Meeting Your Inner-Hero and Healing Your Inner-Child: with Ron Yap @mentalhealthceo

About this episode

Dr. Joey Weisler and Ron Yap discuss healing the inner child and meeting the inner hero to find purpose and direction.

📝 Show Notes (Key Ideas & Takeaways) What if healing isn’t just about looking back—but also about learning to listen forward? In this episode of Classroom Narratives , Dr. Joey Weisler sits down with Ron Yap ( @mentalhealthceo ) to explore the dual work of healing the inner child while also meeting the inner hero —the future version of ourselves who has already found meaning, clarity, and direction. Drawing from his work in Finding Meaning in Life When It Feels Like There Is None , Ron unpacks how people lose their sense of purpose through survival mode, identity disruption, and living stories that were never truly theirs. For educators especially, this conversation hits close to home—where caring for others can quietly lead to losing yourself. Together, they examine anxiety, OCD, the survival mode, imposter syndrome, and the emotional weight educators carry, while offering a grounded way forward: reconnecting to values, separating internalized voices from your own, and creating a vision of who you’re becoming—not just who you’ve been. This episode is both reflective and practical—a reminder that healing doesn’t stop with the past. It continues when we allow our future…

People in this episode

Host: Joseph Weisler

Guest: Ron Yap

Topics covered

• healing
• inner child
• inner hero
• educators
• anxiety
• identity disruption

Keywords

• healing
• inner child
• inner hero
• anxiety
• educators
• identity disruption
• survival mode

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Finding Meaning in Life When It Feels Like There Is None, The Inner-Hero's Journey Newsletter, The Inner-Hero Workbook, Beyond Behavior: Bev Johns

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• Listening as Witness: How Art, Community, and Invitation Create Space for Healing with Rosa McAllister and Tieshka K. Smith · May 20, 2026 · 42 min
• Listening Isn’t Fixing: Creating Space for Presence in the Classroom with Kathryn Pannepacker · May 13, 2026 · 31 min
• Empathy Without Self-Abandonment: Unhooking from Survival Mode in Leadership and Teaching with Leila Boutaleb Brousse · April 29, 2026 · 31 min