Feel Known & Be Known: identity, relationships, growth, and the space between

Katrina Perera
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Discover yourself through the lens of the Enneagram. Join hosts Katrina and Laurel for honest, relatable conversations about personality, relationships, and personal growth. 🎙️ What You'll Explore: • Enneagram types and personality insights • What parenting reveals about you • Self-awareness and emotional intelligence • Communication styles and relationship dynamics • Personal development and mindful growth Perfect for anyone seeking deeper self-understanding, better relationships, upgraded patterns, and meaningful personal transformation. New episodes every other Thursday.

  1. 1d ago

    If I Know Better, Why Don’t I Do Better? The space between recognizing my patterns and having another response available when it actually matters.

    I can explain exactly why I’m feeling defensive. Sometimes while actively defending myself, in the moment! Does that count as growth? (asking for a friend, of course) Apparently, self-awareness doesn’t come with an automatic upgrade. What changes when I can name the pattern, but still follow it? When asking “Are you still coming?” carries both a practical question and a longing for reassurance? When I want to lead—and wonder whether I’m asking the invitation to prove I belong? In this episode of Feel Known & Be Known, Katrina explores the uncomfortable space between insight and transformation: defensive reactions, rejection, parenting, faith, and the practice of making another response available. When her son’s “why” meets her personal history of not being allowed to ask. When the deep desire for reconciliation meets the wish that learning it didn’t involve someone we love. Can we honour the strategy that helped us survive- that helped to bring us where we are at- and still acknowledge its cost today? Can we feel urgency without immediately obeying it? Can we belong in Christ and still ache for an actual invitation? The question I keep returning to: When my familiar strategy arrives, do I have more freedom than I used to? That’s why I’m creating the Practice Room—a place to bring these questions into community, hear another perspective, and practice answering honestly. You don’t need a polished testimony about how you’ve changed. Bring something you understand but are still learning to live. If you’d like to explore the Practice Room with me, send me a message. What would you want room to practice?

  2. Sep 25

    Who is Trump? What Gets the Upper Hand When Rejection Shows Up?

    I tried to book my dog a grooming appointment. A few dates didn’t work. A normal scheduling conversation between two adults with calendars, jobs, children, and a dog overdue for a haircut. Naturally, I began to wonder if the groomer even wanted me as a client. That’s the moment this episode begins: when the facts are still small, but the story inside me has gotten very large. A date conflicts with my husband’s birthday. Another reminds me I’ll be working while my family is home. An earlier cancellation comes back to mind. Suddenly I’m negotiating more than an appointment. In “Who Is Trump?” I’m asking what gets the upper hand when rejection shows up. My need to feel wanted? Someone else’s very real limits? The story I’ve built from what happened before? And how do I decide what to do without making someone else responsible for every feeling the situation brings up? This is a practice in noticing what I know, what I’m adding, and what I’m about to let make the decision for me. Featuring one dog who, as far as I know, has no opinion on any of it.

  3. Sep 12

    The Practice Room: Where Resistance Meets Readiness How to return after change without performing the person you used to be

    Returning to a familiar place does not mean returning as the person who left it. After 22 months away, Katrina is putting her scrubs back on and returning to the emergency department—but motherhood, mental illness, recovery, loss, and a whole lot of becoming have changed the woman wearing them. In this episode, she explores the uneasy space where resistance meets readiness: when one season has ended, the next has already begun, and your nervous system is still standing in August refusing to put on a sweater. What if resistance does not mean you are unready? What if returning does not require going backward? And what if you could enter familiar Unknown’s without performing the capable, convenient, completely recovered version of yourself everyone remembers? Katrina explores: The difference between capability, capacity, and consent How to discern whether discomfort means “this is new” or “I’ve outgrown this” What Enneagram types may resist during seasons of change Why understanding boundaries is different from tolerating someone’s disappointment The former version of ourselves we fear we must perform to remain loved, useful, or safe Why information can name a pattern and how practice is what helps us live differently inside it This episode also introduces Feel Known: The Practice Room—a space Katrina is designing where personal development moves beyond books, podcasts, and colour-coded insights and into honest, embodied practice. Because apparently knowing what a boundary is does not magically make setting one feel like a relaxing spa treatment. You do not need to arrive completely healed, regulated, certain, or wearing properly labelled fall-storage bins. You are allowed to return changed. You are allowed to receive new information and make new decisions. You are allowed to practise the person you are becoming. Where are you returning—and what version of yourself are you afraid you will have to perform there? Comment "PRACTICE" to learn more about Feel Known: the Practice Room.

  4. Aug 27

    When the Help Isn’t Helping: People Pleasing, Selfish vs. Self-Love, and the Need to Be Needed

    What if the problem isn’t that no one is helping? What if there is plenty of help—and it still isn’t helping? In this episode of Feel Known & Be Known, Katrina explores the developmental journey from people pleasing and needing to be needed toward a more discerning kind of love—one that can care deeply without carrying everything. Beginning with the one-year-old proudly offering a toy and the four-year-old insisting, “I’ve got it,” we trace how the healthy childhood discovery I can help can slowly become I should help, and eventually, I must help if I want to remain loved. We explore why self-love can actually feel selfish when your nervous system has learned to associate usefulness with belonging; why competence can conceal exhaustion; how empathy can slip into projection, rescue or control; and why receiving help may feel more vulnerable than giving it. We also return to the Lindsay Clancy case—not to diagnose from a distance or offer simple conclusions, but to ask a harder question about care: Is the presence of help proof that the need is actually being met? Because someone can have support, childcare, appointments, medication, family and professionals involved—and still need us to remain curious about whether the intervention is working. Along the way, we ask: Who is this help actually for? And what changes when we learn to recognize our own needs, ask instead of assume, measure help by its impact rather than its intention, and distinguish compassion from responsibility? Maybe maturity isn’t becoming less helpful. Maybe it’s becoming free enough to help without disappearing. I can help because I love you.I do not have to help so that you will love me.

  5. Aug 13

    Milestones: Put Me in a Box When Judgment Grows Up Into Discernment

    I’m starting the Enneagram series of Milestones with Type 1. Not because Ones are the judgmental ones. The other eight of us aren’t getting off that easily. 🙃 I’m starting with the One because I’m fascinated by what happens to a beautiful developmental gift: Integrity. There is a right way and a wrong way. I can tell the difference. I want to do what is right. But somewhere along the way… I want to do what is right can become I should know what is right. And then: I should get it right. And eventually: If I get it wrong, what does that say about me? So this episode asks: When does integrity become perfectionism? When does conviction become rigidity? When does judgment become condemnation? And what has to develop before judgment can become discernment? But there’s another layer to this episode that feels important: If I’m going to make judgments about how other people judge, then my judgments need to be available for interrogation too. So, Ones especially, I want to know: Where do you feel accurately known in this conversation? Where do you feel misunderstood? Where am I describing the interior experience of a One—and where am I simply putting Ones into another beautifully labeled box? Because maybe the goal was never to stop putting things in boxes. Maybe it’s to become humble enough to keep asking questions after we do. An accurate label can still be an incomplete description.

  6. Jul 30

    Adult Developmental Milestones: the ones that matter most are the ones we stop measuring

    We celebrate a baby's first smile, first steps, and first words. We fill baby books with developmental milestones. But what if we never stopped developing? What if adulthood has milestones too—not the kind your pediatrician measures, but the kind your relationships reveal? In this episode, Katrina explores how the lessons we teach our children often become mirrors for our own unfinished growth. Why is it easier to tell a four-year-old to share than to share our own time? Why do children practice walking while adults call it failure? What if a child's first lie isn't simply rebellion, but evidence of a developing inner world? And what if our job—both as parents and as fellow humans—is to create relationships where truth feels safe enough to emerge? Together, we'll explore curiosity, honesty, repair, boundaries, emotional regulation, faith, and forgiveness through the surprising lens of childhood developmental milestones. Because maybe we haven't stopped growing. Maybe we've just stopped calling them developmental milestones. Why adulthood may have developmental milestones too What your children reveal about your own emotional and spiritual formation The surprising connection between learning to walk and learning to fail Why children lie—and what it teaches us about adult honesty How relationships become the truest measure of our growth A gentler, more hopeful way to think about becoming Whether you're parenting toddlers, leading a team, navigating relationships, or simply trying to become a little more whole, this conversation is an invitation to trade comparison for curiosity—and to see yourself with a little more compassion. Because we're all still becoming.

  7. Jul 16

    What a Big Fraud am I to What a Good God on High

    The older (and naturally, wiser;)) I get, the less convinced I am that children are the ones who need the lessons. "Share your toys." Then I discover how tightly I hold my stories. "Use your words." Then I realize how long I've lived without language for my own pain. "You don't have to earn my love." Then I notice how often I still try to earn the Love that has already called me beloved. What if parenting isn't primarily about raising children... What if it's about uncovering the child still being raised within us? Maybe that's why the deepest wisdom often feels like déjà vu. Not because we've never heard it before. But because we're finally ready to live it. This episode is an invitation to laugh gently at the ego that wants to be the teacher... ...and to become grateful for the Love that patiently keeps teaching us. 🎙️ New episode: What a Big Fraud Am I

  8. Jul 4

    What or Who is Worthy of Your Wholeheartedness? flipping over the price tag of the Enneagram's Sexual Instinct

    What has quietly become worthy of your wholeheartedness? Not everything that captures your attention deserves your devotion. Some relationships do.Some churches do.Some careers do. And every one of them is quietly shaping the person you are becoming. In this episode of Feel Known Be Known, Katrina explores the Enneagram's most misunderstood instinct—the Sexual (One-to-One) Instinct—not primarily through the lens of sexuality, but through attraction, wholeheartedness, and transformation. Beginning with her own unexpected obsession with the Enneagram, Katrina traces the journey from attraction, to absorption, to transformation, asking one question that quietly shapes every human life: What is worthy of my wholeheartedness? Together we'll explore: • Why not everything that activates you transforms you• How to discern whether what you're giving yourself to is making you more loving—or simply more activated Because every attraction has a direction.Every devotion has a price tag.Every wholehearted surrender is quietly making someone of us. The question isn't whether you'll be transformed. The question is whether what you've decided is worthy of your wholeheartedness is worthy of the person you're becoming.

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About

Discover yourself through the lens of the Enneagram. Join hosts Katrina and Laurel for honest, relatable conversations about personality, relationships, and personal growth. 🎙️ What You'll Explore: • Enneagram types and personality insights • What parenting reveals about you • Self-awareness and emotional intelligence • Communication styles and relationship dynamics • Personal development and mindful growth Perfect for anyone seeking deeper self-understanding, better relationships, upgraded patterns, and meaningful personal transformation. New episodes every other Thursday.

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