Sometimes Love Isn't Enough: The Parenting Through Challenges Podcast · Angie Grandt

88. Trauma, parenting, and resilience - with Guest Dina Lobo

·47 min·4 clips

Dina's friend asked her to make life colorful after losing everything to a brain tumor.

This episode features host Angie and guest Dina, a fellow human design coach and mother, exploring how understanding personal energetic design can transform parenting and self-awareness. Dina shares her journey from a pressured upbringing to embracing her unique identity as a "reflector," a rare human design type comprising only one percent of the population. She explains that reflectors have all nine energy centers open, making them deeply intuitive mirrors of their environment. Dina describes growing up in a competitive, punitive environment in India where emotional connection was lacking and achievement was necessary for safety. She pursued engineering, won awards, and worked in Dubai, often overextending herself to meet external expectations. A pivotal moment came when a dying friend asked Dina to "make your life colorful," which became a driving purpose. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Dina hit rock bottom while pregnant and battling chronic inflammation, which her doctor warned could cause a miscarriage. By reconnecting to her "life force" and taking her "power back," she reversed the inflammation, gave birth to a healthy daughter, and left her corporate job to start a business. Dina now has two daughters, one an "advisor" and the other an "initiator" in human design, while she and her husband are both "non-energy types." She reveals that as a reflector, she absorbs and mirrors the energies around her, which previously led to entanglement and burnout without awareness. Dina's open emotional center drove a lifelong quest for emotional intelligence and healing, which human design later confirmed. She practices intentional energetic protection now, visualizing a "plexiglass" shield to avoid absorbing others' energies. Dina emphasizes that non-energy types, like reflectors, are not meant for constant "go, go, go" and need to honor cycles of rest and melancholy for creativity. She shares that aligning with her design ended her pattern of overachieving, overgiving, and overthinking, which she calls "the end of over." A memorable practice Dina uses is the "mirror exercise," where individuals confront their reflections to uncover repressed emotions and set daily intentions. She argues that children remember how parents handle emotions and conflict more than material things, making emotional modeling crucial. Dina observes that her five-year-old advisor daughter needs space to speak without interruption to feel safe and seen, requiring adjusted parenting. She notes that without self-awareness, parents often swing between strict and lenient parenting styles, but human design offers a customized approach. Dina believes bodily symptoms like inflammation or anxiety are signals of misalignment, and recognizing them can shift one from a victim mindset to empowered inquiry. The conversation is conversational, reflective, and infused with personal storytelling and spiritual concepts. It is educational in explaining human design terminology and its practical applications for parenting and personal growth. Listeners interested in alternative self-development frameworks, breaking generational parenting patterns, and intuitive, energy-aware practices would appreciate this episode. Those skeptical of spiritual systems or preferring evidence-based, clinical parenting advice might find it less relevant.

As heard by us

A calm, alignment-first conversation about resilience, identity, and parenting through hard seasons.

Sometimes Love Isn’t Enough: The Parenting Through Challenges Podcast stays close and unhurried, treating parenting as something still being worked out rather than neatly solved.

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Why you'd press play

When you want parenting guidance that starts with alignment, not blame or panic.

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