Latest / The Trauma Therapist / I Took Myself With Me with Jon Labman

Transcript

I Took Myself With Me with Jon Labman · The Trauma Therapist

0:00
Speaker 1: Trauma Thepist podcast. Plus listeners can listen to episodes early
0:03
Speaker 1: and ad free right now. Become a Plus listener by
0:07
Speaker 1: going to Apple Podcasts searching for the Trauma Theverist podcast
0:11
Speaker 1: and signing up today. Welcome to the Trauma Nevers podcast,
0:18
Speaker 1: a show about the incredible people dedicated to helping those
0:21
Speaker 1: who experienced trauma. My name is Got macpherson, and my
0:24
Speaker 1: mission is to raise awareness of trauma and to inspire
0:27
Speaker 1: each of us to help those around us. You ready
0:36
Speaker 1: to do it? Ready? Yeah? All right? So five four, three,
0:39
Speaker 1: two and one, our folks, welcome back to the podcast.
0:43
Speaker 1: Very excited to have my guest today, John Latman. John welcome,
0:46
Speaker 1: Thank you guy, and it's nice to be here.
0:49
Speaker 2: And I would hope that your listeners are giving you
0:53
Speaker 2: five star ratings and thumbs up so that people listen
0:57
Speaker 2: to the broadcast.
0:58
Speaker 1: I appreciate that. So John is a sixty nine year
1:02
Speaker 1: old man who's discovered the truth about spiritual awakening, enlightenment,
1:06
Speaker 1: and liberation and he's able to teach it to everyone
1:08
Speaker 1: who comes to him for transpersonal therapy and liberation guidance.
1:13
Speaker 1: John is a survivor of childhood abuse, life and religious cults,
1:17
Speaker 1: another of life's troubles who's found simple ways to solve
1:20
Speaker 1: the problem of human suffering and to be able to
1:22
Speaker 1: wake up. His books available on Amazon, and he writes
1:25
Speaker 1: a weekly substack column called Simply Awake. He also has
1:29
Speaker 1: a YouTube video channel of the same name, all of
1:32
Speaker 1: which we'll have linked up here at the show notes
1:34
Speaker 1: page at the Trauma Therapists podcast dot com. John Welcome,
1:39
Speaker 1: Thank you guy, glad to be here. So, before we
1:42
Speaker 1: get going shore with the listeners, where you're from originally
1:45
Speaker 1: and where you are currently?
1:46
Speaker 2: I grew up well, I was born in Trenton, New Jersey,
1:49
Speaker 2: and grew up across the Delaware River in the Pennsylvania area,
1:53
Speaker 2: just opposite Trenton, And after many years I've moved back
1:57
Speaker 2: to this same area, although I'm about thirty minutes north
2:00
Speaker 2: of there, about an hour north of Philadelphia on the
2:03
Speaker 2: Delaware River.
2:05
Speaker 1: Okay, awesome, East Coast. I'm from the East Coast as well,
2:08
Speaker 1: are you okay? Yeah? So your bio was very interesting,
2:15
Speaker 1: right to the point, heavy duty. How did how did
2:22
Speaker 1: all this start for you? So?
2:24
Speaker 2: This started as sexual abuse, maternal sexual abuse, which is
2:30
Speaker 2: fairly unusual, although less so as I talk to more people,
2:35
Speaker 2: and it was not only to me but to others.
2:39
Speaker 1: And as a result of.
2:41
Speaker 2: Early abuse, now that I've studied it for a long time,
2:45
Speaker 2: there was a lot of uncoordination in my body. I
2:47
Speaker 2: would always I would be falling down and you know,
2:50
Speaker 2: breaking my chin open on the floor or you know.
2:52
Speaker 2: And so when I was in school, I was a
2:54
Speaker 2: very bad athlete and picked on pretty relentlessly and traumatized
2:58
Speaker 2: again bullied at school. And over time I found a
3:05
Speaker 2: way to get away from public school and to get
3:07
Speaker 2: out of my home. I won an international scholarship to
3:13
Speaker 2: the last two years of high school. But it's called
3:15
Speaker 2: College over in Wales, the United World College of the
3:18
Speaker 2: Atlantic in South Wales, and I spent two years in
3:21
Speaker 2: a Hurst Castle learning with kids from fifty countries, and
3:27
Speaker 2: like you had to get out, I had to.
3:28
Speaker 1: Get out, and that was the way to get out.
3:30
Speaker 2: And it was sort of miraculous that I got a
3:33
Speaker 2: scholarship because they said we wouldn't qualify for one, and
3:37
Speaker 2: I was just studying the New Testament at that point.
3:40
Speaker 2: So I was like, Okay, if there's a God, I
3:43
Speaker 2: want this impossible scholarship. And I got it, and so
3:47
Speaker 2: you know, I took my depressed, traumatized, anxious self.
3:53
Speaker 1: To Wales and did get my two We're talking what
3:56
Speaker 1: seventeen eighteen at this point.
3:58
Speaker 2: I started at sixteen and I was there until I
4:00
Speaker 2: was eighteen, so it was two four years. I did
4:03
Speaker 2: come home for breaks and got to travel, but you know,
4:07
Speaker 2: I took my self with me there and I thought
4:10
Speaker 2: it was going to cure all my problems. But you know,
4:14
Speaker 2: I later after I graduated, I ended up in college.
4:18
Speaker 2: I had what we would have called in nineteen seventy
4:20
Speaker 2: three a nervous breakdown. I had to leave college after
4:24
Speaker 2: the first semester. I ended up at a Christian college
4:28
Speaker 2: down south called Covenant College that's on Lookout Mountain in Georgia,
4:34
Speaker 2: right outside of Chattanooga, Tennessee. And you know, I kept
4:39
Speaker 2: looking for some kind of sense of family, some kind
4:41
Speaker 2: of sense of belonging. I was looking for some way
4:46
Speaker 2: to guide my life because my life internally was very chaotic.
4:51
Speaker 2: I was also a gay man, but not out to myself,
4:54
Speaker 2: and so that just complicated everything. And I ended up
5:01
Speaker 2: leaving college and joined a Christian commune in Santa Barbara,
5:04
Speaker 2: California for a couple months, but I got depressed out there,
5:08
Speaker 2: no surprise, they put me on a thirty day fast.
5:11
Speaker 2: I ended up becoming schizo effective and depressed, and I
5:17
Speaker 2: ended up back home in a private mental hospital for
5:21
Speaker 2: two months getting electro convulsive therapy.
5:25
Speaker 1: That was pleasure, right, Yeah, and I apologize for doing so.
5:31
Speaker 1: But sure, I'm curious about at what point did this
5:36
Speaker 1: abuse start for you?
5:38
Speaker 2: Three years old? Pretty much, you're pretty much certain about that.
5:42
Speaker 1: You said it happened with others. Was that siblings or things?
5:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then and then we didn't none of us
5:48
Speaker 2: remembered it. That The dissociation is amazing. And I didn't
5:52
Speaker 2: remember it until the next generation was being abused. And
5:55
Speaker 2: then my generation started remembering. And I was fifty two
5:59
Speaker 2: years old when that happened. That's about eighteen years old.
6:01
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Yeah, so that kind of leads me
6:05
Speaker 1: to my next my question here, Yeah, how were you
6:09
Speaker 1: managing this as a young kid?
6:14
Speaker 2: You know, what I was doing was was achieving in
6:17
Speaker 2: the classroom and getting the attention of teachers. I and
6:22
Speaker 2: what I ended up doing my whole life was, as
6:26
Speaker 2: I learned later from doctor Besil Vanderkolk when he had
6:30
Speaker 2: his group at Justice Resources Institute, I did everything that
6:35
Speaker 2: he was talking about trauma survivors needing to do to
6:39
Speaker 2: function and cope.
6:40
Speaker 1: I sang I was a singer, right, you know.
6:43
Speaker 2: I achieved academically, so I had something to hang my
6:47
Speaker 2: hat on.
6:47
Speaker 1: It.
6:47
Speaker 2: It's something I could be proud of. I got to
6:50
Speaker 2: travel internationally. I got very involved in religion, so I
6:53
Speaker 2: had a sense of belonging. I had a sense of community.
6:56
Speaker 2: I had a sense of right and wrong. I had
6:59
Speaker 2: a sense of allegedly being protected.
7:01
Speaker 1: Although was your father around.
7:05
Speaker 2: My father didn't know anything about the abuse, and he
7:08
Speaker 2: and my mother were divorced when I was six years old.
7:12
Speaker 1: OK.
7:12
Speaker 2: And then there was a stepfather, and he didn't know
7:14
Speaker 2: anything about it either. But I wasn't being abused by
7:17
Speaker 2: that time. Someone else was, and I'll just leave them out.
7:21
Speaker 1: Did you tell anyone? Did you talk to any about this?
7:24
Speaker 2: I didn't realize what was happening. I didn't really know
7:27
Speaker 2: it was. It was odd or strange, and I didn't
7:30
Speaker 2: realize that I was terrorized until it all came back
7:36
Speaker 2: when I was fifty two years old.
7:37
Speaker 1: I just knew that this was that context in which
7:40
Speaker 1: it did come back.
7:43
Speaker 2: The next generation came home to my generation from a
7:47
Speaker 2: visit to the abuser being traumatized and saying he hated her,
7:54
Speaker 2: he never wanted to see her again, and he was
7:58
Speaker 2: he had some signs of abuse. Was wedding the bad
8:01
Speaker 2: and he was pooping the bad and he was ten
8:03
Speaker 2: years old, so pretty classic signs of abuse. So we
8:08
Speaker 2: were all gathering for a big celebratory birthday party and
8:12
Speaker 2: those involved kind of put their heads together and started
8:15
Speaker 2: remembering just little tiny bits of things, and you know,
8:19
Speaker 2: there was a tremendous amount of dissociation. Others who were
8:22
Speaker 2: abused didn't remember whole years of their lives, and so
8:26
Speaker 2: you know, you've got very serious. I was already a
8:29
Speaker 2: therapist by this point, at fifty two.
8:31
Speaker 1: I was already.
8:33
Speaker 2: Not quite licensed, but was about to get licensed. You know,
8:36
Speaker 2: I was in supervision at that at that point, and
8:42
Speaker 2: I was working in a rehab facility, outpatient drug and
8:47
Speaker 2: alcohol rehab, and I was seeing that a lot of
8:50
Speaker 2: the people coming through who had problems with addiction had
8:53
Speaker 2: histories of adverse childhood experiences and abuse and sexual abuse,
8:59
Speaker 2: and seventy five percent of IVY drug using women were
9:02
Speaker 2: sexually abused. You know, we started to learn these kinds
9:05
Speaker 2: of things. So, but my own story didn't really get completed.
9:09
Speaker 2: And you know, until age between fifty two and middle
9:13
Speaker 2: of fifty four, you know, when I started to feel
9:17
Speaker 2: my way through how bad that had felt a lot
9:20
Speaker 2: of a lot of crying, a lot of screaming.
9:24
Speaker 1: I did a lot of shouting in those years.
9:26
Speaker 2: Used to go in my yoga blankets every night after
9:28
Speaker 2: work and do about a half an hour process work
9:31
Speaker 2: just to get the feelings out that i'd.
9:33
Speaker 1: Been holding for fifty years. Yeah, you know, almost fifty years.
9:40
Speaker 2: So but in the meantime, you know, I lived in
9:46
Speaker 2: this commune. I got I was you know, hospitalized for
9:49
Speaker 2: mental health care, got electroconvulsive therapy.
9:53
Speaker 1: I had later finished.
9:56
Speaker 2: My college degree, it was going to go to seminary
9:58
Speaker 2: and got talked into living in this community also in Pennsylvania,
10:02
Speaker 2: in the King of Prussia area of Pennsylvania, and very quickly,
10:06
Speaker 2: almost as soon as I joined, it devolved into a
10:09
Speaker 2: brainwashing cult. It had been a part of the denomination
10:13
Speaker 2: that ran the college, so I didn't think it was unsafe,
10:15
Speaker 2: but almost straight away the family that I stayed with
10:20
Speaker 2: one summer, they were all excommunicated and the whole place
10:22
Speaker 2: turned upside down, and you know then it was a
10:25
Speaker 2: place of extreme fear and love, just like my home
10:29
Speaker 2: of origin. So I spent seven years there, and when
10:33
Speaker 2: I left there, I was a basket case. And I
10:37
Speaker 2: went the very next day, I fled this place, you know,
10:41
Speaker 2: kind of in secret. The very next day I went
10:43
Speaker 2: into therapy at about age just before I was turning thirty,
10:47
Speaker 2: I guess, and that therapist saved my life and you know,
10:52
Speaker 2: started to teach me that we all have our own
10:54
Speaker 2: thoughts and feelings, that we can learn to pay attention
10:56
Speaker 2: to them, all the things that we teach trauma survivors
10:59
Speaker 2: now right, Yeah.
11:04
Speaker 1: John, intense, intense, Yeah, I mean Jesus, yeah, my god.
11:13
Speaker 1: So it's the fact that you've been through this to
11:22
Speaker 1: me is and you're sitting here willing, not only willing,
11:26
Speaker 1: but you're courageously sharing your story. You've you know, you're
11:31
Speaker 1: helping people. Is really inspiring to me. One of the
11:35
Speaker 1: reasons why I do this. So let's I want to
11:41
Speaker 1: touch on that therapist and then I want to get
11:43
Speaker 1: to how things kind of shifted for you such that
11:47
Speaker 1: you were like, Okay, I want to start helping people.
11:50
Speaker 1: You're writing the books, et cetera. So you said this
11:52
Speaker 1: therapist saved your life? He or she? What what did
11:55
Speaker 1: they do?
11:57
Speaker 2: I mean what she said was I felt hopeless, and
12:01
Speaker 2: she said you wouldn't be in my office if you
12:03
Speaker 2: didn't have some hope. I was like, oh, how did
12:06
Speaker 2: she know that? And you know she in those days
12:11
Speaker 2: it was okay to work in a home. She was
12:13
Speaker 2: working in her home in Princeton, New Jersey. I was
12:15
Speaker 2: traveling an hour and a half one way to get there,
12:18
Speaker 2: just because she was recommended. And she really said, look,
12:23
Speaker 2: I can't deal with any of the religious dogma stuff.
12:26
Speaker 2: I know that they told you you were going to
12:28
Speaker 2: hell if you left, but I don't have any experience
12:31
Speaker 2: with that. We're going to treat this like a divorce,
12:34
Speaker 2: and so we treated it like, you know, this terrible
12:37
Speaker 2: family separation, which is what it was. It was my
12:39
Speaker 2: entire life for seven years. It was a terrifying life,
12:41
Speaker 2: but that was my life, my home, my friends, everything
12:45
Speaker 2: was gone. And she started to ask me what did
12:50
Speaker 2: I feel? What did I think? And nobody was interested
12:53
Speaker 2: in what you think. You know, when you're in a
12:55
Speaker 2: brainwashing called they want you to think what they think,
12:58
Speaker 2: and they want you to feel what they tell you
12:59
Speaker 2: to feel, and they're not interested in what your thoughts
13:01
Speaker 2: and feelings are. Your thoughts and feelings are generally just
13:04
Speaker 2: wicked or sinful now, which goes right along with the
13:07
Speaker 2: shame that a child takes out of being traumatized sexually abused.
13:11
Speaker 2: Almost all children come out of that circumstance feeling shame.
13:16
Speaker 2: Like I'm broken at the core. You know, you go
13:18
Speaker 2: into a religious cult that says, you know, your first
13:23
Speaker 2: doctrine is total depravity, you are as a human being,
13:26
Speaker 2: totally depraved, and it kind of aligns with your inner
13:29
Speaker 2: belief that you're you're broken. And this woman, her name
13:34
Speaker 2: was Pat McGrath, my therapist. She said, question your thoughts,
13:41
Speaker 2: I mean, question what you feel what And she was
13:46
Speaker 2: the one who said, okay, if you have feelings for men, okay,
13:49
Speaker 2: that's the thing.
13:50
Speaker 1: It's all right. You're not going to die. You know.
13:52
Speaker 2: The church had said if you leave and act on
13:56
Speaker 2: feelings for men, you're going to get AIDS and go
13:58
Speaker 2: to hell. This was nineteen eighty four, but he was dying, right,
14:02
Speaker 2: And this woman said, you don't have to get AIDS.
14:06
Speaker 2: Get a condom, learn to use it right. And she
14:10
Speaker 2: introduced me to a therapist friend of hers who was gay,
14:13
Speaker 2: and he introduced me to a bunch of his friends.
14:16
Speaker 2: So I knew what gay people were like, and I
14:18
Speaker 2: soon came out of the closet. I moved to a
14:23
Speaker 2: town very close to where I live now, which is
14:25
Speaker 2: very friendly to gay people called New Hope, Pennsylvania. Uh
14:30
Speaker 2: you know, and I yeah, and I and I started
14:35
Speaker 2: meeting people who were New Yorkers who came down to
14:37
Speaker 2: New Hope because it was it was a summerstock town,
14:40
Speaker 2: and theater people came down in the summers, and I
14:44
Speaker 2: soon found myself wanting to be in theater. There's another
14:48
Speaker 2: thing that is recommended for trauma survivors, do drama therapy. Right,
14:52
Speaker 2: I was a singer. I was a very well trained singer.
14:54
Speaker 2: I had two different Broadway vocal coaches, each of whom
14:58
Speaker 2: told me I could work. One of whom was the
15:00
Speaker 2: coach to Betty Buckley, the star of Cats, and was
15:04
Speaker 2: this coach the star of West Side Story Lead. And
15:10
Speaker 2: they said, come and train. And so you know, when
15:12
Speaker 2: you train, you learn what makes you feel. And that's
15:17
Speaker 2: really important for trauma survivors. We have to know what
15:20
Speaker 2: causes us to feel things. They also teach you that
15:25
Speaker 2: your own imagination can make you feel things. So I
15:28
Speaker 2: learned that not everything that I thought was true. You know,
15:33
Speaker 2: a lot of my thoughts weren't true, and they could
15:35
Speaker 2: produce very strong emotions. I also learned about the fact
15:38
Speaker 2: that the body, the body of a trauma survivor, is
15:42
Speaker 2: often very tense. And you know, we do a lot
15:45
Speaker 2: of somatic work now, but in those days we didn't
15:49
Speaker 2: know much about somatic work. But in acting, when you're
15:52
Speaker 2: doing method acting, go to physical acting school, they teach
15:55
Speaker 2: you to relax. You can't feel until you relax. Your
15:59
Speaker 2: muscles are so tight and you're not breathing, which we
16:01
Speaker 2: know is a freeze response now in trauma.
16:05
Speaker 1: Right.
16:06
Speaker 2: So I was learning all these things along the way,
16:08
Speaker 2: and you know, I really thought I wanted to be
16:10
Speaker 2: on the stage, but when it came down to it,
16:12
Speaker 2: I didn't like performing. I loved to sing, but I
16:14
Speaker 2: didn't like to perform. And it was so interested in
16:18
Speaker 2: who is Jonathan now that instead of that, I just said,
16:23
Speaker 2: all right, I'm out. I did some word processing administrative
16:27
Speaker 2: work because I'd done that after college, and eventually I
16:31
Speaker 2: found my way into Eastern Enlightenment studies with some people
16:35
Speaker 2: who did massage therapy and breath work and meditation and
16:39
Speaker 2: mindfulness and counseling all at once. They became the model
16:44
Speaker 2: for what I eventually ended up doing. So the first
16:47
Speaker 2: thing I did was I went to massage school, and
16:50
Speaker 2: I learned how to touch safely because trauma survivor doesn't know.
16:56
Speaker 2: And I learned how to hold boundaries, which was very difficult.
16:58
Speaker 2: I was working with gay men, was working on Fire
17:00
Speaker 2: Island if anybody's ever heard of it, out there the Pines,
17:04
Speaker 2: you know, the great Gay Resort in the nineteen nineties,
17:07
Speaker 2: and working in New York City in the gay neighborhoods,
17:10
Speaker 2: and I was holding boundaries or trying really hard to
17:12
Speaker 2: hold boundaries, learn how to hold boundaries, learned how to
17:15
Speaker 2: do that. Eventually, I went to NYU and took some
17:18
Speaker 2: graduate school courses, but that wasn't quite right. It was
17:22
Speaker 2: rehab counseling, it wasn't full counseling. So instead I took
17:26
Speaker 2: three years of energy healing work, and I learned how
17:31
Speaker 2: to deal with and how to feel a lot of
17:33
Speaker 2: the subtle stuff going on in the body which trauma
17:37
Speaker 2: survivor needs to know. After that, I went to graduate
17:40
Speaker 2: school because I thought, well, these energy healers had have
17:43
Speaker 2: too much power. I don't want that much power. I
17:45
Speaker 2: want people to have power. I wanted to have power.
17:47
Speaker 2: I didn't want to be lorded over by any more
17:51
Speaker 2: cult like figures. Although I kept sort of repeating that pattern,
17:54
Speaker 2: I didn't live in cults, but I tended to go
17:56
Speaker 2: to people like that who were a little scary, a
18:00
Speaker 2: little loving, and we're trying to get you closer to God.
18:04
Speaker 2: And eventually I just took that into my own hands.
18:07
Speaker 2: But you know, eventually I went to graduate school. I
18:11
Speaker 2: got my diploma, my master's when I was forty five,
18:15
Speaker 2: and I started doing the work that I had wanted
18:18
Speaker 2: to do in you know, back in the eighties when
18:20
Speaker 2: I first learned Eastern Enlightenment traditions from these people that
18:24
Speaker 2: did all this different work meditation and mindfulness and.
18:28
Speaker 1: Massage and all that.
18:29
Speaker 2: But I started with massage and then I ended, you know,
18:32
Speaker 2: with that clinical degree and then a yoga teacher training,
18:37
Speaker 2: and I learned to teach meditation, and as part of
18:40
Speaker 2: my work, I've always taught meditation and mindfulness practice because
18:43
Speaker 2: trauma survivors need to learn that the present is safe,
18:48
Speaker 2: the trauma is back there. Somewhere part of the brain
18:50
Speaker 2: feels stuck back there, but it's back there. So I've
18:55
Speaker 2: been working now for twenty five years as a therapist,
18:59
Speaker 2: and as part of my process to get license, I
19:04
Speaker 2: went to that place.
19:05
Speaker 1: I was telling you.
19:05
Speaker 2: About where I did outpatient therapy in the drug rehab
19:10
Speaker 2: outpatient facility. And when I was there, I had a
19:14
Speaker 2: great supervisor who was the vice president of the foundation,
19:18
Speaker 2: and she said, you know, there are a lot of
19:21
Speaker 2: traumatized people, and we've got other departments here that are
19:24
Speaker 2: starting to deal with trauma. Why don't you go study
19:29
Speaker 2: with Bessel vander Kolk a weekend. I found this course
19:32
Speaker 2: that he was offering at Crippollo Yoga Institute in the
19:36
Speaker 2: Berkshire Mountains. I met him, I met David Emerson, who
19:40
Speaker 2: was doing yoga for trauma survivors. And when I came back,
19:44
Speaker 2: my boss said, as soon as you get your degree
19:47
Speaker 2: your licenser outher which was November twenty ten, I want
19:50
Speaker 2: you to head up a trauma treatment project here. We're
19:53
Speaker 2: going to get outside funding. And so what we did
19:57
Speaker 2: without outside funding was we trained thirty emissions, twenty from
20:01
Speaker 2: our agency and ten from outside agencies. We did live
20:05
Speaker 2: link broadcasts to Boston with Bessel Vanderkolk and his classroom.
20:12
Speaker 2: You know, we didn't have zoom in those days, like
20:15
Speaker 2: twelve years ago, and so we studied thirty weeks, three
20:19
Speaker 2: hours a week with all these wonderful trauma specialists that
20:22
Speaker 2: are still working in the field, and with doctor Vanderkolk himself,
20:26
Speaker 2: with Bessel, and then I later took a year long
20:30
Speaker 2: course with doctor Bruce Perry, who just wrote What Happened
20:32
Speaker 2: to You with Oprah Winfrey, and that was more working
20:36
Speaker 2: with children, but still gave me all the principles of
20:39
Speaker 2: what happens to.
20:40
Speaker 1: The brain and the body when there's trauma.
20:43
Speaker 2: And so I've specialized in trauma, but also in spirituality
20:46
Speaker 2: because traumatized people feel like we're broken. And the spiritual
20:52
Speaker 2: and the here and now in the present moment, the
20:55
Speaker 2: Eastern mystical traditions are all about. In the present moment
20:59
Speaker 2: is everything that you ever wanted. The peace and the contentment,
21:03
Speaker 2: the compassion, the curiosity, the creativity, the sense of no
21:08
Speaker 2: boundaries but safe no boundaries, the sense of timelessness.
21:13
Speaker 1: All of that's in the right brain.
21:16
Speaker 2: And so if you deal with left brain thoughts and
21:20
Speaker 2: feelings if you teach people how to name and talk
21:22
Speaker 2: about their feelings, how to check and see whether their
21:25
Speaker 2: thoughts are true or not, a lot of the drama
21:28
Speaker 2: of left brain quiets down, and then people have access
21:31
Speaker 2: to all the goodies of the right brain and the
21:35
Speaker 2: ability to live from the right brain, which is what
21:38
Speaker 2: we call spirituality.
21:42
Speaker 1: Your journey and the steps along the way are not
21:49
Speaker 1: only incredible, but you know, from being a young kid
21:56
Speaker 1: who was traumatizing, carrying that whole life, you know, to
22:03
Speaker 1: getting to a point where you're able to have these
22:05
Speaker 1: realizations and live these awakenings and spiritual how these spiritual experiences.
22:14
Speaker 1: That's that's a gap, Yeah, a big, big distance for
22:18
Speaker 1: for a lot of us. And it's oftentimes uh rife
22:24
Speaker 1: with hills and valleys and and and and traps and
22:29
Speaker 1: Quicksand when did that start to happen for you? When?
22:35
Speaker 1: And I know it's not oftentimes in the blink of
22:37
Speaker 1: an eye, or some could say it is in the
22:39
Speaker 1: blink of an eye, But for you, John, when did
22:41
Speaker 1: you start to feel like, okay, maybe there I'm seeing
22:48
Speaker 1: the light of hope.
22:49
Speaker 2: Well, I really the first day I was in therapy
22:53
Speaker 2: with with Pat McGrath in Princeton. I started to feel
22:59
Speaker 2: that there must be some hope and light of hope.
23:02
Speaker 2: I think when I came out of the closet and
23:04
Speaker 2: went to live in New York and started to live
23:07
Speaker 2: whatever life I thought, I was able to live freely.
23:11
Speaker 2: In other words, I had never felt really very free,
23:13
Speaker 2: and you know, then I could live the way I
23:17
Speaker 2: was kind of created to live. I could I could
23:21
Speaker 2: feel my own attractions. I think feeling my own attractions
23:25
Speaker 2: was a big part of feeling some light in the picture.
23:31
Speaker 2: But it was in the eighties, in the late eighties,
23:33
Speaker 2: when I started working when in the Eastern mystical traditions,
23:37
Speaker 2: that I realized there was a spirituality that was good
23:41
Speaker 2: for me that was also accepting of me as a
23:44
Speaker 2: gay person. And not all that, you know, Eastern spiritualities are.
23:50
Speaker 2: You know, even some Hindus won't accept you as a
23:52
Speaker 2: gay person. But I found people that did. And then
23:57
Speaker 2: it was like, oh, right, well, oh, I have a
24:00
Speaker 2: spiritual life too, and it's not dictated by dogma or
24:04
Speaker 2: doctrine or a book or somebody else. It's something I
24:08
Speaker 2: can experience. And that that was like, oh, I can
24:12
Speaker 2: experience feeling good in my body. That was like miraculous
24:17
Speaker 2: to me because I'd always just felt tense and you know,
24:20
Speaker 2: headaches and back aches and stomach aches and you know,
24:25
Speaker 2: crawling around on the floor from bad back injury and
24:29
Speaker 2: you know all kinds of somatic problems because of trauma.
24:34
Speaker 2: And suddenly I was starting to feel like, oh I
24:37
Speaker 2: don't have there's some freedom from pain, and that's like
24:42
Speaker 2: that's kind of when you feel like, oh wow, I've
24:44
Speaker 2: got some hope now. And it's really the leftover pain
24:48
Speaker 2: and suffering is what always motivated me to go further.
24:54
Speaker 1: Just want to remind everyone speaking with John Labin, He's
24:58
Speaker 1: at Simplywake dot com and on your website it says
25:02
Speaker 1: liberation therapy, clarity piece simplicity for those who maybe aren't familiar,
25:07
Speaker 1: what is liberation therapy.
25:09
Speaker 2: So it's what I was describing earlier. I work with
25:12
Speaker 2: people to get them to understand their humanity and dedramatize
25:18
Speaker 2: their lives enough so that they can have contact with
25:21
Speaker 2: their spirituality. And I do all of that, and I'll
25:26
Speaker 2: do any of that that people want. I'll just do
25:28
Speaker 2: the left brain work, or I'll just do the right
25:31
Speaker 2: brain work, but really the right brain work needs the
25:33
Speaker 2: left brain work, so usually.
25:35
Speaker 1: They go together.
25:36
Speaker 2: And so that's you know, what I do is I
25:38
Speaker 2: start with people where they are, listen to their story,
25:41
Speaker 2: figure out what they need, work with that, and then
25:44
Speaker 2: if they're open to spirituality, I introduce spirituality to them.
25:48
Speaker 2: But I work with a lot of trauma survivors.
25:52
Speaker 1: And when you say, you know, introduce people to spirituality,
25:57
Speaker 1: what does that mean? How are we defining? How are
25:59
Speaker 1: you to finding spirituality?
26:02
Speaker 2: Present moment awareness without thought is the basic definition I
26:08
Speaker 2: would give of spirituality. Can I have a present moment
26:12
Speaker 2: awareness where I'm my attention is not just caught in
26:15
Speaker 2: my thoughts, where I can actually feel the environment around
26:20
Speaker 2: me and breathe and be temporarily at peace. That's the start.
26:26
Speaker 2: There's way more than that, but that's the start. Yeah,
26:31
Speaker 2: And so mindfulness practice and basic mindfulness practice, basic meditation.
26:35
Speaker 2: I teach meditation in about twenty five or thirty minutes,
26:39
Speaker 2: and I help people to meditate walking or biking or
26:42
Speaker 2: however they can do it right. So all those things
26:46
Speaker 2: are incorporated in the practice. It's kind of a hybrid.
26:52
Speaker 1: I'm guessing that your quote unquote healing journey is ongoing. Yes,
27:00
Speaker 1: I mean as it is for all of us. Right, Yes,
27:06
Speaker 1: how is that for you? Now? How do you experience
27:13
Speaker 1: that healing? What helps you at this point?
27:16
Speaker 2: Well, I because I did a podcast in November with
27:21
Speaker 2: somebody who had interviewed a doctor who had been working
27:26
Speaker 2: with dual sympathetic reset still a ganglion block. I don't
27:31
Speaker 2: know if you've ever heard of that treatment. It's treatment
27:35
Speaker 2: where they inject the same thing that's in an epidural
27:38
Speaker 2: into the ganglion of the neck and the trauma survivors.
27:43
Speaker 2: That often produces extra adrenaline right here in these nerves,
27:47
Speaker 2: and that adrenaline goes right to the amygdala, which is
27:50
Speaker 2: the smoke you know, the emotional smoke detector of your brain.
27:52
Speaker 2: It's what sets off the alarm bells. And I had
27:55
Speaker 2: that treatment to just further calm my nervous system, which
27:59
Speaker 2: is really amazing and does work a lot of people
28:02
Speaker 2: who go are you know, active duty military special ops,
28:08
Speaker 2: people who are in battle and have PTSD and other
28:11
Speaker 2: PTSD survivors. So I'm still working with my body. I'm
28:16
Speaker 2: still calming my body. You know, I'll be seventy tomorrow,
28:21
Speaker 2: so you know, this is an ongoing process. The formal
28:24
Speaker 2: spiritual path there's no dangling carrot anymore. I don't need
28:29
Speaker 2: anything else. It's not that we don't continue to learn.
28:34
Speaker 2: There's always refinement going on. There's always stuff in the
28:37
Speaker 2: left rain that still needs to be worked with. But
28:40
Speaker 2: it's just much more peaceful life now. I don't need
28:46
Speaker 2: to achieve anything to be here. I don't need to
28:49
Speaker 2: prove anything to be here.
28:51
Speaker 1: I know that I am lovable and am love.
28:58
Speaker 2: And I don't need to be ashamed of what happened
29:04
Speaker 2: to me. And it wasn't my fault. I was three,
29:08
Speaker 2: you know, so all of that is kind of where
29:11
Speaker 2: I am now. And then whoever wants to come comes,
29:13
Speaker 2: and you know, sometimes I'm busy and sometimes I'm not
29:16
Speaker 2: very busy because this is a kind of a hybrid
29:18
Speaker 2: practice and people.
29:19
Speaker 1: Don't know what to make of it.
29:21
Speaker 2: But hopefully I presented it, you know, clearly enough that
29:25
Speaker 2: they'll understand.
29:26
Speaker 1: Today you did and beautifully and happy birthday tomorrow. Thank you? Yeah,
29:32
Speaker 1: John uh so inspiring. I want to say Jesus, but
29:38
Speaker 1: giving the content of what we're talking about might not
29:41
Speaker 1: be appropriate. How do people learn more about you and
29:43
Speaker 1: what you're doing well?
29:44
Speaker 2: As a gift to your listeners, if they write to
29:47
Speaker 2: me at support at Simplyawake dot com. So support at
29:53
Speaker 2: simplywake dot com. I will send them my last book,
29:57
Speaker 2: a PDF of the last book that I wrote called
29:59
Speaker 2: Being Here in Waking Up, and a link for a
30:02
Speaker 2: free fifteen minute session with me if they.
30:04
Speaker 1: Would like to take that. Clear Wow. And that's how
30:09
Speaker 1: they get in touch with me.
30:10
Speaker 2: And of course reading the website is always good too.
30:15
Speaker 1: Okay, awesome, I'll put that here at the show notes
30:17
Speaker 1: page at the Traumatripris podcast dot com. John, Awesome again,
30:21
Speaker 1: really inspiring. I appreciate you coming on here and sharing
30:24
Speaker 1: your journey and I love to have you back at
30:26
Speaker 1: a later time. Thanks guy, I'd love to come back
30:28
Speaker 1: anytime you want. Okay awesome, all right, we'll be in touch.
30:31
Speaker 1: Happy birthday again. Thank you, Bye bye bye ye