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Every self-help book tells you to love yourself first before you can be loved by anyone else. Yana Fry, founder of the Academy of Love, says that advice is a trap, and she has watched it keep high-achieving women stuck in the same loop for years. Her own work traces back to a single moment at age 8: her parents’ divorce, a dog-eared relationship book, and a promise she made herself in a notebook.
In this episode of Growing Pains, she unpacks the archetype framework built from that promise, nine patterns that explain why some of us repeat the same relationship over and over, and why kids pick up on all of it long before they have the words for it. Yana gets unusually honest too: a panic attack in the middle of the Namibian desert that decided something for her before she’d consciously decided it herself, a confession about what her own date nights actually look like lately, and a story from her late 20s she doesn’t tell often, the moment she says was quietly driving everything before she understood why.
Your kids are watching how you love. This episode is about what they’re actually learning… from you.
What you’ll take away
- Why “love yourself first” might be the worst advice a high achiever can follow
- What decided itself in her body during a panic attack in the middle of the desert, before her mind caught up
- What her own date nights actually look like these days, and why she’s not hiding it
- The moment in her late 20s she rarely talks about, and the wound it revealed
- The nine patterns that explain why you keep ending up in the same relationship, romantic or otherwise
- What her toddler is already absorbing about love, without a single word being said
- The one thing she hopes her daughter never has to unlearn
About Yana Fry
Yana Fry is an internationally recognized speaker, transformational coach, and founder of the Academy of Love. She built a nine-archetype framework for identifying love patterns after her own upheaval: a marriage at 22, a cancer diagnosis three months later, a divorce, and a full rebuild of her life from there. She now lives in Singapore, is 17 years into an intercultural marriage, and works primarily with high-achieving women untangling how they love, parent, and lead.
Connect with Yana Fry:
Website: Love. Yana Fry
Social media: YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn
Find out which love pattern your kids are learning from you. Sign up for Yana’s masterclass here.
Growing Pains is HoneyKids Asia’s podcast for the conversations you want to have after the kids go to bed.
If this one moved you, share it with a parent who needs to hear it. Or send your feedback and topic suggestions to podcast@honeykidsasia.com — we’d love to hear what you’d like us to talk about next.
Growing Pains is produced in partnership with Poddster, Singapore’s podcast studio.
