just in predictive mode.

It's predicting the next bad thing from happening.

So I could be on one end of the spectrum,

Completely self-centered and believe that I'm so awesome and my life is so awesome and I want everyone to think that my life is so awesome and predict that people are going to think my life is so awesome.

And I can fall into a pattern of doing things that my brain has decided are the types of things that other people think are awesome.

I could live in that world.

It's still not who you really are.

Or I could live in the other end of the world where these bad things have happened.

I'm predicting that the next thing is going to happen.

My mother's going to abandon me if I set that boundary and my husband's going to stop talking to me.

If I confront my daughter about her drinking or her alcoholism or what I think may be alcoholism,

This bad thing's going to happen.

Oh,

I better not say anything.

Oh,

I did some bad things to my children when I was younger.

Let's just make believe it never happened.

So I never have to face that.

So it's this idea that we can actually,

Our brains can go the other way too.

Now what's most important is that we all understand that our brains are predicting all the time and they predict based on our history.

So on one end of the spectrum,

If I grew up and I felt invisible and I believe that the answer is to be seen,

I can in a very materialistic,

Socially governed,

Socially media governed world it seems,

I can very quickly figure out what works in terms of algorithms to be seen.

It's a fake being seen.

It's not real.

It's not altruism.

It's not authenticity.

But based on my patterns and my programs from the past,

Based on my pain and what I associate pleasure with,

I will construct a world,

A virtual reality world inside my head that says,

Ah,

This is the answer to my woe.

You'll age.

You'll keep doing this.

And if it's really not rooted in true meaning and oneness,

It'll make you feel very empty.

You're going to feel controlled by posting on social media and looking for external validation and the meaning and purpose in life would be outside of you,

Still not inside of you.

And if you're on the other end of the spectrum where you're giving up on life and life sucks and they have no meaning in life,

Your neurology is working against you.

And it's not your fault that you feel that way.

But it comes down to,

Well,

How do I,

On either end of the spectrum,

How do I find meaning and purpose in life?

And so again,

If we go back to neurology,

Because I discovered that when you put people in a learning mode,

Anxiety comes down,

Default mode network lowers,

Nervous system activation lowers,

The amygdala is inhibited,

And prefrontal lobe activity comes back online.

I think that's giving my life meaning and purpose.

Wait a minute.

You mean to tell me if I meditate and if I learn something,

I will be 10 times,

A hundred times,

A thousand times more likely to feel closer to a sense of meaning and purpose?

Yes.

So if I set a goal to just meditate,

Even though my world sucks or my life sucks,

If I just set a goal to meditate every day and I reach that goal every day,

Even if it's just for five minutes,

You're telling me that that's enough to spark meaning and purpose?

Yes.

Because you are in control.

You see,

We're looking for meaning and purpose outside of us,

And we just can't find it out there.

And what has hurt us so much is this idea of separation.

COVID put us all into home environments.

We're all working from home.

And we're proving that we might be more effective and efficient when it comes to work,

But we're not doing better socially.

We have a mental health crisis.

We are struggling with purpose.

We're struggling with trying to figure out who we are and giving ourselves meaning.

Like really,

We're in bad shape.

And then we have social media,

Which again,

Separates us and people are so fake on social media and they're getting their hits and their likes on social media.

They're getting their sponsorships on social media,

But it does make us feel disconnected from others.

And those of us who are isolated,

We look at people who seem so perfect and we think their life is so much better than ours,

Which only makes us feel less worthy.

And we have to really think about that.

And we have to take some,

I guess,

Sovereignty and autonomy over that,

Where we rebuke that.

We rebuke the separation and we rebuke the people who have fallen into this idea that separation is the way,

That war is the way,

That hating other people is the way.

We have to rebuke that because what is always going to help us in our lives feel more meaning and feel more purposeful is connecting with other people.

But first we have to bridge the connection to self.

We have to change the perception of self.

So if you take anything away from this session,

What I would like for you to take away today is that this idea that I have to heal my inner perception of who I am.

In all of my work,

It is founded on you are enough.

There's nothing wrong with you.

It was just your programming.

You were born to dysfunctional people,

A bunch of things went awry,

And that is why you could not connect to yourself.

That is why you develop codependency.

That's why you feel separate.

That's why you feel separate from others.

You are really separate from the self.

So my work is gently bringing people back to the self,

Gently overcoming fear,

Gently shifting their perceptions of self,

And giving them a meaning for just being true to the self.

And we have to go through a bunch of veils.

Setting a boundary for someone who is used to fawning is a huge veil.

It's a huge veil.

Wow,

I can say no and survive.

It was just fear.

It was just fear.

Wow,

I can end a relationship and survive.

It was tough,

But yeah,

You could do that.

I could start all over.

I quit college.

That's what I did.

I quit college.

I got married.

I had three babies.

And a year and a half after my youngest was born,

I was like,

I can't take this anymore.

I was terrified.

The bridge appeared after I jumped,

And I survived.

And my life improved vastly because I stopped believing in separation of self.

I stopped believing that my ability to love myself was in the hands of another person.

I stopped believing in a God outside of me.

And I started to believe in what scripture said,

That I was an extension of God.

God breathed spirit into me.

If there is a God,

Then God is the perfect harmony between male and female.

At least that's my opinion.

You don't have to agree with me.

But this idea that we are separate is so silly because I come from a male sperm and a female egg.

So there it is.

The answer is unity.

It's bringing me back into balance,

The male and the female within me,

Bringing it into balance.

Just me,

Whoever I am,

Feeling comfortable in both those energies.

We have special gifts each of us bring to the world.

And male energy is very different than female energy.

And balanced,

It's the most beautiful thing in the world.

And so we need people and communities that are more focused on unity versus me.

And we're coming out of that,

I hope,

This narcissistic ego driven age that I believe social media has sparked.

Look at me,

Listen to me.

I'm the most important thing.

I have something to say and I'm going to say it.

And just assuming that that opinion is fact and that my opinion negates anybody else's opinion.

I mean,

If that's not narcissism,

I don't know what is.

I mean,

If you're going to share your opinion,

Share your opinion.

Do it lovingly.

Don't do it to harass and abuse people.

Do it with the intention of enlightening people and bringing people together that have diverse perspectives.

Because anything else,

In my opinion,

Is destructive and it is self-centered and it will destroy a family.

It will destroy a mind.

And if you look at narcissists,

Narcissists are unable to commune in healthy ways with others.

They hurt themselves.

No one wants to be with them.

If anybody's with them,

Everybody else is talking about them behind their back.

And it's a very sad thing to not be able to get along with other people and to be anti-social.

And when you're anti-social,

In lots of ways you're anti-connection,

You're anti-love.

And so merging with the love of self to the point where there is no fear anymore with who you are.

There is no fear about what other people are going to say about you.

You live with authenticity.

You live with autonomy.

You know that you're coming from the most beautiful place and you give people permission to see you through their lens,

Knowing that we're all asleep.

Everybody sees everybody else through a very subjective lens.

It is not objective.

It is not objective.

It is subjective.

And once that clicked,

That really,

That really triggered my nervous system to calm down.

It was just like,

What are you worried about?

What are you worried about?

That person is,

Is,

Can only see you through their perception.

So if they have judgments that they're carrying around in their head,

That's all they can see you in their field of perception.

You are a biatch.

You're this.

You're a liar.

You're a fake,

Whatever.

Give them permission to have their perception.

And so that completely updated my brain.

I got a new brain map.

It was like,

Oh my God,

I'm free.

I'm free.

People can see me any way they want.

Like this is fabulous.

Why didn't anybody tell me this when I was like seven?

And so that's why I do what I do is why I teach my granddaughter all of these concepts.

I teach my grandchildren,

I teach my niece's children,

These concepts early.

Don't get wrapped up in the world of separation.

Heal the separation within.

Understand the separation outside of you.

Understand that you can have meaning in anything.

The meaning is just being.

When you can just be in light of everything and anything that's happening in the world,

You don't longer burn yourself out trying to be good enough.

You're not running yourself ragged,

Trying to scrub off the stain of shame,

Being the adult child of an alcoholic or a narcissistic parent.

You're no longer acquiescing to narcissistic siblings.

You're no longer tolerating gaslighting and crazy making conversations and the people in your life.

You're learning to say no.

You're learning to really resurrect yourself.

You're learning to do a soul recovery.

Like you matter.

You matter.

When you start connecting to the sun and to the moon and to flowers and to trees and to animals,

And you start realizing you are an extension of everything and everything is you,

Then every moment,

In every moment,

You'll find meaning and you'll find purpose.

It is never going to be the purpose of anything that's happening outside of you.

You could find meaning in anything,

Even in the worst of times,

By going nonresistant to what you can't control.

There's meaning in that.

There's purpose in that.

So I so hope that this quick little chat has given you something to think about,

That you're enough.

Change the perception of who you think you are.

You don't need permission to be yourself.

You don't need love from the outside.

You are enough.

Really start thinking about what is the root identity?

What is your perception of self?

When I realized that I was enough,

That it was only my relationship with my mom and my dad and growing up as the adult child of two very dysfunctional people who were adult shoulders of alcoholics.

When I realized that that created an internal framework that was false,

That's when I broke through the first veil of self-identity.

I was able to reclaim my perception of self,

And there are many veils that I've had to traverse in the future and veils that I'm still walking through now.

Namaste,

Everybody.

Until next time.

Bye for now.

You are enough.

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Love Lisa's work, it's helped me so much 🙏