From the Empowered Vision Series on See Her Now Podcast

I always say on this show that we all have lenses through which we see the world. Lenses shaped by childhood experiences, old beliefs, and stories we’ve been telling ourselves for so long, we’ve stopped noticing them.

But every once in a while, a guest comes on and shows me what it actually looks like to have those lenses shatter and rebuild from scratch.

That’s what happened when I sat down with Chanoa Inez.

Chanoa is the author of Dream On, and her story begins at what she describes as the most perfect day of her life –  and ends, the very next morning, in devastation.

What she uncovered in the years that followed is something I don’t think I’ve heard anyone articulate quite the way she did: the profound, hidden connection between victim mindset and self-love.

The Most Perfect Day, and Then

Chanoa had been living in Miami when she fell in love with a man from Montenegro, and with Montenegro itself.

After visiting and finding it spectacular, they made a plan: to move there the following summer. If it didn’t work out, they could always come back.

Their first day in their new home was everything they’d dreamed of. They spent it in the capital, then headed to the coast, where a friend had lent them his condo right on the water.

That evening at a restaurant, there was live music, and nobody was dancing – until he pulled her hand and led her to the floor. They were the only ones dancing.

“It was the first day in my life up until then that I felt like everything was perfect,” she told me. “Everything was just aligned, and I was so grateful.”

She woke up the next morning. He didn’t.

He was 41 years old. Healthy, energetic, always the most alive person in the room. And he had passed away from a blood clot in his sleep.

Chanoa found herself alone in a foreign country, unable to say the word “help”. She opened the balcony doors and started yelling in English. The neighbors who came running included a teenage girl who had been at that same restaurant the night before, had watched them dance. Her sister, it turned out, lived in Miami. She spoke perfect English and helped Chanoa call for help.

“It was so surreal,” Chanoa said. “I was just seeing happy families dressed for the beach. The sun is shining. It’s a perfect day. And meanwhile it’s like hell going on for me.”

The Grief That Went Underground

Chanoa decided not to go back to Miami. Half the people in her life thought that was wise. The other half thought she’d lost her mind. But as she explained it to me, I completely understood: Miami was their city. Every corner would hold a memory. People who didn’t yet know he was gone would ask how he was doing. It was just too much.

She stayed through his Orthodox Christian funeral traditions, through the 40-day ceremony, with his family. Then she stayed for six more years.

From the outside, she looked like she was living her life.

But the grief had gone underground, quietly doing its work. It started showing up in her body — food allergies, sensitivities, chronic health issues that no doctor could simply fix.

She tried everything: meditation, yoga, Amazon plant medicine retreats, Tibetan healing sessions. Each thing would help for a while, then she’d be back to flat.

“I didn’t realize so much of that was tied to Bodo’s passing,” she told me. “I didn’t realize I’d just gone underground.”

This is something I see in my work over and over. How unprocessed grief finds its way into the body when we don’t have the tools or the space to move through it consciously. Chanoa had no roadmap. She was young, she’d never meditated, and the culture around her just said: keep moving forward.

The Victim Mindset Hiding in Plain Sight

After six-plus years in Europe, Chanoa moved to Los Angeles. And it was there that she started seeing a pattern she’d never seen before. One that had been with her far longer than Bodo’s death.

It started with something small: a friend who would make a whole production at restaurants whenever the server asked about Chanoa’s food allergies. Dramatic retelling, the whole table drawn in, “Oh my God” reactions all around.

Chanoa started noticing she felt worse after those moments, not better.

The real breakthrough came when that same friendship ended.

She woke up the morning after dinner with this friend and had a sudden, jarring realization: this friendship had the exact same dynamics as the romantic relationship I had just ended.

She called the friend and ended it. And in that moment, she saw the full picture: she had unconsciously chosen the two people she spent the most time with to be people who kept her in a victim mindset.

When she told me this, I had to stop her. Because I think her message is so important.

The victim mindset, she explained, didn’t start with Bodo’s death. It had roots in her childhood.  something she isn’t ready to share publicly, and I respected that completely.

But his death cemented it. A loss that profound, that inexplicable — the why me, why us of it — can harden whatever stories we were already carrying.

And here’s what really hit me from our conversation: in Western culture, nobody usually flags it. Nobody pulls you aside and says, I think you might be seeing this as a victim. As Chanoa says, we treat it as normal.

Sometimes the dramatic stories are even rewarded! People connect with them and gather around them. Chanoa didn’t realize what those stories were doing to her until long after the pattern was set.

The Thing About Victim Mindset and Self-Love

This is the part of our conversation I keep coming back to.

I’ve talked a lot on this show about the lenses through which we see the world. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone connect victim mindset and self-love the way Chanoa did, and it genuinely shifted something for me.

Here’s what I think many of us miss: when we’re in a victim mindset, it can actually feel like self-love. “Poor me, I can’t do that.” “I deserve better than this.” “Nobody understands what I’m going through.” It sounds like self-advocacy. It sounds like caring about yourself.

But Chanoa flipped it completely.

“To be a victim is to give away your power,” she said. “It’s to say that you are just at the mercy of the world around you.”

Real self-love, in her framing, is an act of taking back your power. It’s saying: yes, there are things outside my control, but I am not defined by them.

She tested this recently when toxic fumes from building renovations forced her out of her apartment for a month. A friend told her she was objectively a victim in that situation. She refused the title.

“There’s a circumstance happening outside of my control, and I’m going to figure it out. But I reject the title. It’s so disempowering.”

And then she shared something that I think connects so many dots: the chronic tendonitis in her writing hand, which five years of physical therapy and treatment couldn’t touch, cleared up once she started doing this inner work.

She connected it to the fifth energy center — the throat, the voice — and to a period when she wasn’t speaking her truth. When the victim thoughts arose and she learned to redirect them, the pain eventually left.

The body keeps the score, as they say.

How She Actually Changed: Dr. Joe Dispenza and Going Deeper

Chanoa had been meditating for nearly a decade when someone invited her to a Dr. Joe Dispenza retreat. She almost said no. She’d already been meditating for years. Her friend said: This is different.

At the 2023 retreat in Denver, she tried one of Dispenza’s meditations and initially laughed at the dramatic voice effects. Then she disappeared into the deepest meditation she’d ever experienced. When it was over, her only thought was: what is this?

She dove in completely. Sometimes three or four hours of meditation a day, alongside EFT tapping, moving through layers she described as finally starting to lift.

Then one day she came home, and something was different. She was on cloud nine. And she realized she had just stepped outside the cloud of grief for the first time since Bodo died.

Her immediate next thought: I have to write a book. Nobody should have to spend that much time in it.

That book is Dream On. And I believe it’s going to help a lot of people.

What I Shared – and What Chanoa Said Back

During our conversation, I shared something I use with my own clients: the elevator analogy. Imagine you’ve spent most of your life on the third floor of a building. You do the deep work, you heal your thinking and your patterns, and the elevator rises. Suddenly, you’re on the seventh floor. The people there are different. Less drama, less jealousy, more depth. And the people from the third floor no longer fit.

Chanoa lit up at this. She said that’s exactly what happened. Toxic relationships fell away, but the deep, long-term friendships she’d had for over twenty years somehow got even closer. Family dynamics that had been complicated just naturally improved.

“As we change, either we’re going to repel the people who need to leave our lives, or our relationships become deeper and richer.”

That’s the quiet miracle of doing the inner work. It ripples into everything.

Practical Takeaway on Victim Mindset: Watch for the Shoulds

If you’re reading this and recognizing something of yourself in Chanoa’s story, here’s the most practical thing she shared – and it’s simple enough to start using today.

Watch for the shoulds.

Notice when you’re in a situation: a friendship, a job, a relationship that feels draining or frustrating, and instead of honoring that feeling, you’re quietly scolding yourself. I should feel good about this. I should want to be here. What’s wrong with me?

“Those shoulds are dangerous,” Chanoa said. “We’re trying to force something when everything, our intuition, everything,  is telling us to make a different choice.”

That internal chiding is often a sign you’ve been ignoring your own signals for a long time. And the martyrdom of showing up dutifully to things that are depleting you isn’t virtue. It’s self-abandonment.

The practice she found most powerful for rebuilding self-love was inner child work. Literally carrying a photo of herself as a three-year-old and asking: Who is going to advocate for her?

“We are still that person,” she said. “No matter who we have in our lives. Bodo passed away, and then he was gone. So if I won’t show up for me, what does that say about my relationship with myself?”

It’s the question I want to leave you with, too.

On Honoring Without Dwelling

One last thing Chanoa said that I want to share: she used to believe that staying in grief was a way of honoring Bodo. That letting go meant leaving him behind.

She doesn’t believe that anymore.

“If energy can’t be created or destroyed, he’s not in the past. His passing was in the past. But I can still focus on the present and the future and still honor him.”

That reframe doesn’t make the loss smaller. It just refuses to let the loss become the whole story.

Chanoa’s book Dream On is available now. Find her and everything she offers at ChanoaInez.com.

And if this episode moved you — please share it with someone who needs it.

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