Hi, I'm Dr. Carin La Count

This is my story

I certainly didn’t grow up knowing how to love who I was, and my parents were in no position to teach me. I was six years old when my mother, momentarily overwhelmed with her duties to care for her five children, asked me, “What would you ever do if I died?”

I had no idea what to say. I didn’t know a mother could die, so I didn’t answer her question.

A week later, after she tucked me into bed for the night, she mentioned to my dad that she had a headache, and it was getting worse.

The next morning, my father explained to me that my mom had a blood vessel burst in her brain and that it was called an aneurysm. He could hardly compose himself as he explained that she wouldn’t be coming home. A few days later he made the call to take her off life support.

Not many of us escape the generational trauma of our ancestors. Our parent’s difficult childhood was largely due to that which was passed on from their parents and beyond, and few know how to avoid it, at least not until later in life when more damage has been done. After my mom’s death, other than her mother—my grandma Rose—we never really heard from her family again. My dad’s parents died young. First his father when my dad was 12, then his mother passed away when he was still in his 20’s. He spoke very little of his parent’s death. He certainly never discussed the emotional impact it had on him, but given the manner in which he pushed passed my mother’s death and refused to speak of it or acknowledge the trauma it caused us kids, I suspect he never did process that pain.

And we followed suit.

Without self-love to motivate his actions, my dad’s love was very conditional. He didn’t love himself without conditions so how could he love us any other way? If we made him proud, we got love, if we didn’t, well…I wasn’t going to be one of those kids. 

That trauma played out for me when my six-year-old ego told me my mother left because I never answered her question, and no one was the wiser as I developed the habit of lying to myself about love. Instead, I nurtured the beleif that since I never told her I would cry for days if she died, or that I’d always be on the look-out for her face in a crowd, that I deserved to not have her in my life. That was how my psyche worked, and my dad hadn't the emotional capacity to even try to understand.

My people-pleasing, codependency became even more deeply ingrained when my step-mother came on the scene a year after my mother was gone. She had her own set of familial dysfunction that made her critical and hard to please, but that wasn’t going to stop me from trying. In my mind she was my replacement mother. I was ever so grateful to have her, so there was no way I was going to mess it up a second time and have her leave me, too.

Self-love was never, ever considered by anyone around me when I was growing up, so I had no idea of how valuable it was. Subsequently, every relationship I had in my young adulthood took advantage of my need to please. 

When I’d met my husband at the age of twenty, I’d had two more years of undergrad to go and then four years of optometry school that was over three hours away in Chicago. That totaled six years that I’d devoted to him in a mostly long-distance relationship, for which he rewarded me with a proposal for marriage promptly after I’d obtained my doctorate. 

When I asked him twenty-two years later, “Why did you even marry me?!” he told me I was the most reliable person he knew. The question became pertinent to me when I had learned—three months after our divorce—the details of his infidelities that had begun within months of our seeing each other. On our wedding day there were several attendees who knew that he had “commitment issues,” but the lies he’d spun about me kept them quiet and loyal to him.

My babies:

Roan and Aidan

I’d tolerated an abusive marriage for far too long because of my lies. I’d told myself that the most loving thing I could do for my children was not get divorced. This was until self-love showed me that the most loving thing I could do for them was to leave their father.

Twenty five years into our relationship, although oblivious to my husband’s affair of the moment, a spark of self-love finally gave me just enough light to see that I was not being loved or respected in my marriage. That spark came in the moment my husband told me—with his usual pout—that his day was boring. While I lay in the hospital bed weak and thirty pounds underweight from 2 months of blood loss with ulcerative colitis and waiting for an emergency blood transfusion, my poor husband was bored. He didn’t get to see the band he wanted to that night because he had to stay home with the kids. Plus the brakes were squeaking on his car but he “can’t fucking get them fixed because we’re broke because you’re not fucking working.”

That night, self-love initiated the process of detangling myself from this man. I said I wanted a divorce, but it took another 18 months of epic manipulations—while he maintained his affair— expertly used to confuse my intentions before he finally left. 

Once divorced, I stood on the courthouse steps energetically feeling the thorn in my side finally let loose. I believed I’d self-loved myself out of a shitty marriage and that it was all behind me. Simple as that. I had big plans to finally launch my coaching business, make an even bigger impact in people’s lives through not just their physical vision, but their spiritual vision as well.

I’d expected that joy would fill my life and it would finally take off! 

Little did I know the devastation that was to befall me when I learned I’d been cheated on since the beginning of my twenty-seven year relationship to which I was blindly devoted.

That was when I began the first excavation of the lies I’d told myself my whole life. I had married a man who never loved me. He never even intended to love me, he only intended for me to take care of him so he could live as he pleased.

The thing is, I knew it from the beginning. However, bent on being in a mutually loving relationship, I couldn't face that truth. I was afraid I didn’t deserve any better, I was afraid that no one would love me and I’d be alone. I was so afraid I’d be without love for the rest of my life that I lied to myself about the love I was getting from a man who simply couldn’t love. 

I had created a barrier to the love within me that attempted to show me he was not a good choice for me. 

I chose fear over love.

Once I learned the truth that I’d fought so hard not to see all those years ago, I unpacked the realities of my life created by my fear-based decisions and began the process of healing my shattered heart.

However, I still I neglected to comprehend another unloving habit I had adopted my whole life: needing validation from others to feel loved.

As badly as I wanted to be done with this healing and move forward with my life I could not fully heal because the barriers I had constructed against it were deep in my soul. Being a sensitive old-soul with my most recent past lives being stuffed full of judgment, abuse, physcial and emotional pain in spades as well as very lonely deaths, my soul came into this life with patterns it needed to overcome and a fire to do so.

In the first half of this life, as a sensitive old-soul, I was determined to love myself through this life with the naïveté of one believing in the benevolence of my creator. However, I dismissed the power of "evil" in the form of other's fear-driven insecurities and self-absorbed coping mechanisms due to their young-soul perspectives.  

The slow dawning of the reality that self-love went way beyond positive thinking and turning a blind eye to the ego's fears, began after I got out of an abusive relationship, but I still looked to family, friends and the men I dated to give me the love I couldn’t give myself. I needed them, and my ex-husband to understand the torment his abuse, indifference and coercive control had become. I needed them all to tell me I didn’t deserve to be treated like that. I was desperate to show them that I deserved their love because I was a good person and that I could prove it. I did this by not honoring my needs and giving myself away to others until my body literally broke down from the stress of it all.

It wasn’t until I was in an ambulance receiving life-saving blood transfusions that I finally faced the hardest truth of my life: I didn’t love who I was to such an extent that my colon once again became so inflamed that it hemorrhaged with dramatic consequences. The stress I’d put myself through to avoid the deeper work of my soul to love, respect and validate myself threatened my life and cost me my colon. 

Two years and five surgeries later, I began to see that codependency and narcissism are both the byproduct of not having enough love for one’s self. Getting honest with myself about my responsibility in my marriage and in my life—as is told in my memoir The Love Liar—was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, but it took my self-love practice to a whole new level. 

Love for myself continues to be a journey, a daily practice, and an experience for which I am forever observing, contemplating, and documenting. 

I had lived for 53 years in Wisconsin, other than the 4 years of optometry school in Chicago, but with the passing of my father in 2020, I decided to follow my dreams of living in a warmer climate. I’d consulted an Astro cartographer, and given the choice of 3 different cities, I chose Austin, Texas. 

My transition to Austin did not go smoothly. The Texas optometry laws have strangled the profession and optometrists get paid much less than what I was making in Wisconsin. The first job I acquired was with a doctor about whom I was questioned for forty-five minutes by the Justice Department after I managed to get fired. 

Another narcissist, to be sure.

The next job was in the nursing homes. For five months I dragged all my optometric equipment around the Austin area to care for the residents, for many of whom I could do very little. Not a healthy work environment for this old, compassionate soul bent on saving the world.

The depression that set in by the first year in Austin was immense. I realized that I was still hanging on to my codependent ways to cope with the stress, and it was drawing in the wrong people to my life. My precarious self-love faltered and I had reverted back to my old patterns. 

About the time I quit the nursing home gig and found more reasonable employment, I published my book. Although, I was proud of my accomplishment and eager to sell books, I began to feel a crushing sense of regret for having exposed myself so completely. Imposter syndrome consumed me as I realized I had more self-love work to do—lots more—and I stopped all efforts to market my book.

The next stage of my self-love journey involved  learning more about sensitive old souls and our particular challenges to loving ourselves. This gave me great solace in knowing my challenges were linked to the fact that I had a heightened sense of compassion, justice and honesty due to the many, many lifetimes I’ve endured in the physical plane.

I learned that my path to self-love was to balance my old soul with the loving foundation from which we are all created. To not judge myself, my body or my negative thinking, but to choose gratitude and joy in every moment, while--most importantly-- forgiving myself when I don’t.

Of course there are a kagillion books, memes, and gurus out there telling us all day long to do this very simple thing, but it’s been my study of the philosophy of A Course In Miracles, that has helped me to understand and have compassion for the fear of the ego that keeps us all stuck in unloving patterns. 

Now, I have found and—most days—can sustain compassion for myself amidst the yin and yang of life. Finding this place within myself allows me the opportunity to balance my (sometimes confounding) old-soul integrity with the loving birth right we are each awarded, no matter what. 

My dream of helping people see, love, and heal themselves and others so they can fully step into their power and follow their life purpose… is my life purpose. 

What is your dream? Let's see how your dream is driving your soul's purpose for this beautiful life you're living.