Dr. Rosenna Bakari – Author Of Seven Exits: Leave Behind What No Longer Serves You

 

Achieve profound personal transformation by understanding the power of Seven Exits, a framework for shedding the baggage that keeps you stuck. Author and trauma recovery expert Dr. Rosenna Bakari, who holds a PhD in Psychology, explains that true growth is not about endlessly pursuing more, but about exiting limiting constructs like the hyper ego, emotional dependency, and complacency. She shares her insights on using this self-centered (not selfish) approach to address past trauma and embrace continuous growth, so you can achieve new clarity and inner alignment without waiting for a crisis to force a change.

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Dr. Rosenna Bakari – Author Of Seven Exits: Leave Behind What No Longer Serves You

Dr. Rosenna Bakhari is a psychologist, educator, and leadership consultant. She is the creator of the Seven Exits Framework, a transformational model centered on the power of conscious departure. Her work integrates lived wisdom, mental wellness, and empowerment practices that promote alignment rather than performance.

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Thank you for joining us. Let me get this right. Is it Rosenna?

Yes.

The Core Of Transformation: Introducing Seven Exits

Thank you again, Rosenna, for joining us. I am delighted that you were able to get me a copy of your book, Seven Exits: Leave Behind What No Longer Serves You. I am hoping you can start us off by giving us the intro to this and what you are hoping people will take away from this book, like why you wrote it and what you hope people will take away from it.

Thank you. I am excited to be here and happy to talk about that, Seven Exits: Leave Behind What No Longer Serves You. Someone has called it the Magnum Opus because it is my seventh book. I feel like it is the book I have been trying to write for the last two decades to really give people an invitation into a healing process or a transformation process that often seems scary for people. When I started my own healing journey, at least that is how it felt as well.

I have been on all sides of the couch. I have a PhD in psychology, and I have taught psychology for decades. I have been a client on the couch. I have had to address my own trauma. I have been a mentor. I have been a researcher. I feel like I am a brass of this whole mental health field and have been critical of some of the things that it lacks in delivering services and meeting the needs of help seekers.

Also, being grateful and thankful for the impact that it has in helping us to understand human behavior and the mind. Seven Exits is a culmination of all that I have come to understand and apply it to my own life and my life with clients. That is at the end of it, that all this, we want to be better, we want to be more. It sounds like we are supposed to be in pursuit of something. Seven Exits says, “Wait, no.”

What happens if we begin to let go of things instead of trying to be more? What if we start investing our development in what we are holding on to that is no longer serving us? I do not mean people in cars. I can tell you specifically what I mean. I mean the hyper ego. What would happen if we started to show up with less of an ego? What would happen if we started to release our silences and secrecies, our complacency, and our indoctrinations? What would happen if we started to leave those things behind?

You know what would happen? It would be just you and me, heart to heart, really being able to connect without all the static between us. Much of that has gone to the wayside as we begin to pursue beauty and fitness and money and experiences and travel and all this other stuff that tells us we have arrived. Unfortunately, sometimes the further we arrive, the further we get from ourselves. That is what the Seven Exits is about.

Beyond The Pursuit: Leaving Purpose and Passion Behind

You have named almost all of them there. The last one that you did not mention from my notes in the book is purpose and passion. If you would say a little bit about why we would want to leave behind purpose and passion.

I would love to. Purpose and passion are a good thing. All of these, in fact, are in moderation, but we often extend or exceed moderation. Purpose and passion are one of the things that we hold on to that actually can remind us that we are not enough, that we have not arrived. Sometimes we hold on to it as this hope that one day we are going to arrive. If we are like, “If I just find my purpose and passion, I will be okay.”

Nothing is lacking about you that gives you permission to be okay right now, and especially not passion and purpose. Instead, when we find passion and purpose in daily living, then we are getting somewhere. This idea that it is the passion and purpose that we must pursue in order to have our happiness or have a meaningful life, then that is one of the ideas or constructs that we can exit out of and instead begin to pursue alignment.

Finding passion and purpose in daily life matters, but we don’t have to chase them to have a meaningful life. Alignment is enough. Share on X

The phrase being instead of doing comes to mind, right?

Yes.

What is the context in which you developed this work? Am I correct in remembering that you had a lot of work with trauma and addictions?

I do have a background in working with addiction early in my career. The last twenty years, in fact, from 2000 to 2010, I founded and ran an organization for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, which I am one myself. I was very close to the work and addressed a lot of issues with people recovering from or trying to heal from adult survivors. Oftentimes, it is easy to get trapped in this idea that there is something that is missing because we use the language, “Something has been taken from us.”

When we get stuck in that language, that is the language of lack. It means we are small. It means we are insignificant. What happens if we stop trying to get something back that we believe was taken from us, and we start looking at the things we have yet to exit out of to become full? We cannot change what happened. We can minimize this effect on our daily living by getting rid of the things that keep us stuck in that pattern.

What Is The Hyper Ego And How Does It Keep You Stuck?

In terms of what I download into my mind and my energy system and beliefs about myself as I go through certain situations, that is literally what we call the trauma. It is not the event itself. It is what I took, what I came to believe about myself, or the energies that might be lodged in the body, or the negative thoughts that just keep spinning, that without my recognizing them and acknowledging I have a choice about whether to focus on them or not, they just keep spinning. It is something I carry with me into all of these other life events and relationships. When you look at the list of your exits, you use the term hyper ego, and I had not heard that before. Can you enlighten us as to what you mean by it and how you came to use it?

Ego, we are used to that word, and it is not a bad word, but when we overextend it, then we lose our authentic self. Particularly, we are talking about anyone who has come from any sense of trauma, whether it is in childhood or even in adulthood. We have to protect ourselves. At least our mind tells us we have to protect ourselves. We go into protective mode. We come up with things like “That is how I am,” or “Nobody is going to hurt me again,” or these excuses that our ego now amplifies into a hyper ego.

When we overextend ourselves, we lose our authentic self. Share on X

Hyper ego is hyper protective. Hyper ego is hyper performance. We are already good at what we do, yet we do not ever feel like it is enough, or I am not sure whether you know that I am really good at what I do. I go into hyper ego, making sure that you know too. It becomes so performative and so protective. Now we are into the hyper ego instead of the ego. Ego tells you to lock your door at night so you are safe. The hyper ego tells you to never unlock it.

The Heavy Burden Of Secrets: The Difference Between Private And Secret

Got it. The next one is silence and secrecy. For decades, I have talked to people about how it is our secrets that keep us sick. I used to talk about how if it takes ten units of my mental energy to hide a secret from somebody, that same amount of my own mental energy is going into feeding the conclusion within me that I am damaged, broken, or unlovable. If the person I am hiding this secret from discovers it, they will either attack me or run away from me. Every secret at any level that I hold, that dynamic is fueling my own belief in my lack.

It is such a heavy burden that people do not realize, especially when we have secrets. After all, we like to normalize things because then we do not have to look at them or address them. That is when they actually have their biggest effect. Sometimes we think it is just privacy. Dealing with the difference between how I live openly as a survivor versus how I maintain my privacy? Is it private or is it secret?

That is one of the questions I ask my clients a lot. If it is privacy, you are trying to protect your right not to have everybody know your business. If it is private, someone knowing it does not feel like it is going to destroy you. It is still private to me that I am an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse. That is still private information, yet I live openly as a survivor. It is private because I do not go around saying that and shouting that, and putting it in every conversation.

It is not a secret, because it is not a secret, whenever the context allows for it, invites it, I can have some conversation around it without shrinking and feeling shameful, which I did until I was 45 years of age, and really started digging into the world. You know it is a secret. If it gets out, it is going to instill the slightest bit of shame or guilt or negativity. You are not just being private. You are trying to hold on to a secret. When we understand how these things we hold on to interrupt our lives in small ways, then we can really begin to see ourselves with more clarity.

Seeking Validation: The Exit From Emotional Dependency

Critical is to be able to see myself with more clarity. The more accurately I can view myself without shrinking away from it or judging it negatively, the better decisions I am able to make. The next one you have got is emotional dependency. If you would give us the thumbnail sketch of why you have to release or take an exit from that. What do you mean by emotional dependency?

The seeking of validation is emotional dependence. When I do not get to know or understand myself, I can never get clarity about who I am if I constantly seek validation from other people or even from one other person. Again, it removes me from the clarity because what happens is that I begin to intertwine with you or me, and I am you, and neither of us then has clarity.

Seeking validation is emotional dependence. Share on X

I do not have clarity about who I am, and I do not have clarity about who you are, because I only see you as a tool to know myself. I do not even get to see you as you are. Everything gets judged based on my emotional dependence in this relationship. That puts a strain on the relationship, and it puts a strain on you. Life is so much easier when you allow yourself to be free. Not at first, it is not, but when you allow yourself to make mistakes. It is like, yes, someone is going to judge you.

They will, and so what? To be alone without feeling like you are isolated or that you are going to be alone forever. So what? I am outside of a relationship. My children moved. They graduated from college, and they are moving away from home. That is not about you. That is about them taking care of their lives. I see that a lot with people who have stayed home with their children, for example. We have all kinds of unhealthy emotional dependencies on people or places. When we hold so tight to them, then again, it interferes with that clarity about who we are.

You are not advocating that people give up all their emotions or all their relationships. You are advocating that people become aware of the investment they are making and whether or not it is a realistic investment. In other words, if I want you to make me happy, that is an unrealistic investment in you.

Right. What is interesting in this, the next one is stagnant relationships. They go together, but there are definitely some things that keep them separate. There are so many idiosyncrasies in this, like this idea that I am going to be letting go. The reality is that when I free you, our relationship becomes bigger, not smaller. If you are held in that spot of emotional dependency, it is just really difficult to trust that. When I can allow myself to see you for who you are and trust you to see me for who I am, it is such a bigger relationship than a tiny confined space that we operate in when I rely on you just to fulfill my needs.

It is. You talked before about the word ego, and then the hyper ego, but the ego as a tool is a very useful tool, although it is limited. Like a carpenter does not just have a hammer. A carpenter has all kinds of other tools and measuring devices, etc. If I am using this tool of relationship or emotion to either control you or demand that you do things that control my behavior or my emotions, then it is the old adage about “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Everything you do that I do not like, then, once I am in that mode, I can start to use it as accumulating evidence for why you are a bad person, or maybe I should not be in a relationship with you, etc.

That is a very small relationship as opposed to really seeing you.

It gets smaller and smaller the more I hold to that vision of it. The other thing that just popped into my mind is that all through listening to your book, I kept thinking about the book by Dr. Henry Cloud, Necessary Endings. Are you familiar with that book?

 

No, I am not.

It is the same kind of theme as you have in your book. He just tries to help people do an analysis of the return on investment and the cost-benefit analysis for relationships and behaviors, and jobs. That is the kind of thing that just kept coming up for me. You are doing that from a less corporate angle, and he was trying to do it from a corporate angle all the way through the book, you would say. Of course, this applies to personal relationships as well.

An Unnecessary Weight: A Personal Story Of Roles And Resentment

When I can see that something I am doing that I am actually doing and have some control over is either keeping me stuck or taking me in the opposite direction of where I want to go, it is pretty easy to cease it when I see it all the way to the roots of what is causing it within me. However, if I do not see it, it just keeps having its impact on me. I just flashed on the story you tell in the book about driving and who drives in your marriage. Can you share?

This is within the last fifteen years, or we have been married for over 30 years and so maybe within the last twenty years. That is what we are talking about, continuous growth. When I started to come out of my shell in a different way to be an entrepreneur and build something different, like “I have more to give. Look at that with this healing, I have more to give.” I started saying to my husband, or complaining sort of like, “Why do you have to drive all the time?”

That is how I saw it. He had never seen it that way. He was like, “Who cares who drives?” Because he had always gotten in the car, gotten behind a driver’s seat, I assumed that he was attached to that. That was my assumption. That was a behavior. Yes, that was his pattern, but that was not his attachment. More or less, it had been my attachment to what it meant to play these roles as husband and wife and caregiver, and what his part is. He never cared who drove, but that is not how it looked from my end. Especially since I thought I was a better driver than he is.

I still think I am a better driver than he is. He couldn’t care less about which seat he sat in on these trips. It was such an unnecessary weight on my mind that I carried for years. I did not know I was carrying. Sometimes you do not even know you are carrying these tiny resentments that are related to how you see yourself, and then that is what you project into the world.  As you said, when you can see it, it is a game-changer. That is why I love personal development. When I got to the point where I just welcomed it, like, “Look at what I get to change today.” That is what people run from.

Some do, and some run towards it. You just said these teeny weeny little issues. Of course, miracles would point out that the slightest irritation is connected to the deepest rage. If I am willing to take responsibility for those slight irritations and look into them, use a tool, process them, lighten up my attachment to them, I can do a lot of good work without having to wait until I am in the throes of some major emotional crisis.

Absolutely, and that is really my wish for people everywhere, that we can learn to do the work without being in crisis, because I am not a believer that you need pain to gain. I want to shift the world toward personal growth without personal trauma.

We can learn to do the work without crisis. You don't need pain to gain—personal growth without personal trauma. Share on X

At the same time, having listened to your book, I understand you would hold the position that it is possible to turn pain into gain. You just do not need to go out and create the pain to gain.

Absolutely 100%. That is it.

In a process like yours and reading a book like yours, and engaging that process, I would offer that it will help people turn their pain or their discomfort into their gains.

If we just step into it. Life has its challenges. No one is getting out of here without some pain and challenges. What I hope for is that we move out of the space where pain is the only thing that shifts us. I still have some pain in my life, but it does not guide my behavior. It is not what moves me. I can learn and grow without feeling wronged or bitter or defensive. It is like, “I get to look at that little thing and make those little changes so that when the pain comes, I am prepared.”

The Only Thing That Moves You: The Exit From Complacency

When the pain comes, you are prepared. The other thing you said was that you want people to be in a position where pain is not the only thing that motivates them to change and grow. That leads to one of the next exits, which is complacency. If I am in that complacent space, then the only thing that will get me to move and change and grow is enough pain. Talk a little bit about what you mean by the exit of complacency.

We want to keep growth fresh. That does not mean we are bouncing around, because then we get to passion and purpose later. We are not bouncing around. We are not just doing busy work with ourselves, but we want to be paying enough attention to ourselves that we see the growth that is happening. Growth does not happen. We know what happens. You cannot watch grass grow, but we are not stuck. Particularly for high-performing people who get so many accolades, it seems like what I notice is that the more accolades I get, the fewer invitations into growth I get.

I like to just say that one more time. The more accolades I get, what happens to my growth or the invitations to growth?

The fewer invitations I get, to grow. No one says when you are getting the stars, “How is your relationship with your children?” People do not ask those kinds of questions. “How are you feeling about the things you sacrificed to get here?” People do not ask those kinds of questions. They just keep pouring on the accolades. You do not get a lot of invitations to self-reflect, to go within, to check in with yourself, to say, “What is at the next level? You are here. Now you made it. Now what is next?” When I say what is next, I do not mean what is next in a career realm. I mean, like, “What is next? What is your next path toward growth? Where are you going from here?”

 

“What is the next piece of baggage that is unproductive that you can unload or put down?”

There are so many invitations for that for people who are getting the accolades. You see, some of the most popular books are about how to make more money, how to advance in your career, and people do that and take pride in that. I am not separating myself from that. I just like to think that that is not the priority for me, that what is in my heart and what is in my mind and what comes out of my mouth is so much more critical than what goes into a bank account.

I come across a couple of different times recently is something that Abraham Hicks says regularly. “Your most important creation in any moment is your emotion in that moment.” Your inner state is your responsibility. If you understand that, if people have helped coach you and train you into how you work with that and what choice of the focus of your conscious awareness is, it is a powerful creative force, then now you are empowered. Now you can start using that focus of your attention, as Krishnamurti would say, “The flame of attention.” It will just cut through all of the garbage and help you understand or help whatever you are looking at teach you about itself.

I love that expression, “let it teach you about itself.” I love that. Everything in life becomes sort of a playground. You get to make things and experience the world with new eyes almost every day.

Seeing The World Anew: Breaking Free From Indoctrination

How can you experience the world with new eyes every day if you have been indoctrinated? Here is indoctrination, another one of your exits. Can you talk about that?

That is one of the reasons why we want to exit indoctrination so that we can see the world anew. Our mind likes to make things easier for us. It likes to tell us what we have already done, even if it is not working. Our mind is very prejudiced toward telling us what we have done, not telling us what we have done right, but it is like, “This is a familiar path.” We will always lead you down the familiar path, not down the path that is healthy or that meets your needs.

Indoctrination is good at that because indoctrination just says, “I have this list of rules, whether they are from my culture, my family, my work profession, my religion, but I have this list of rules. These are the rules that I apply to everything, whether or not they fit.” The mind is happy because it does not work as hard, but it is not nearly as creative or nearly as fulfilled. Even if you take the example that we just talked about with my husband in the driving, part of that was indoctrination. I do not know that I ever saw my mother drive when my father was in the car.

That’s a big one. What we watched our parents do, right? Bruce Lipton says, “Our first seven years of life, we are living in a state of self-hypnosis, and we are just sucking in stuff we did not even realize is getting lodged in there.” That is a part of the indoctrination. Most of the time when I hear people use the word indoctrination, my mind at least is saying, “Someone is intentionally trying to implant something in a person.” Yet what we are talking about here is that we get indoctrinated just by living with our parents.

In organizations, too. Even if we are looking at the profession of psychology has its indoctrinations. Professions have their indoctrinations, and organizations have their indoctrinations, and sometimes spiritual groups have indoctrinations. “I know this is what we do.” It is nice because it is the we. It gives you this sense of safety because you have some sense of belonging. You know for sure in indoctrination that you are not the only one who believes that. That feels powerful, but it is not.

It is the illusion of power. I just flashed on the book, Buddha’s Brain, and it is a book about trying to make sense of the neuroscience of how we might have gotten where we are. One of the things they talk about is that as humans, the brain evolved to overpredict danger for negative outcomes danger. We stay hyper vigilant.

The other one is that we are programmed to overpredict how much joy or satisfaction we are going to get from something before we have gotten it. There are all kinds of phrases in our culture, like “The shine is worn off that rose,” or “The honeymoon is over.” The recognition that we build ourselves up in this expectation of, “It is going to be so great when I get that new stereo,” and then you save, or you win it, or whatever.

You get the stereo, and it is great. For a week or two, you are playing music 24/7, and a year later, it has got dust all over it, and you have not turned it on in six months. It is that kind of thing that they start to look at. We do not need to beat ourselves up over this. We just need to start to look inside and understand how this develops as a very strong pattern that we overpredict the satisfaction or joy we are going to get from acquiring something, and we lean towards expecting the negative or danger far more often than it is actually there.

I have a little story recently. A couple of days ago, I was at the gym with a friend. When we left, we went into the locker room together to get our things. She saw, and I was like, “I do not even know what locker I put my coat in.” I checked a couple of lockers. I found, “Here is my coat.” I just opened up the locker and got my coat out. Walking out, she said, “You did not have a lock on your locker?” I was like, “No, it is just my coat in there.” She said, “What if someone takes your coat?” I said, “I guess they needed it.” She looked at me like that was the oddest answer.

She just said, “What planet did you come from?”

She thought about it, though. She was like, “That really makes sense. I got what it was like. Yes, I guess they needed it.” She said, “I have probably twenty coats at home.” I said, “Yes, I have a few too. If someone took it, I assume they needed it. Like it is cold out there.”

My brain is telling me that in this exchange between you and your friend, she is coming from the hyper ego, and you are helping her see the hyper ego impact.

I do not go into the gym thinking someone may steal my coat. I just do not put that much. I do not go in there thinking someone is not going to steal it either. I have learned to cut myself off from some predictions. Not all, but I have learned to cut myself off from some unnecessary predictions. I am not thinking about whether or not somebody is going to steal my coat because I put it in a locker. Maybe if I had my wallet in, but I intentionally did not have my wallet in there. My ego had done its job of making me build some level of safety. Coats are a dime a dozen.

Expressions, Not Pursuits: Revisiting Purpose And Passion

The seventh of your Seven Exits, I want to give you the opportunity to come back to the purpose and passion now that we have talked about the others. What I got from what you said before is that it can be very useful to have purpose and passion in your life. If it gets to that hyper ego state, or if it gets to be something that you feel like you do not have value until you achieve the purpose or passion, do I have that right from what you were saying, then it is a problem?

Absolutely. It is really the pursuit of that. When you are pursuing purpose and passion as opposed to living with purpose and passion. Purpose and passion are expressions, not pursuits.

 

Can you say a little bit more about that?

When I allow my passion and purpose to be seen, whether it is that I am passionate about humanity that I do not worry about a coat in a locker. That part of that is my passion for humanity. I am not trying to protect myself from humanity, even though there are certainly moments where I might go into hypervigilance, but I intentionally try not to do that.

The things that I do, I try to do with purpose. Like, “I want to be intentional about this.” Again, they have their use, but trying to avoid making an identity out of it is important that we do not make an identity out of our passion and our purpose. I have sat in, for example, consulting rooms where I am there to support organizations. One of the things that I see is that these three teams are both fighting over their individual passion and purpose that they feel like they have in this job.

“This is important because this is my team.” That is it. In some ways, they are bringing their passion and purpose and attaching to that instead of each other, instead of the ideas, instead of the humanity on the table. They are really fighting over passion and purpose. Those are the ways when passion and purpose, as you say, get intertwined with hyper ego, then it does more harm than good.

The Self-Centered Framework: Mastering Your Own Life

I just realized how long we have talked and I think we should just take a breath and get centered and ask you to review what we have talked about so far and decide is there something you want to go back and highlight that we have already talked about or something we have not even mentioned yet about you, your work, or this book that you want to bring into the conversation?

I would like to summarize these Seven Exits. You may remember the concepts in the book about being self-centered, because that is how I see these. When we commit ourselves to these exits, it just means that we are bringing ourselves into the awareness of self. We can be self-centered, not selfish, but self-centered. When we center ourselves in every problem, every solution, every pride, every joy, every disappointment, when we center ourselves there, we begin to master our own lives as opposed to being other-centered. “Someone else is going to make me happy. Someone else is the cause of that problem.”

“Something else is needed for me to be happy.”

When we bring it back to self, then I really like for us to operate on a concept of being self-centered. “I am really disappointed today that the meeting did not go as I said. They did not do what they said.” Where am I situated in that? What decision did I contribute to that situation? Even if I did not, what do I have to contribute to the resolution of it?

Where does my power lie? I am self-centered. I am going to focus on myself and not on what other people need to do because I cannot control other people. Every time I blame it on you, I disempower myself. That is one of the things that is really important for people to grasp in the Seven Exits. It is a self-centered framework.

I keep thinking when you say that of Dr. Michael Ryce, and he talks about rather than selfish, let us be self-wise. This is my interpretation. Every time I heard you talk about it in the book, and I am hearing you now, my brain is translating that into, “Yes, she is talking about what Dr. Michael Ryce is referring to when he says be self-wise.” When you are self-wise, then you understand you are connected to everyone and everything, and you keep your energy focused on the things you actually have some control over, and things work out better.

There is such beauty and connection that we keep missing. As the world gets more complex, it is intuitive to want to close ourselves in and find our little corner. I lived like that for a long time, just trying to protect my corner of the world and feel safe. “Man, I missed so much.” It is what it is, but I would say living now openly. I am not just living openly as an adult survivor.

There's such beauty and connection we keep missing by closing ourselves off. Share on X

I am living openly, like opening up that heart and really being intentional about wanting to make connections with people. That is how we get new eyes. I get new eyes because I am trying to see with your eyes and I am trying to see with their eyes. You just see so much more of the world that way. It is a trust fall. I get it. It is a trust fall, but well worth the trip.

With what you have done inside yourself and with the work you have done in combination with the life events you have lived through, whether you want to call them traumatic or not, all of that is what makes it possible for you to have the depth and appreciation of life that you do now when you are choosing to engage and when you are choosing for interdependence rather than emotional dependence.

I strongly encourage people to recognize that it is silly to think, “I only have this good thing in my life today because of that bad thing in my life.” It is not so silly to think, “I have some of the good things in my life today because of how I have chosen to interpret and respond to the challenges in my life.”

It is not the pain that gives you the gain. It is the healing of the pain that gives you the gain.

There is a lot of good stuff in there where you interpret and respond to it. I was just reading an Alan Watts article where he was talking about how we cry out, or we pray that we want strength or we want patience, and then we run kicking and screaming from the situations that demand us to be patient, or demand us to get stronger in order to handle it.

It is silly because once we really get it that you have already been through the worst. If you are coming from trauma, your life is likely never going to be that traumatic again. Pat yourself on the back. Look at what you have done. You have gotten here, and now, how can you grow because you have already done the hard part, which was survival? Now, let us move on to thriving.

What else can you do with those energies that are still in you or the memories you have about them to grow even further?

Exactly, because you do not want to get stuck in survival. You want to thrive. You want to start creating joy because survival is about just overcoming something. It does not put you in control of your life. It just means you did not die, which is good because that is what our brain is meant to do to keep us alive. Now what?

 

I just have to mention this, as you are talking, I am seeing in my head an image of a piece of art. It is an artwork that, when the camera starts, it is on one of those nights where you have a gimbal camera so you can move all around it. When you start looking at it, it is the picture of a bird of prey, like an American Kestrel or a hawk. The camera starts moving around this way. By the time you get to the other side, you realize this is just garbage picked. Here is a doll’s head. Here is a spoon.

Here is a bent fork. Here is a feather. It is all of this stuff out of a dumpster, but it has been arranged in a way. If you come from this perspective, you see this beautiful image. That is basically what we all have an opportunity to do with anything we are still carrying from anything in our past that we would label as trauma. We can turn that trash into treasures. We can literally learn to grow from it into the perspective that says, “You know what, that did happen, and yet that is not who I am.”

It absolutely is not who you are. Now the healing is about introducing yourself to who you are. Now I get to really pursue and find who I really am.

I like introducing yourself because for the vast majority of the things we discover, it is not that I have to grow into it. It is that I am already it, and I have been suppressing it or denying it.

Which is why we want to let go and shed. The transformation is a shedding. It is not a gathering.

Closing Wisdom: The Next Step In The Transformation Journey

Do you want to offer some closing words of wisdom on top of the wisdom you have already shared?

Thank you. I appreciate it. One of the things I will share that I am excited about is that I am opening the Bakari Institute, where I am actually delivering courses now on Seven Exits, a variety of courses for personal transformation, leadership, etc. If anybody is interested in really diving into the framework of Seven Exits, that is available.

They can find that if they go to SevenExits.com. They can find out more information about that. I am super duper excited about coming to this point in my own transformation in terms of personal transformation, career transformation, and author transformation, to feel like I am in the mix of where I want to be in terms of influencing and gathering other people around to take this journey.

Is that the preferred way for people to connect with you, through the website Seven Exits?

That is the easiest way. Yes. My name will be in the notes and stuff. RosennaBakari.com, you can look there too, but Seve Exits is maybe easier for people to remember. Just spell out the word seven, SevenExits.com, and you can easily reach me from there.

Delightful. Thank you so much for being willing to take the time to share with us. I greatly appreciate your willingness to send me the book in advance. This made it a lot easier.

I appreciate it.

Thank you so much for your time. It has been a blessing.

Thank you so much. I look forward to sharing the episode when it comes out.

—

Dr. Rosenna Bakari is a psychologist, educator, and leadership consultant. She is the creator of the Seven Exits Framework, a transformational model centered on the power of conscious departure. Her work integrates lived wisdom, mental wellness, and empowerment practices that promote alignment rather than performance.

In addition to being a scholar and thought leader, Dr. Bakari is a fourth-degree black belt, marathon runner, and poet who integrates mind, body, and purpose into her work. Her newly released book, Seven Exits: Leave Behind What No Longer Serves You, offers a grounded, practical path to lasting personal change. It serves as the foundation for her transformational courses that guide people back to themselves.

 

Important Links

• Rosenna Bakari
• Rosenna Bakari on LinkedIn
• Seven Exits
• Seven Exits: Leave Behind What No Longer Serves You
• Necessary Endings
• Buddha’s Brain

 

About Dr. Rosenna Bakari

Dr. Ro-Zee-na   Ba-car-ri is a psychologist, educator, and leadership consultant. She is the creator of the Seven Exits framework, a transformational model centered on the power of conscious departure. Her work integrates lived wisdom, mental wellness, and empowerment practices that promote alignment rather than performance.

In addition to being a scholar and thought leader, Dr. Bakari is a fourth-degree black belt, marathon runner, and poet who integrates mind, body, and purpose into her work. Her newly released book, Seven Exits: Leaving Behind What No Longer Serves You, offers a grounded, practical path to lasting personal change—and it serves as the foundation for her transformational courses that guide people back to themselves.