Latest / Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce / 24. Overcoming Divorce Trauma, and Learn How to Trust Yourself & Others

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24. Overcoming Divorce Trauma, and Learn How to Trust Yourself & Others · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Hi, love, this is Dawn and you're listening to Dear Divorce Diary with my coach, dawn, where we explore the post-divorce life and you, the woman who lives it.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: We cover everything from trauma during and after divorce to feeling like a stranger in your own life and the new frontier of life as a single woman.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: We're cozy in for the conversations we've been longing to have about this new life.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: Hi, love, welcome back.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: How are you doing today?
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: I wish I could wrap you in a huge hug.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: You know that feeling you get when you see someone who you haven't seen in a while and you're like, oh, my goodness, let me hug you, let me squeeze you.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: That's how I feel when I sit down to record and chat with you.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: I just wish I could snuggle you.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: So trauma, the idea of trauma is trending.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Have you noticed that?
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: Are you?
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: are you tick-talking about trauma?
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: So that's what we're going to talk about today And it's one of my favorite topics, because it's been a lot of my life's work to learn about how to overcome trauma and then subsequently to overcome the trauma, and it's been so much of my own healing process and then a gift that I am so honored to be able to pass on to other people.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: It is one of the most.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: There are not even words to describe what I'm going to try to convey to you right now, but it is one of the most humbling aspects of my career is to sit with people in their most painful places and for them to trust me in that space, to go to the darkest, most turbulent moments of their lives and to let me carry them through that.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: It is absolutely an unparalleled honor in my life, and so hopefully we can give you a little bit of that today to have a better grip on you, understanding whether or not this is part of your story and what you want to do about it, because we always have choices And I really honor that.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: It's a big, big, big deal to face the traumas in your life and to understand yourself on that level and then to get free from it.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: And while I know that it is completely possible for you to be free from it, i understand that it is a process that casts a lot of doubt.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: You know, as we're unraveling one belief system and reconstructing a new one, that journey is one that has a lot of doubt woven into it, and so if you've experienced that at all in your process of healing, just know that that's really normal and super relatable.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: So maybe we can eliminate some of that doubt, or quiet some of that doubt today so that you can, you know, be more aligned with your truth and your process.
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: So let's talk about it.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: It is become a belief of mine that much of divorce can be tied back to childhood trauma, and that a lot of childhood trauma comes out of attachment, trauma Meaning when we're born.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: If we're born into parentage that is not consistent or harmonized or reliable, or, to take it a step further, right, if it's just downright hard or abusive or many things, there's a consequence to that in terms of the small humans that get exposed to it.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: And so no big deal.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: This isn't about blame at all.
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: This isn't about blame because each of us, in our journey, we have to fit, we have to take responsibility for the circumstances that we have been born into, and so we are not here to blame anybody, not your ex, not your parents, not that guy that did that thing to you back in the ninth grade.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: We're not here to blame anyone.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: We are here to embrace empowerment.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: So let me just reinforce that We do not talk about trauma for the purpose in wallowing in the who did it.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: We do this for the purpose of being able to pull the threads of empowerment.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: It is not your fault, but it is your responsibility And that's why we talk about this, so that we can more fully take responsibility, because when we do that is where we find freedom, that is where we find release, shedding, it's where we find our stride and our power, and it is amazing.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: So it is common for there to be overlap between divorce, divorce trauma and childhood trauma.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: So let's just throw that out there at the outset.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: So what is trauma?
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: What is childhood trauma?
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: We loosely just described that, but let's talk a little more specifically.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: So trauma is just what happens in the mind, body, spirit or soul, however you want to refer to it when something so painful happens that it causes separation, or the perception of separation, either from your mind, body and your spirit.
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: So, literally in the mind, there is a response to trauma, there is a body response to trauma and a soul response to trauma.
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: So when it's an event that is so overwhelming whether it's a single event that's what people often associate with, trauma is big, single events or something that's so chronic that it is just chronically kind of woven into how you experience life that it becomes in totality something that is too much to bear.
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: So how do you know if what you experienced either as a child or as an adult was too much to bear?
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: This is such an interesting question.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: We know enough in the science community anymore to be able to see in brain scans that trauma creates a structural impact in the brain.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: So when we say mind, body, spirit, we can literally see how the brain becomes altered as a result of trauma.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: And as an EMDR therapist who treats trauma, i can tell you that the more chronic childhood stuff versus a single incident stuff.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: It's really interesting how that chronic childhood stuff that doesn't seem overtly or obviously like trauma it's trickier to treat because it's like woven into almost every memory or experience or the framework of how you believe life is or was.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: So we can really literally see the effects of trauma in the brain.
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: We can see the effects of trauma in the body.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: Many massage therapists, energy workers, craniosacral therapists, people who do body work, even physical therapists they know what the rest of us have been able to come to know, which is that we store emotional and mental pain in the body, so a lot of pain that people experience in the body is stored trauma.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: Oh, yoga instructors, they know this so much right That you could come to a yoga mat or you could come to a massage therapist and all of a sudden you just find yourself crying on your mat or on the massage table.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: And it's because when something gets unblocked in the body, all of a sudden, here come all the feelings that were stored associated with that body blockage.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: So in grad school, when I met my grad school wife, which is AKA my best friend that I met there in grad school, she was a massage therapist and she knew there was so much more to know because so often and she managed she gifted in all the ways mind, body, spirit.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: So she would have people on her table and people would have these somatic releases.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: And she just knew that there was so much more to understand about how a human sores and releases emotional experiences.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: And so when we think about what is trauma, it's something that was so overwhelming that it created this blockage, this alteration at a cellular level, in the brain structure and how the body experiences reality.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: And then in the soul, the soul can, yes, end up with imprints on it to do with traumas.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: And so later on, as we talk about healing, i'm going to say that healing has to happen in all three dimensions.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: Right, think of it as a three-legged stool.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: You could, you could go, do the somatic work, releasing, but if you don't heal the mind that structural thing that we can see that happens in the mind, if you don't heal the soul, you're always still kind of sitting on a one-two or three-legged stool.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: So trauma in your childhood could be anything that shifted you away from who you were born to be.
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: It altered your, your self-ness.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: It created a shift, a fundamental shift from kind of the pure self that you came into the world as, and whether it happened all at once, in a single incident, or it happened in bits and bobs along the way, in something that shifted you away from your self-ness and and this happens.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: So let's normalize this, it's okay.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: It's okay, love We.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: It's so tempting to get all hooked into the drama of that Like, can you believe that they did this to me?
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: And oh man, have I been there and have I spent years, years in the can you believe it?
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: at of it all, yeah, and let's, let's not go back there.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: It's normal.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: We all have things that we are going to have to work through, accept and shift, and the cool thing of it is that we are given all the tools we need to heal from these things.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: This is not a life sentence love, it is a.
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: It's a.
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: It's an empowerment story.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: It's a comeback story.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: It's like a oh man, watch out, here she goes, watch out world, right.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: So so that is the angle I want you to take with this, not a.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: Can you believe they did this to me?
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: Can you believe how much more of me I get to tap into as a result of healing from this thing, right, okay?
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: so another question that people ask about trauma is what are the stages of trauma, and this question is so interesting to me.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: What are the stages of trauma?
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: So I don't want you to get too tied up in that question.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: We like to label things.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: Humans, we like to label things.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: It helps us feel like we're in control of them.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: So I don't want to get bogged to bog down in this question, but I'm gonna give you, from a trauma therapist's perspective, what this means through my eyes, and what this means through my eyes as a clinician who would be helping you heal from the trauma, is, there are some ideal ways to overcome or heal from trauma, and the first one would be to create some stabilization or, more importantly, some awareness that trauma isn't you.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: You are you and the trauma is a thing that caused you to kind of get off the path of the truest you.
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: And so if you listen to the episode with Bernadette where she said okay, if you are the ocean and there's a storm, and on the surface of the ocean the storm feels very tumultuous, go deeper, right, shift your perspective down, deeper into the ocean and sink deeper and deeper and deeper into the ocean and then look up and get some perspective about that storm right And in that visualization that Bernadette did with us, which was so beautiful, is giving us some perspective that you are not the trauma.
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: There is some separation, there is some awareness.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: The trauma is something happened, it created some impacts to the mind-body, spirit, but that you can still, even as an impacted woman, you can still have the awareness that it did not completely consume you, that you can still have mastery over yourself enough, with the awareness that you can still regulate emotionally.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: Yes, it will be harder.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: You can still regulate mentally.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: Yes, it will be harder, you can still regulate spiritually while we reprocess the trauma.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: So if I were to call some stages of trauma, as a trauma clinician I would say the first phase would be ideally it's not necessary, but ideally to get some perspective on the trauma, to get some awareness that you can still, you still have the capacity to regulate.
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: Though the capacity is diminished, you still have the capacity to regulate, to get some stabilization, to be more solid than you feel and to see yourself as separate from the events.
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: From that perspective you can reprocess your trauma more easily.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: Because when you reprocess trauma, if you're like, oh, i am only the surface of the ocean in the storm, it feels bigger than it is right And I don't want you to reprocess trauma and be consumed by it.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: I want you to have dual attention, dual awareness.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: I want you to realize that was then and this is now.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: That was then and this is now.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: And so the first stage being capturing that awareness of then and now, the second stage perhaps being reprocessing the working phase of trauma, where we go in and we lace up our shoes and we, you know, do the work of reprocessing trauma.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: In an EMDR that just means kind of activating some of these key events and applying some bilateral stimulation and watching the movie of the trauma.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: And yes, that is a very intense.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: The working phase is very intense, but it's temporary and it's never as bad as people think it's going to be.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: And yes, it can take several weeks or several months, but the more I learn and the more I practice using things like law of attraction in conjunction with EMDR, the less painful it is for people and the faster it goes, which is amazing.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: And then, if I were going to call there a third stage, it would be an integration stage.
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: And this is where, even after we've cleaned up all the trauma, we've reprocessed, we've desensitized and we've healed it.
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: In essence, we've given you back your mind, body, soul.
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: There's still a relearning in there, and so the way I was describing it earlier was when we've experienced trauma, we learn to adapt right.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: We know that the structure changed in the brain, we know that we held some stuff in the body, we know that the soul was impacted, and so, even though we've cleaned all that out, now we have to go from and I was using this example can you imagine learning to walk using only your left hand and your left foot?
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: I didn't even try to do it And, like later, when I'm done recording, i'm going to see if I can even figure out how to move myself around on my left hand and my left foot.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: But the integration or the third phase of trauma recovery would be if you've been walking around on your left hand and your left foot your whole life, learning to walk on two feet upright.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: That's what that third phase is.
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: It's like a reorientation of living in all the ways and all the relationships and all the places in your love life and your work life and your self life and your spiritual, all the things, but with a very different availability in your mind, body, spirit, and so it's just, like you know, when we talk about in the world of divorce, like all the firsts that happen after divorce and it's kind of like all those invitations to grief.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: It's like there's a whole bunch of firsts that come in a healing phase of trauma, because it's like the first time I did this and I had my full capacity available to me.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: It's very different right, when your mind is quieter and you're more peaceful, and it's like walking through all these firsts.
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: It's very cool.
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: I would call that kind of the third stage of trauma healing, if you will.
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: So, but just know that that's how I'm calling the stages of trauma.
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of labels out there for stages of trauma you're going to find.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't say that any of them are necessarily right or wrong.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: We all have a different lens that we view things from.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: This is my lens, from my kind of robust experience in having experience trauma, healing from it and then being a trauma informed therapist.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: So can trauma ever be overcome Absolutely?
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: And I can tell you reliably that I have treated the heaviest thing you could possibly imagine.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: I've treated it Like and don't, don't, please don't imagine the heavy things, because I don't want you to go to that place, but just know that there is literally no kind of horrific story that I haven't heard or treated and watched somebody recover.
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: And that's what I'm saying to you when I say it is such an honor to sit in those places.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: So if you're over here thinking like, but on, i have experienced things you can't imagine, oh, i promise you love, i can't imagine them.
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: I've heard them and I've treated them and people get better.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: There's a bunch of questions out there about the how of it, right, how do we heal from trauma?
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: Can someone heal themselves.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: Does it?
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: what does it require to heal from trauma?
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: And I'm not the end, all be all in answering that question.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: I know that what I've done personally and professionally works.
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: That doesn't mean there aren't other ways.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: Now, when someone asks the question, can I heal myself from trauma?
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: I would say why would you want to?
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: that right, i want to want to answer your question with a question, and I think there's trauma has this tendency to say I don't want people to know and I don't want people to see it.
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: My daughter fell off her bike when she was five or six and she caught herself with her face.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: It was awful.
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: Could have been so much worse, though Thank God she was wearing a helmet and the helmet really did spare her so much there.
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: But what happened in the moment following it was fascinating.
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: As a trauma informed therapist, i heard her speaking the language of trauma and I thought that was wild, because to a certain extent, i've always understood that a trauma happens when we don't have the emotional support needed to make sense of the trauma when it happens.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: But my kid had all of the emotional support and all of the physical support and all the spiritual.
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: She had all the support in that moment, right, we did everything what I would call quote unquote right.
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: And she still experienced a trauma from it And I could hear her saying the things don't tell grandma is happened.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: Don't let grandpa see me.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: Folks, can you appreciate that trauma?
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: just, it just happened.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: Nobody did anything wrong.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: She got all the support she needed.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: People fall off their bikes like it just happened.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: Right, and nobody did anything wrong.
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: So that urge to heal yourself from trauma, know that that's probably a trauma response.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: Right, there are so many people that want to hold so much safe space for you.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: I would encourage you to find those people And and there are probably many, many ways to do it I think that I have found some ways that work for me.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: Yes, they involve EMDR therapy.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: They involve a lot of regulation techniques like journaling and EFT, tapping and breathwork and yoga, and they involve working with spiritual healers to handle that part of it.
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: And, yes, the body stuff to do that part of it Right.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: So there are so many mind, body, spirit ways that, with EMDR being one of the most powerful, because the mind right, the mind can tell, the can dictate the experience.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: So I think the EMDR heals the mind part And once we have more capacity over our mind, then we have so much more, so much more power to shift how we feel and to make better decisions and to go seek the other treatment.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: So I think that's probably my experience of why I find EMDR to be one of the most powerful, because I started via yoga or via spirituality and those didn't.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: It wasn't the full picture, right.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: So it wasn't until I did all three legs of the stool that I I experienced complete shedding of trauma and a complete reintegration of being able to like walk upright on my left and right feet.
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: So how do you know if you're healing from trauma?
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: How do you know if you're healing from trauma?
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: You know that is such a powerful question that doesn't have a lot of great answers, because I think that healing from trauma still looks really messy.
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: But what I would call it is like gaining ground.
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: You can tell you're gaining ground.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: So let's say there was a time in my life where I was completely unconscious to the fact that I even had trauma, let alone mastery over it, right?
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: And so let's call the beginning stages of healing from trauma even realizing that it was there, and then let's call it stumbling across some techniques that gave me some mastery over my mind, body, spirit, some capacity to still the storm within me, and I really think that I found, or tapped into, so many of those things as a result of becoming divorced.
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: Right, that's where I started getting really hungry for solutions and got the medicine that ended up treating both the trauma from divorce and the earlier stuff, and so realizing that you're gaining ground and that ground can be either via knowledge and awareness and or via mastery, so like an improvement in how you're experiencing life, like well, sometimes I feel like shit, but more often than not, or maybe even just more than I used to, i have moments of peace or moments of joy or powerful moments of awareness, or, more consistently, i follow my heart or have courage, or you name it right.
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: So I'm going to call knowing your healing gaining ground.
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: Now, if you are a recovering perfectionist like me, i am often way too hard on myself about this and I'm always trying to do it right, right, right, right, right.
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: I want to be so good at healing, i want to be so right.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: So the fact that you still experience painful emotion is not a good measurement.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: About what is it?
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: whether or not you're healing trauma.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: It's far more about.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: Do you have more access to your personal power?
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: Do you have more access to solutions?
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: Do you have more access to strategies and people who are for you?
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: and are you generally more for yourself than you used to be?
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: right, like more of a true eater, like, yeah, let's do this, like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: So that's how you know that you're headed in the right direction.
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: It's not all or nothing.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: It is a process, and it's not even a short process because there is no there, but it's being able to see your progress.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so when you are still affected by trauma, it can look really messy, right.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: How does it look?
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: How does a person who has experienced trauma behave?
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: And I would say that dysregulated.
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: Have you?
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: have you heard that phrase on TikTok quite a bit lately, like this conversation about central nervous system dysregulation or emotional dysregulated?
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: So when you think about when something is regulated, it's flowing evenly, it's it's it's flowing smoothly, and for someone who's experienced trauma, things don't really flow smoothly, right.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: Their thoughts can be disjointed, their emotions can be disjointed, they can have pain that is constantly kind of ebbing and blowing, and it can feel like like life comes and stops and starts like maybe things aren't always going your way, mixed up, right, someone who's got trauma.
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: They tend to really relive things over and over again.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: They loop.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: You ever heard that where someone just gets looped on a thing Oh man, i spent years looping on certain things, just really really looped up.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: And that's because one of the things that trauma does is it freezes certain aspects of how our brain functions in time And it's as though that thing that was then, it's as though it's happening now.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: And so when we keep looping on a thing, can you believe, can you believe what he did?
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: Can you believe what she said?
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: Can you believe about that thing?
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: Can you believe, can you believe, can you believe that loopingness That's how a person with trauma behaves, as though what happened then is still happening now.
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: People who get stuck in fear cycles right, like people who become preoccupied with bad things happening, people who experience acute anxiety and panic attacks Like these, are all really good clues that there's trauma And it's not their fault, it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: And so how do you break a trauma cycle?
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: Such a good question, right?
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: And so some of that is about that awareness.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: Oh, i'm looping.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: I'm looping on fear, i must be in a trauma cycle.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: Well, i wonder what I could do about that.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: I could go to yoga, i could do some journaling, i could listen to a podcast that makes me feel really positive, i could call the therapist, i could go to church.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: If that right, like whatever, helps you to feel better when you're in a trauma loop.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: That is how you break the cycle.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: You get awareness and then you take action.
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: Awareness action, awareness action, awareness action.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: That's how we break the cycle of the thing.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: And it's first, it's like the awareness takes a minute, right, we might be like three days into a loop and we're like, oh man, i just spent three days looping.
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: But then eventually it's like you've maybe been in a loop for an hour or for 10 minutes and you catch it sooner and you take an action, and that is literally wash your hands, repeat on that awareness action.
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: And that's how we break a trauma cycle.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: Can you get over trauma without therapy?
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: Therapy is an interesting concept, probably, but I don't know how to tell you to do that, because that's not my frame of reference.
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: Again, i might ask why would you want to?
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: Because if you're wanting to get over trauma without therapy.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: Again, i think there's some trauma languaging in there, like are you afraid therapy costs too much or it would be too hard, or like what is it that you're telling yourself about therapy?
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: So my understanding about can you get over trauma without therapy would probably be like there is probably some indigenous tribe of people that has some spiritual path to healing trauma that doesn't involve what we experience as therapy.
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: There's got to be a way.
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: I'm just not familiar with it, so I couldn't advise you as to what that is.
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: You're talking to the lady who wanted to become a therapist when she was in the sixth grade like this is my mission.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: So I am acknowledging that I am biased, but I also know beyond a shadow of a doubt.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: I know that there are many paths to the truth.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: There are many ways to get to 10, 5 plus 2, 5 plus 5, 5 times 2, 9 plus 1, 12 minus 2,.
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: There are many ways to get to the answer 10.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: So I believe that there are many ways to get to the truth.
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: So can you get over trauma without therapy?
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: Probably.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: Why would you want to?
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: I don't know.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: I can't tell you exactly how to do it without therapy.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: I could tell you that EMDR therapy with a really with a really positive therapist who really knows their stuff is a really smooth way to get over therapy.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: I mean to get over trauma.
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: So that's what I know.
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: There's this common question why is it so hard to let go of trauma?
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: And that is because of what I mentioned in the very beginning that it fundamentally shifts the expression of who we are on a mind, body, spirit level.
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: It's so intense that it literally shifts our biology And that's it.
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: But that question why is it so hard to get over trauma would be like why is it so hard to get over open heart surgery?
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: Because we can't see it in the way that we're used to seeing physical trauma like a gunshot wound or open heart surgery or like blockage in the artery.
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: We can see it.
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: So it's like Oh, i know that for a fact, right, that's just about how our society has validated certain things and not looked at others.
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: But the reason that we're having this conversation right now is because trauma is trending, so get ready, here it comes.
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: This may feel like like an edge for you, meaning it might feel like a new conversation.
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: It's not a new conversation, it's just finally getting to a tipping point in our consciousness as a community that it's becoming more widely accepted and understood.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: It's harder to dismiss because we have the brain scans to demonstrate it.
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: So you wouldn't expect somebody who had open heart surgery to just go to work the next day.
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: You would perfectly understand and accept that that person needs some bed rest.
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: It's the same for people who are in EMDR therapy.
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: Often on the day of treatment they need, they're exhausted, absolutely exhausted.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: Now are they better the next day?
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: But it needs to become just as acceptable that on a day you go to EMDR, you get some grace that day, because recovery is recovery.
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: I don't care what you're recovering from.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: The understanding is that recovery is a process that requires some TLC, right.
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: So so what are some symptoms of childhood trauma in adults?
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: There are so many and I'm sure that I will not accurately name them all.
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: I've named some of them already, like anxiety, chronic anxiety, panic attacks, anger, issues with anger, the urge to control perfectionism, difficulty sleeping, difficulty quieting the mind, difficulty feeling ease, chronic health issues, like pain-related health issues.
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: What else?
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: Looping right, a tendency to to struggle to let go of something, difficulty letting go of things like holding on to resentments, or even holding on to things like hoarding or people people who have difficult time letting go when people pass on or transition That's a good sign that there was some childhood trauma.
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: Issues around food, right, eating too much or too little is usually a pretty good sign that there's some trauma there, and even some when we think about, like anxiety, depression, adhd, like a lot of really common mental health issues.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: I'm really kind of cooking on this idea that some of those are organic.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: Sometimes people are born with some of these issues, but some of them are born out of chronic childhood trauma, because I will tell you that I spent most of my life with some pretty significant anxiety issues and that's just not the case for me anymore.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: So I don't think I was born with an anxiety disorder.
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: I think it was secondary to complex post-traumatic stress disorder, cptsd.
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: So I think a lot of the mental health issues that we're seeing are secondary to trauma And, oh man, i could fall down this rabbit hole and talk about that so much.
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: I think that things go in cycles and I think that there were many generations of trauma that led to, ultimately, this generation that's facing all of the things, because we had a better understanding and better tools And I think a lot of that came because of the information age.
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: Technology allowed us to better measure these things and see them And then share our awareness and understanding about them and then share our tools about how to treat them.
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: Man, what a time to be alive, right, where there's so much understanding and so much treatment available.
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: It's so freaking exciting.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: When I think about how this time came to be, we think about all the seasons of trauma that came before, like World War I, world War II, the Great Depression, all the effects all those events had on the generations that came before us and how they landed us where we are today.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: But now, with technology, we've been able to treat it all And now we need to make a conscious choice to lean less into technology as a part of our healing.
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: It's so interesting.
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: So I love looking at all of the layers and the things that came before that led to this moment And I love sitting in appreciation for this now moment being when we get to, when we have the gift of facing it all and healing it all.
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: It's so exciting to me.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: So we've talked.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: We've talked so much about how to heal from childhood trauma.
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: There are so many paths, so many paths And I can tell you that I wouldn't trade any one of them.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: You know that, that there are spiritual paths, there are physical paths, there are mental, emotional paths to healing childhood trauma, and I believe that they're all necessary.
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: They're all magical in their own right And they work best when they're worked together.
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: And there are many things that have been written on this.
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: You know, oprah put out an amazing book in the last couple of years.
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: What happened to you?
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: love that book?
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: Bessel Vander Kolk.
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: The Body Keeps the Score.
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: There are just so many amazing understandings about this mind, body, spirit, connection with trauma and how to heal it.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: And so get curious, get super curious about how can I heal spiritually, how can I heal mentally, how can I heal physically And know that they're all valuable?
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: And I want you to just come from that super curious place.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: There's a question around does trauma cause divorce?
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: And absolutely, because when you take the understanding that we're all vibrational beings, we all attract things to us like calls to like.
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: Have you heard that before?
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: Like calls to like.
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: And so when you have someone who's traumatized, that is attracted to someone who's traumatized, because that's what happens with attraction.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: There's so many things that create attraction in relationship.
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: But we know that part of what happens in the attraction world is we attract people who are vibrationally in a similar space as we are.
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: So when you catch yourself pointing your finger at your ex they did this, they did that, they did this Know that vibrationally you were attracted to them in a very similar level, meaning as much healing as your ex has to do is as much healing as you need to do, and that can be a hard pill to swallow, right, but there's so much freedom that comes in that understanding.
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: So traumatized people attract other traumatized people.
• 39:28
  Speaker 1: And then when you think about all those symptoms and all those isms and all those issues that traumatized people have, of course there's so much doubt and insecurity and fear and anger built into that relationship.
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: It's hard for it to be sustainable.
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: So and then people get lulled into this idea that it's them.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: If they would only fix that, if they would only heal this, if they would only be different, then I would be okay.
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: And all of that is not real.
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: If I claim my healing, i will feel better.
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: If I claim my happiness and my peace, if I free myself from trauma, i will feel better.
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: But the marriages that make it are two people who make a conscious decision to take responsibility and heal their wounds together.
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: And I will tell you, as a licensed marriage and family therapist who ended up loving trauma work it is not that common that two people in a dysfunctional marriage say, ooh, let's heal our trauma together.
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: More often than not, that relationship breaks down, which frees up the individuals to do their trauma work or not do their trauma work, and then attract new partners based on a new way up level vibration.
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: So, absolutely, trauma can be part of what leads to divorce, and that's okay, right, because I think that often the divorce is what I experienced as the pathway to finding all of the solutions, if you let it be right.
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: When we talked with Bernadette again, we talked about transformation coming as a result, And the transformation is way more important than the thing that initiated the transformation.
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: So, stay on the path, love, stay on the path and trust that the path that you are on is amazing, even though it's painful sometimes.
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: Sometimes people ask how long does divorce trauma last?
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: And I am going to give maybe not a popular answer divorce trauma lasts as long as you allow it, because you have all the power to walk that path out.
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: You have all the power and all the resource and all the capacity to say you know what I am going to tackle, all of these mind, body, spirit things, that I am going to apply the medicine and I'm going to heal.
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: Now.
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: Even if you decided to go full force into all three legs of the stool today, it would still take time, right, and I can't tell you how much time it would take, but I could tell you would take a crap load less time And I want you to be easy on yourself along the way.
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: But it doesn't have to take years, it doesn't.
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: It just really really doesn't have to take years.
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: But the more have you ever heard this phrase, what we resist persists, and so the longer you resist healing one of the legs of that stool, the longer it's going to persist.
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: So I want you to understand, more than how long it takes is, i want you to understand the relationship you have with the timeline.
• 42:28
  Speaker 1: You have all the power.
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: Love.
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: You have all the power.
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: And our final question for today does divorce change a woman?
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: Hell yeah, hell yeah.
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: And that woman gets to decide how it changes.
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: Her Divorce changed me in all the most delicious ways, because that's what I chose.
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: I chose to rise, i chose to transform, i chose to overcome, i chose to become the most spectacular version of me And I sit in appreciation of my ex-husband for being my partner on that path.
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: That is a powerful place to sit, that he was such a powerful and important and necessary part of my transformation And I am so grateful to him for being there and knowing that it was all purposeful And so being able to hold love in my heart for him, because I couldn't walk the path without him And my path was perfect and I'm grateful.
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: So divorce is gonna change you one way or the other.
• 43:40
  Speaker 1: It is going to change you one way or the other.
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: You get to decide if it changes you for the better or for the worse, but know that if you feel like it has changed you for the worse, that you have been dictating that aspect of your story, it's not his fault, love.
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: He didn't do it.
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: He was in a dance that you chose And now you get to decide how this dance goes from here.
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: You have so much power in your life And I remember feeling completely disempowered at parts of this journey, so I'm not sitting here telling you that I felt like this, the way I feel today.
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: Then I did not.
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: I felt broken, but even in your brokenness, love, you have so much power and it's just about accessing it as you can Awareness, action, awareness, action, awareness, action.
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: When you've done that enough days in a row, oh man, eventually you look back and you're like I'm on the MF thing top of this mountain And I am strong because I climbed, and that is what I know, and that is what I see for you, and I am here to help you climb.
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: I'm here to help you climb in a whole space when you are climbing and you run out of energy.
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: And I am here to believe in you when you don't.
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: And I'm here to help you know what to expect in the next leg of the climb.
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: And I'm here to help you see yourself as beautifully as you are.
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: And if you are called to know any more about any of this, please just reach out.
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: I'm here, i'd love to hear from you, and I know that you are meant to do big things, otherwise you wouldn't be here listening to this part of this pod.
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: You are magical And I love you so much.
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: Talk soon, peace.
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: All we need is coffee.