Passion Struck with John R. Miles - What Are The Hidden Attachments Running Your Life | John R. Miles - EP 783

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

In this solo episode of Passion Struck, John R. Miles continues the Connection Crisis series by exploring one of the most overlooked reasons we feel disconnected—not from other people, but from ourselves.Many of us believe our struggles stem from the people in our lives or the circumstances around us. But what if the real barrier to connection isn't external at all? What if the invisible identities we developed to survive childhood are still quietly shaping our relationships, careers, and sense of self today?In this episode, John introduces a powerful new framework: The Backpack We Never Chose—a metaphor for the emotional survival strategies, protective identities, and hidden attachments we carry long after they have outlived their purpose. Drawing on attachment psychology, neuroscience, William James' concept of the "I" and the "Me," and his own journey through burnout and corporate leadership, John reveals why so many of us confuse our coping strategies with who we really are.You'll discover why perfectionism, hyper-independence, people-pleasing, and the relentless pursuit of achievement often begin as adaptive responses to early life experiences—and how those same strategies can quietly become barriers to authentic connection, belonging, and mattering.In this episode, you'll learn:Why hidden attachments are often more powerful than attachment styles aloneHow childhood survival strategies become adult identitiesWhy perfectionism, people-pleasing, hyper-independence, and overachievement are forms of emotional self-protectionThe surprising reason your brain prefers familiar pain over unfamiliar freedomHow your nervous system influences your relationships, choices, and emotional reactionsWilliam James' powerful distinction between the "Me" and the "I"—and how it can transform the way you see yourselfWhy identities often feel safer than intimacyA practical framework for recognizing the emotional "backpack" you've been carrying throughout your lifeHow to begin releasing outdated survival strategies through intentional micro-choices and self-compassionThe one question that can change everything: "Does this still belong to me?"This episode is an invitation to stop mistaking your protective patterns for your identity. Because the version of you that learned how to survive your past isn't necessarily the version that's meant to lead your future. Healing doesn't begin by becoming someone new—it begins by choosing what you're finally ready to set down.Passion Struck is the #1 Health and Wellness Podcast and personal growth podcast dedicated to helping people live intentionally, unlock human potential, and build lives rooted in meaning, purpose, belonging, and mattering.Limited-Time OffersShopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial today at SHOPIFY.COM/PASSIONSTRUCKFunction Health: Visit functionhealth.com/PASSION or use code PASSION25 for a $25 credit toward your membership.FODZYME: Get 30% off your first order at ICanEatAgain.com/PASSIONSTRUCK.Full Show NotesDownload the Digital WorkbookIf this episode resonated with you, please follow the show, leave a review, and share it with someone who may be carrying an invisible backpack of their own. Together, we can create a world where more people feel seen, valued, and deeply connected.Connect with John Pre-Order The Mattering Effect: https://matteringeffect.com/Book John to Speak: https://johnrmiles.com/speaking/Keynotes, books, podcast, and resources: https://linktr.ee/John_R_MilesChildren’s Book — You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Substack: https://www.theignitedlife.net/Support the Movement: https://startmattering.com/. Every human deserves to feel seen, valued, and like they matter. Wear it. Live it. Show it.DisclaimerThe Passion Struck podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Passion Struck or its affiliates. This podcast is not a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice.

Hey friends, when I launched Passionstruck, I thought the hard part would be creating great content, but what I didn't realize was how many hats I'd have to wear. Creator, marketer, customer support, website designer. When you're building something meaningful, your to-do list never seems to get shorter. That's why having the right tools matters. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. From household names like Heinz and Mattel to brands just getting started. It helps you build a beautiful online store with ready-to-use templates,

and you can even use AI tools to help write product descriptions and improve product images. And everything from inventory to payments to analytics is in one place, making running your business a whole lot easier. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing Chechang. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash passionstruck. Go to Shopify.com slash passionstruck. That's Shopify.com slash passionstruck.

Cheching. You know what's frustrating? Going out to dinner, excited for the meal, and then spending the next few hours regretting it. For a long time, I thought certain foods just didn't agree with me anymore. Garlic, onions, pasta, even healthy foods like beans. It always felt like a trade-off. Then I found Fodzine, a tasteless powder you sprinkle right onto your food.

It helps break down FodMaps, the hard-to-digest components in foods that can cause bloating gas and pain before they cause discomfort. Think of it like lactate, but for garlic, onions, wheat, beans, cheese, and other common foods. It mixes right into your food, comes in portable packets, and honestly just makes eating feel enjoyable again. And it was created by Harvard-trained scientist and has been clinically studied. We're so excited to partner with Fodzheim and offer you 30% off your first order when you go to I Can Eat Again.com slash Passionstruck. That's I Can Eat Again.com slash Passionstruck for 30% off your first order.

Finally, you can enjoy your favorite foods without the pain. Just go to I Can Eat Again.com slash Passionstruck. Starting something new can be terrifying. I still remember launching Passionstruck and thinking, what if nobody listens? What if this completely fails? When you build something that matters to you, there's always the moment of doubt before you hit publish. But sometimes the biggest breakthroughs in your life start with betting on yourself, and if you're building a business today, having the right platform behind

you makes all the difference. That's where Shopify comes in. Shopify powers millions of businesses around the world and gives you everything in one place. From beautifully designed online storefronts to AI tools that help you write product descriptions, improve images, and streamline your workflow. And when it comes to marketing, Shopify helps you create email and social campaigns so you can actually find your audience. It's time to turn those wood ifs into Cheching with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash passionstruck. Go to shopify.com slash passion struck.

That's Shopify.com slash passion struck. Cheching. Coming up next on Passionstruck, we often think our lives are shaped by the people we're attached to. But the deeper truth is that our lives are shaped by the identities, the beliefs, and the protective strategies that we attached to ourselves long before we ever knew we had a choice. Because the version of you that learned how to survive your past is not necessarily the version of you that is meant to lead your life. Today, we're exploring the hidden attachments running your life and how you can finally choose who you want to become. Welcome to Passionstruck. I'm your host,

John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week, I sit down with change makers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter. Imagine I handed you a backpack.

I told you that you would have to wear it every single day for the rest of your life, but you wouldn't get to choose what went inside. Other people would. Every criticism you received, every rejection you endured, and every quiet moment you felt completely unseen would add to the weight. Every time you were made to believe that love had to be earned, another stone was slipped inside. One more weight, one more thing to carry. At first, the backpack wouldn't seem very heavy because you were young and adaptable. But after 20, 30, or 40 years

of carrying that invisible weight, something remarkable happens. You forget you're carrying a backpack at all. You simply call the heavy burden on your shoulders, quote unquote, me. But what if the heaviest things that you're carrying were never actually meant to define you. What if they were only meant to help you survive a specific chapter of your story? And what if the very coping strategies that once protected your heart have quietly become the primary barriers preventing you from truly connecting? Not just with other people, but with yourself. Today, we're going to unpack that backpack. Welcome back to Passionstruck and welcome to episode 783. Over the past, month, we've been exploring a defining challenge of modern life, this deep, pervasive sense

of disconnection. This goes far beyond a disconnection from our technology or our institutions. It's a disconnection from one another and increasingly from our own inner lives. This week, therapist Katie Morton helped us to understand the root cause of why we repeat the exact same painful emotion. As I've gotten older, I've become much more intentional about how I train, recover, and take care of health. A few years ago, if I felt tired, my workouts weren't clicking, I'd just push harder. But I've learned that sometimes the answer isn't more effort. It's better information. What surprised me is how much of your performance and recovery comes down to what's happening beneath the surface. Things like your glucose, which affects how your body produces and

uses energy. Your omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, which can influence inflammation and recovery. Or DHEA sulfate, one of the building blocks your body uses to make testosterone. When those markers are off, You can be doing all the right things and still not feel like your best. That's why I use function and you should too. It helps me understand what's actually happening inside my body so I can make more informed decisions about my health and longevity. Check your health the way I do. Function provides 160 plus lab tests for a dollar per day

and member pricing on MRI and CT scans. Join at functionhealth.com slash passion or use gift code Passion 25 for a $25 credit towards your membership. of relational patterns. And yesterday, Adam Lane Smith showed us precisely where many of those relational blueprints begin in our early family dynamics. Today, I want to go one step further, because simply understanding where your patterns came from isn't enough to change the trajectory of your life. The real question we have to confront today is much larger. Which of those patterns are still running your life right now? Before we dive in, if this series,

is giving you the language to understand your own experiences with connection and belonging. Please share it with someone who might benefit from hearing it today. Taking a moment to leave a writing or review on Apple Podcasts for Spotify is one of the most powerful ways. You can support our mission to help people live intentional lives. Make sure you're subscribed on YouTube so you never miss a step in this journey, and you can download the companion workbook for this episode right now at my substack at the IgnitedLife.net. Beneath nearly every human pursuit lies the exact same question.

Do I matter? Let's look inside the backpack to find out how we answer it. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. Think about how you and I learned to make sense of the world when we were kids. If you want to know why we're still carrying all this hidden baggage, that's exactly where it starts. The reality is when you're young, you just don't have the tools to understand the hidden storms the adults around you are walking through. A child doesn't look at a distant, completely checked out parent and say, you know what? My parents are under immense financial pressure, and they're just burning out from their

corporate careers. A kid can't comprehend that. Instead, they look at that cold distance, turn it completely inward, and ask a simpler, heartbreaking question, what is wrong with me? And because a child can't change the adults who control their world, they do the only thing they have the power to do. They change themselves. To bring some kind of stability to a world that feels completely unpredictable, a child's brain writes a silent script just to stay safe and get noticed. If love feels like it only shows up when you perform or stay perfectly quiet, you internalize that as a rule. You pack that heavy strategy right into your backpack, deciding right then and there that if you're completely flawless, if you never ask a single soul for help, or if you just keep yourself entirely invisible, you will finally be safe from the pain of being rejected. We carry those early adaptations straight into our adult lives on complete autopilot.

And the real tragedy is that so many of us spend our entire adult lives protecting a version of ourselves. that a frightened child invented. Because here's what most people never realize. We don't look back at our past clearly. We live through adaptations, our past installed. When we finally step into adulthood, the scenery around us changes completely, but the contents of the backpack stay perfectly intact.

We tend to think we're attached to specific people in our lives. But the deeper reality is that we are actually attached to the rigid identities and emotional strategies we adopted back then just to get by. Honestly, we don't cling to our relationships nearly as tightly as we cling to the versions of ourselves those relationships allow us to be. Because identities often feel safer than intimacy, and that's exactly where so many of us get stuck. We turn our old protective strategies into lifelong emotional contracts, and we completely forget

that these roles were originally meant to be shields, not our actual skin. Think about how this plays out in normal, everyday life. You probably know someone who's completely attached to the idea of being needed. They are the ones answering every single phone call at midnight, solving every family crisis, and willingly carrying everyone else's heavy burdens

while totally ignoring their own exhaustion. Somewhere along the way, they signed a silent contract with themselves that says, if no one needs me, maybe no one will love me. Or maybe you know someone who's obsessively attached to achievement. They're running on a relentless corporate treadmill, constantly chasing the next promotion, the next award and the next metric of success. They look incredibly driven from the outside, but their entire hustle is fueled by a quiet belief that their value is tied strictly to what they produce. They think if they can just accomplish enough,

they will finally prove they belong in the room. I know exactly what that trap feels like, because for years, I carried my own heavy backpack into every single boardroom I entered. Early in my career, I was on an absolute rocket ship of corporate advancement. I became the youngest vice president at Lowe's and later stepped into a global executive role at Dell. From the outside looking in, my life was the perfect blueprint of success. I was outperforming and outworking everyone around me, constantly running on the frantic fuel of 100-hour work weeks and nonstop global travel. But during a routine leadership evaluation, an organizational psychologist handed me a copy of Marshall Goldsmith's book. What got you here won't get you there. She looked at me and directly

challenged my style, telling me that my intellectual intellectual ability to outwork people was actually masking a total lack of deep relational connection. I remember being furious because I couldn't see what she meant at all. I thought to myself, she's completely wrong. My relationships are fine. My results speak for themselves. I couldn't look past my own ego. What I couldn't see back then was that I had become so attached to the identity of being indispensable

that I had completely forgotten how to simply be present. I had substituted professional utility for personal significance, and it took a brutal encounter with burnout and a gray empty landscape of total exhaustion. Before I finally woke up to the fact that I was running an old script I had never consciously chosen. Then there are those of us who become fiercely attached to hyper-independence. We build an entire identity around the world. the pride of never needing a single soul. Entirely unaware that our emotional armor is actually just a

calcified fear of being let down. Whether we attach ourselves to being the fixer, the strong one, the person who's always right, or even staying safely in the role of the victim, the mechanism is exactly the same. We exhaust our lives and our relationships defending these manufactured masks, completely blind to the fact that we are protecting the exact identities that keep us disconnected from ourselves and the people we love. Why do our minds fight so hard to hold onto these identities, even when they cause us so much personal loneliness and exhaust our relationships? The reality is your brain is far less interested in making you happy than it is in making tomorrow look exactly like yesterday, to that That deep, primitive part of our wiring, whatever is familiar feels safe, while the messy,

volatile uncertainty of true intimacy gets flagged as an immediate crisis. That's exactly why we keep repeating the patterns that hurt us. And you can see it playing out in tiny human moments all around us every single day. Picture a high-level corporate executive who leads hundreds of employees with total confidence. he physically cannot ask his own partner for emotional support when he's drowning under stress. Because his system tags needing help as a total weakness. Or look at a mother who constantly apologizes just for taking up space in a room. Over-explaining her choices and managing everyone else's comfort,

because her biology convinces her that keeping the peace is the only way to avoid being abandoned. The faces change. The stories change, but the backpack stays remarkably the same. The moment in interaction touches an ancient childhood wound, your survival brain completely hijacks your body, taking all your communication skills and your best intentions entirely offline. Your system drives you to protect the trap because opening your fist and letting go of that protective identity feels like stepping off a cliff. We settle for a predictable, isolated routine because our primitive wiring would honestly rather keep us lonely than allow us to risk

the vulnerability it takes to be truly seen. If you and I want to break free from these hidden attachments, we have to completely change the questions we ask ourselves when we look in the mirror. Real self-reclamation doesn't happen just because you label your behavior with an attachment style and treat it like some kind of permanent life sentence. Instead of driving yourself crazy asking, what's my attachment style? You need to ask a far more powerful question. What identity am I absolutely terrified to lose? You know, more than a century ago, psychologist William James offered an insight that still completely shapes how we understand ourselves today. He argued that each of us has two very different dimensions of self. There's the me, which is basically

the collection of roles, achievements, disappointments, beliefs, and all that protective emotional armor we've piled up through our lives. It's the story we've built and told everyone else about who we are. But he said, there's also the eye, the observing self. This is the quiet awareness deep within us that is entirely capable of stepping back, noticing these old stories, and deciding whether they actually still serve us today. That's exactly why the backpack matters so much. Everything you've been dragging around, the perfectionism, the hyper independence, the exhausting need to be indispensable, or that deep fear of ever asking for help,

all of that belongs to the me. But the person who's capable of sitting down, opening the backpack, looking inside, and asking, does this still belong to me? That's the I, and that's exactly where your internal freedom begins. To find your way back to a life of real authentic connection, you have to realize that setting the backpack down is completely different from throwing it away. Putting it down takes a little bit of self-compassion and small, deliberate microchoices. It's never about making those massive, overwhelming resolutions that just cause your survival brain to freak out

and freeze up. True ownership starts when you stop trying to think your way out of an emotional storm and instead use simple physical techniques to calm your body down. When you soothe your nervous system and you steady your biology, your logical brain finally comes back online. Suddenly you can communicate honestly. You can just state your needs directly instead of sitting there expecting everyone else to read your mind. And when you start approaching your old habits with curiosity, instead of beating yourself up with judgment, you begin to discover something remarkable. The version of you that learned how to survive your past is not necessarily the version of you that's meant to lead your future. As we pull up to the end of our time together today, I want to leave you with a few simple questions

that I've been wrestling with myself this week. Try to ignore that natural instinct to rush out, and find a fast solution. Instead, just let these reflections sit quietly in your mind while you drive or while you walk and see what surfaces. First, what is inside your backpack right now that you have mistakenly called your personality? Second, what emotional strategy once kept you safe as a child but is now actively standing in the way of intimacy

in your adult relationships? Third, where in your life are you completely exhausting yourself trying to earn a sense of worth that is already fundamentally true? And finally, just imagine setting that backpack down on the floor for one single day. Who would you actually be if you didn't have to perform anymore? Maybe today isn't about unpacking the entire backpack all at once. Maybe today is simply the day you realize it was never supposed to become a part of who you are. Open it. Look inside. Pick up one belief you've been carrying for decades. Turn it over in your hands. Look at it with curiosity. Then ask one simple question, does this still belong to me? Because the greatest act of self-reclamation isn't pretending the backpack never existed, it's realizing that you finally get to decide exactly what comes with you for the rest of the journey.

we're continuing this journey through the Connection Crisis series, and we will be joined by Spencer West. For years, Spencer found himself living according to expectations that never truly belonged to him. Like a lot of us, he spent a long time trying to fit into a version of success that looked perfect from the outside, but left him feeling completely disconnected from who he really was. What followed was a remarkable journey of self-discovery that ultimately led him to challenge those limiting beliefs, redefine what was possible, and build a life rooted in absolute authenticity and purpose. Together, we're going to explore why so many people get trapped by identities. They never consciously chose and what it actually takes to break free from the expectations, assumptions,

and stories that keep us from becoming who were meant to be. It's a powerful conversation about resilience, identity, belonging, and having the courage to follow your own path. Asking yourself the question, why am I here? And really leaning into, that and stop worrying about what life is and start wondering what it could be. I think those are the two things that when I was writing this book that really resonated and that I hope people will pick up on is to really just pause and take a look around you and why am I here it and what do I want and then having that ability to wonder what could be because part of the framework also for this book is this idea that we have to have self-trust and self-confidence. Self-trust to be able to

listen to what's in here and what we want and the self-confidence to believe that you can actually achieve whatever that is. And so to do that, I think we have to start with those questions. If today's conversation gave you a new lens through which to understand your relationships, please share it with someone who may benefit from hearing it today. Leaving a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify is one of the simplest and most impactful ways you can help others find this show. And be sure to subscribe on YouTube as we continue exploring how we find our way back to authentic connection. Somewhere in your life, today, you're carrying a backpack that no one else can see. Maybe today isn't the day you empty it.

Maybe today is simply the day you realize you don't have to keep adding to it. Because what was packed into that backpack by your past doesn't have to determine your future. Every intentional life begins the same way by choosing what you're willing to keep carrying and what you're finally ready to set down. I'm John Miles and you've been passion struck. Thank you.