Nicole LePera

I still try to do that, which is why I have a very compassionate approach.

And I'm still learning to give myself compassion and say, wait a minute, I'm hurt.

And this is now what I need to do because of that.

That's what I'm perfectly describing here.

I was disconnected from my own self.

And on the outside...

I appeared to be unbothered.

I was so shook when I had my first boyfriend.

I was 16 years old.

We dated for about a year and a half in high school.

We were going off to college and he broke up with me.

And I was devastated when he broke up with me.

And he more or less told me he was a very eloquent, young, developing man at that time and said, you're emotionally unavailable.

And I was like, I'm what?

Because inside, meanwhile, I'm having a ton of emotions in these moments that I'm describing.

I'm just not able to outwardly communicate in them.

So I kind of logged that.

I eventually discovered I liked women in college.

I was like, oh, that's why I was emotionally unavailable.

It turns out when I was in my training program to become a psychoanalyst, which I did not complete, and I was in a training program with other analysts.