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TJ Butler: Dating Silky Maxwell part 2 · Surviving-ISH Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: In every dark tunnel there's a glimmer of hope.
• 0:01
  Speaker 1: In every painful moment, there's a strength to heal.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Welcome to Surviving Abuse, the podcast that aims to help you navigate through the treacherous waters of trauma and bring you stories of resilience, empowerment and, most importantly, the reminder that there is life after trauma.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: What the fuck is it that I can't say?
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: I don't understand why it was me.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: I don't know if I'll ever be the same.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: It's the same what I want anyway, you took what I thought I could never get back.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: I'll clean all the holes and I'll do the hang-out.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: I broke down just to begin again.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: I'll clean any longer.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: I'm there Making the good kiss in the back.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Goodbye, welcome to Surviving Podcast.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: If you haven't listened to a previous episode where we had our new friend TJ Butler on, please check that out first.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: But during that episode God's, I'm a new friend and she is supporting the show, supporting me, and it's just so amazing.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: To be honest, I asked a question and she willingly, was answering and then, after we were done recording, she was like there's so much I can go into this.
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of questions that I get sent to me that I will give my opinion on, but I don't have experience with and I will try to provide resources.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: In this case, I found somebody that with particular questions that had some great insight, and so we have decided to have her back.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: I mentioned at the end of episode one how Miss TJ Butler is now stuck with me, and I think she's realizing how true that is.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: I am so stuck with you and that is awesome.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, like we have talked like 30, 45 minutes even before we hit record.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Like we're emailing all the time.
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: I was even thinking I was like I need to just give her my phone number.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: Why are we not texting?
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: I will text you all the time I love it and I.
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: We have so much to talk about and it's going to be so great, and so I want to give the preference.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: I'm saying that most of my shows would go into some kind of an agenda.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: We have a certain topic that is our goal to discuss, and today's really not one of those days.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: We have a lot to discuss and I think everyone's going to really enjoy it, and there's been so many questions that's come in that I've shared with TJ along the way.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: But if you haven't listened to the episode that TJ was in, where TJ has promoted her book dating Silky Maxwell, then please listen to it.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: You don't necessarily have to listen to that episode in order to follow this one, but I highly recommend it.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: But with all that said, tj like new bestie.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: Will you give us a little bit of background on you just to catch us all up?
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: I?
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: will bestie.
• 3:31
  Speaker 2: Thank you for asking.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: My name is TJ Butler and I came to this podcast because I'm a trauma survivor and I wrote a short story collection, essentially to control the trauma narrative, and I was looking around for who can I share my story with and a lot of choices out there.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: But I found you and you're.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: It just really seemed like a great place to land.
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: So I grew up with domestic violence and alcoholism and my mother would not move away from an abusive boyfriend so she popped me into social services custody so she could continue to live there and I aged out of foster care and I had some pretty rough, a pretty rough time in my 20s and got myself together in my 30s and fast forward.
• 4:39
  Speaker 2: I wrote a book and I guess that's me.
• 4:42
  Speaker 2: Here I am.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: There are so many people that write in and they're like, hey, do you have an episode, do you recommend about this topic?
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: And luckily I'm in a place two years later where I'm like, yeah, check out episode 12.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: And then there's some times that people write in and they'll ask my opinion on things or even ask for recommendations on an episode that maybe I haven't ran across that person yet, and so I'm so excited to have you back.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: We're going to talk about some deep things, but we're also going to have fun along the way, which is what's so important, right?
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: I am totally down for the deep things.
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: Lay it on me.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: In episode one you had mentioned that you were in the adult industry and I felt listening back to it.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: I felt like my response was to the stigmas that come to adult industry workers versus your stance on it, which was such an eye-opening moment for me.
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: As much as I want to say like I'm open-minded and I'm all these things like, there are still these cliches that I even had and so I came into it, hopefully respectfully, but still came into it with the questions and mindset of the stigmas that come with, and your response to it really shook me.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: Most people today when they think about what's going on with women who are taking their clothes off for money.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: Most of what we hear about is only fans and it's primarily women who have careers losing their jobs because they have an only-fans account.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: And a lot of times you'll see an article in somewhere like New York Post or Huffington Post or these places that profile these women.
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: And the women will come out and say I realized that I was making like nine times more money on only fans than I was as a teacher, so I resigned and now I'm doing great with only fans.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: And we typically don't hear a lot of narratives where the women say I didn't love it.
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: The internet doesn't really want stories about women who did those things and hated it.
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: That doesn't make a story.
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: That's just another woman who's got some things she needs to work on and I am accustomed if I'm asked about it.
• 7:38
  Speaker 2: I'm long retired, but if I'm asked about it I have no problem letting people know that it wasn't the fantastic job for me that it is for a lot of these women.
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: Only fans has allowed a lot of people to do things in the comfort of their own home that women.
• 8:04
  Speaker 2: When I was working in this business.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: We just didn't have those opportunities, so it was quite a bit different for me, and so I think that there are women that we see online that are loud and proud about it, and then there are a lot of women in the middle who have various experiences where they might love the money but they might not feel so great about how they get it, or they might have no other choice because of finances or having children to support or not having an education, so they don't have any other choice and with as many women as work in that business, there's that many different stories and that many different reasons for people getting in the business.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: But when you asked me about it before, I didn't think anything.
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: Most of the time when people ask it's a curiosity.
• 9:06
  Speaker 2: I don't think people go into it saying how was your time, are you okay from it?
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: I think if people bring it up, it's either a salacious story or they want to know about all your money, or they're interested in this kind of like a Hollywood flashy story and they don't really want the details.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: They don't want the gritty details or the boring details.
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: And I also think too that because we did have, or we do have, a conversation happening, that you knew my intent of asking that question.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: It wasn't great, it wasn't a judge no, not at all it was just that curiosity.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: I have always said, and I will continue to say as long as it's two consensual adults, then how about it.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: But it was crazy to me too, because if anyone knows anything about me, they know that I live and breathe only for Reba McIntyre and her song Fancy, right Like.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: That song is pretty much saying that this girl became of age and her only way out was to do this.
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: So her mother bothered the stress and painted her hair and her lips and sent her and was just like be nice to the gentleman fancy, and they'll be nice to you.
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: And so that is.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: And that song is 30 years old.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: It's actually older than that.
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: Reba remade it, but I've known about it for 30 years.
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: So to me that is what sex work was.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: I don't have anything else but to do this and the only way I can do, my only thing that I can do is to feed into this man's ego to get just a little bit of what he gets every week on his paycheck, when that's what necessarily always the case.
• 11:21
  Speaker 2: No, it's not always the case.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: There are with the internet.
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: There are plenty of women who are paying their way through school.
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: They're going to have no student loan debt.
• 11:33
  Speaker 2: There's women who are saving and buying property.
• 11:36
  Speaker 2: There are women who are putting their children through private school and not having to depend on a man by going to their various adult jobs when the children are in school and it if a woman is of the mind to do this.
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: There are tons of opportunities to to take care of yourself.
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: Not everybody is in it for the same reasons.
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: Some women they may end up in this line of work because they don't quite know what else to do If they come from, for example, me coming out of foster care and not having any family support.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: And I entered an ad in the back of a free weekly newspaper that was looking for models and I showed up and he said so do you want to undress here in the bathroom?
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: And I just went on autopilot and took my clothes off and did a photo shoot and then, when I got the money, I was like, okay, I don't have to do anything.
• 12:50
  Speaker 2: I took my clothes off and it's thinking about it now.
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: I was like, oh, I didn't have to do anything at all.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: All I had to do is take my clothes off and that seemed so.
• 13:03
  Speaker 2: It didn't seem like there was anything wrong with it because he was nice and he paid me and said nice things about me.
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: There was nothing untoward about that for a shoot.
• 13:17
  Speaker 2: I have stayed in the business for so long, but it really fed my ego when I didn't have anyone else in my life saying things like you're valuable, you're a good person, you are really kind to animals and you have a great imagination.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: There was nobody saying that, but they were saying here's money if you take your clothes off.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: And to a person coming out of all those years on foster care, that was really appealing.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: And it turns darker a little later when I couldn't not do it.
• 13:57
  Speaker 2: But women get into this for so many different reasons and a lot of times we get stuck and I tried to leave the business so many times.
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: One of my leaving the business jobs was getting a job at Whole Foods and I went from making $100 an hour plus to making $12 an hour.
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: At that point at Whole Foods I couldn't buy more contact lenses.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: When mine ran out, I had to sell my car and there was no health insurance.
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: I think at that was the point that I went to a food pantry, because and I was really frugal with my cash but after going from that to $12 an hour, I went right back to the business.
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: Because without having job experience, there's no resume.
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: And without having a resume, where can you get a job?
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: You can get a job with a photographer.
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: You can get a job at a strip club.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: It was this like catch 22 that you don't feel great about going to work, but you can't leave.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: I think that's how jobs period gets you, regardless of the jobs, because the only thing I can relate the job that we were just speaking of to myself personally is when I was a server bartender.
• 15:23
  Speaker 2: I remember oh, yeah, totally.
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember a time that my friends called and were like it was like a Thursday and I was off that week.
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: I was off Thursday, friday, saturday, sunday and Monday Then called and they were like let's just go to the beach, because I live in Tennessee where an eight hour drive from Myrtle Beach we'll all pitch in a couple hundred dollars.
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: I had either just put a car or was saving money for a car.
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Either way, money was tight.
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: I was either having to save or something or I just finished it on something.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: But I was like, oh, I'll call and I'll pick up a shift on Thursday and Friday and that'll be my beach money.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: And that was just serving yeah.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: That was serving at a chili, that was bartending at a chili's and knowing that I was like I'll pick up these shifts and I can go do what I want.
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: I totally, absolutely.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: But you're 100% right, because the minute I got into that corporate world and I've got my first paycheck, I'm like I wouldn't make this in four hours Bartender.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: I have a little story like that.
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: So one of the times when I was just about on my way out and I was doing some temping and I had come from a long time of cocktail waitressing at the strip club and nightclub waitressing and so I had this temp job sitting at the front desk as a receptionist and I kept.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: It was pretty boring and there wasn't a lot of activity, but I kept catching myself wanting to put my seat belt on and I realized near the end of the day that I had never been sitting still in a chair for so long, unless I was in a car ride.
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that was just one of these defining moments that says I have, I didn't come, I'm not in office work, I'm not accustomed to this.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: Yet One of the things about those kind of jobs do you remember from your waitering and bartending shifts standing up and eating really fast, sometimes over the trash can?
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, do you know that I could smoke cigarettes, I could drink a Coca-Cola and eat a hamburger while peeing all behind a dumpster at the same time?
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: And like the ring in it.
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, none of my tables would ever miss a water without lemon.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: Oh, totally, you can do all of these things.
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: You're like standing up and wolfing down your food, but then when you're at dinner with somebody and you realize like you've eaten your entire plate and they're still like picking up the sauce and arranging their food before they take a bite, yeah, there's all waitressing, all restaurant habits die hard.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: But I do want to say that we're not here to condone or condemn anything.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: What we are here to say, and with this conversation, is regardless of and, tj, I'm sorry I can't speak for you what I'm trying to say is, regardless of what path your life goes down, I want you to make those decisions.
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: I want you to be in control of it.
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: If you want to take off your clothes for however much, fine, but I want you to want to do that.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: You need to be OK doing that.
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: And so, again, I was not trying to speak for you, but my point of this conversation is boundaries, what you're comfortable with, what you want to do.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: And I know I'm throwing a lot at you, tj, but oh, I can take it.
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but I would love for you to respond where I was trying to speak for both of us, for you to respond to that, but also like how and when were you able to say, OK, this is what I do and don't like, this is my boundary and these are lines you won't cross?
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: First, what you said.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: I totally agree that if people want to take their clothes off for money and they want to keep their clothes on for money as long as they're consenting to it, hooray, go make that money.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: But for me, I didn't want to, but I just didn't.
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: I didn't believe that I could get any other job.
• 20:14
  Speaker 2: Part of it was just the resume.
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: When I first got, when I first left the adult business and finally ended up with a tamping job that turned into a career, my resume was completely fabricated and this is going back to 20 years ago, but I didn't have anything to put on my resume and so back then the internet was different than now and so I was.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: I got away with it until I had enough jobs under my belt and at that mark, when my last fabricated job came off and I wasn't working in any industry where, like you need credentials and a degree, I was working in property management and like construction administration and these aren't things where I was like handling patients or anything like that.
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: It was.
• 21:13
  Speaker 2: I would never do something like that today, but it was really the only way that I was able to get out of, to get out of that line of work, as far as consent and all of those things go, I never actually was able to say I've had enough.
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: I was never able to stand up straight and say I choose not to do this anymore.
• 21:40
  Speaker 2: So I, when I was in my late 20s and I was doing it, I would get panic attacks and I just did not believe that I could really do anything else.
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: I would get panic attacks.
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: There were times when I just couldn't go to work and I would call, like when I was doing modeling, I would call the photographer crying and I'm sure that it was.
• 22:07
  Speaker 2: He was thinking I'm flake or something because I'm crying and really having no idea why.
• 22:13
  Speaker 2: I didn't recognize them as panic attacks.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: I just thought that I had mood swings but I had a panic attack disorder because it got to the point where I just could not go and pose for any sort of modeling anymore.
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: So I was working in my corporate job, but I was modeling part time because I wasn't making enough in corporate.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: I was living outside of DC and it's pretty expensive here, and so I was modeling part time and occasionally having panic attacks and having to live this dual life where I was going to these photo shoots on the weekends and sometimes in the evenings, and then going to work Monday through Friday in a corporate office wearing business casual, and I never thought that I was going to be discovered because I had just always kept in my mind having some sleazy corporate man coming up to me and saying oh hey, I saw your pictures.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: I always just imagined myself triumphantly going, what were you doing?
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: Looking at them, and that kind of I don't know if it would have happened that way, but that kind of gave me this mental armor.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: I'm never going to be discovered and I never was.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: So I didn't have to deal with that.
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: But I was working at a corporate job and having these panic attacks and I met, I hooked up, not hooked up, but I ended up going to a studio that had just opened nearby and the photographer introduced me to the studio owner and I thought it was in my best interest to network with him, because he's owner and I'm looking at how much money can I get from people.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: If I can get in with the owner, he'll get me shoots and we became close and then, as it was, I would cry after my shoots and he found me crying and then I'm talking to him and he realized and we weren't seeing each other or anything like that.
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: But he realized, like I had a good head on my shoulders because we had talked about business, and he told me we were driving to IKEA to get some stuff for his studio and he said, if you want to quit modeling, I can make it happen.
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: And I was just short like a couple hundred dollars a month and so fast forward a little bit.
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: We got married, but at that point I just needed and he didn't have an agenda.
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: He wasn't trying to sleep with me, he just saw a human that's in his studio in horrible shape, and so he really helped me out and, ironically, I managed that studio today and so I see models that are coming in just like me, and now a lot of the models are on OnlyFans and these models have 200,000 Instagram followers, and when I was doing this, instagram hadn't become a thing yet.
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: But I've come full circle, because in my corporate job I could never have told anybody oh, I have a centerfold, I have all of these adult magazine covers, I've got all of these 10 page glossy spreads and adult magazines and all of these bullet points that add up to a modeling resume, and so I would have had to hide that when I was in corporate, but now that I am in a studio environment, I don't have to hide anything at all because the photographers are shooting that and we have other clients too.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: The photographers are shooting that and the models are all doing that too.
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: And sometimes I see younger models and you can tell who's a little more and a little less together.
• 26:30
  Speaker 2: And I've never approached anybody to say I think you need a friend.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: But when the models come in I do always let them know.
• 26:42
  Speaker 2: Hey, I was a full time model previously.
• 26:46
  Speaker 2: If you need anything at all and it's almost like Wink Nudge anything at all just come talk to me, because I am getting up there in age.
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: I'm very solidly Gen X and these young women are young enough to be my kid.
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: I don't want to make it weird like this old lady, but I try to be a good friend to models who maybe have no choice but to take their clothes off to pay the rent.
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: I'm so glad to hear that, and the first time that we talked we didn't go into this deep of it, but I'm so glad that your community has you, and if this is something that they are inspired with, this is the path that they're wanting to go down, then I support that 100%, as long as they're the ones wanting it.
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: And so the question that I get a lot that I would love for us to speak on, and I hope that I ask it properly, because every single one of them has that has sent us questions.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: I don't even know how to ask it, but I feel like you will know how to take it over.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: But there's a fine line between boundary and what you've been taught.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: And so some girls and even some guys fewer but some guys have even messaged and said I'm OK taking off my clothes because it's what I've been taught.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: I don't know that it's what I want, and the I don't know is what is so scary.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: And so I guess maybe the question is how did it you separate of?
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: This is what I'm comfortable with, this is what I'm not, this is what the boundary is.
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: I might be a little bit of an extreme example, because I have had a lot of things happen to me in my life and I have normalized so many scenarios that and when I say normalizing them, that's being able to talk about them afterwards and take myself out of it.
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: However, just while I'm there, knowing that if I took myself out of the situation and said, hey, something, I'm standing up, knowing that I wouldn't get paid, but it's not even really making a conscious decision to say I'm going to, I don't like doing this and this is not my thing.
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: And I'm going to stand up because my like, my mental, the way that I was, the way that I was made up, like what kept me together, the fabric of my inner soul didn't and wouldn't, would not have even known to to be able, would never have even known that I could have said, hey, I don't like this, because what are the stakes?
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: This is where we get into agency and I think that the question people are asking is about agency.
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: When we are taught and when we think about growing up in our childhood, we are taught things by people reacting to us in certain ways when we do things.
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: So if a little girl gets attention from somebody for being pretty or for letting an older boy touch her or letting or for not speaking up when somebody touches them or something like that, and then there is some sort of approval, then she's being taught that to allow these things to happen to her.
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: But she's also learning that.
• 30:51
  Speaker 2: So it's not as much being taught coming from exterior places, it's also learning and coming from how you see the world, where, if I let an older boy something and he pays attention to me, if I'm not getting attention at home, or if my parents fight all the time at home, or something at home is not so great.
• 31:16
  Speaker 2: And I learn that being promiscuous at school or meeting people at places and allowing them to have their way with you or whatever happens, if that brings affection to you.
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: An affection is a multifaceted word because not all affection is what we want.
• 31:44
  Speaker 2: But if you get positive reinforcement from that, then you're going to keep seeking that out.
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: And if you're not getting healthy positive reinforcement, if you're not, for example, really good at something as a kid, and then you get positive reinforcement for being really good at the science fair or really good with horse riding, if you're getting reinforcement for being really good at letting boys touch you or things like that.
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: You learn that people approve of you, and with that comes sometimes kids that find out that you're doing that.
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: And then it backfires at school because then there is people that are slut shaming you and there's mean girls that go along with this.
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: But as I was plenty fine if somebody were to ask me, I was plenty fine taking the clothes off because I would say I didn't know what it was like to work in an office and all I knew about offices was like the movie office space and everything on sitcoms that everybody in the media hates going into work in the office, and so I didn't know any other way.
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: I knew that if I worked at a retail or a restaurant job I was gonna make hardly any money, or I could go work in air quotes at office and it would be soul sucking, or I could take my clothes off for money.
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: I didn't believe that I could do any better.
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: I was filling out an application for an apartment with a girl that was also working in the adult business with me.
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: We were applying together and we were, of course, lying about our income and we made cash, and we made lots and lots of cash daily.
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: So we had plenty of money, but not on paper, and so we had put that.
• 33:44
  Speaker 2: We were making $500 a week from this made up job and I was so convinced that the person in the office was going to look at this application and then look at me and see through to my soul and know that I was not good enough to make this real money.
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: And I mean, I've gotten over those things.
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: That was a long time ago.
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: But I think that the guy that you brought up who said I'm okay taking my clothes off for money, but I'm not sure why and I'm not sure it's agency and it's a voice.
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: It is having the agency to say where's the power, where is who's got the power here?
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: And if it's not me, I need to take that power from myself.
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: And that's actually unpacking things and looking at why I wrote my book.
• 34:43
  Speaker 2: I gave all of these characters agency.
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: During times I had none and in these scenarios of voice when I just had no voice and so many of us.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: We don't have agency If we are not just people who take their clothes off for money, but if we get into situations with interpersonal relationships, maybe we keep having a boss that does a certain thing, and every job we go to we have this there's always somebody in the job that is this ex-person.
• 35:25
  Speaker 2: It's because we haven't learned how to deal with ex-personality trait yet and a lot of it is having agency to be able to say who's making the decisions here and when.
• 35:40
  Speaker 2: Of course we're gonna say I am, I'm gonna make the decisions, but there's something in you, you have to have a thing in you that actually inherently believes that and then somehow I think magically you will know whether or not you are okay with it.
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: I think that another thing is trusting your gut.
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: We are taught especially women are taught that it's better to be polite than it is to trust your gut.
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: And there's a thing about maybe not speaking up for yourself when you would rather not rock the boat or when it would be a thing for you to put a stop to something, and it's easier to just go on with it.
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: And I don't have the big answer for how to gain agency.
• 36:35
  Speaker 2: I'm still working on that myself.
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's something we'll learn along the way together, but what had resonated with me is when you mentioned and this might not be your point, this was what triggered me is you had mentioned it's better to be polite than to follow your gut.
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: And what immediately hit me and maybe it's because I'm a gay man and so I have to listen to my gut a lot and I have a lot of female friends and I have a lot of female listeners Now my adult wives that have reached out to me and what is polite is to do what the man says, because your gut is telling you to not do what he says, but that's not what is right and that's what leads to this shit.
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it leads to so much stuff.
• 37:40
  Speaker 2: There's situational awareness and there are.
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: I spend a lot of time thinking about killers.
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: I walk my dog and I like to go out and take pictures and I'm always thinking about like killers right, because there's always somebody that's disappeared.
• 38:02
  Speaker 2: What the man wants is not always bad.
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: Not everybody is up to sinister, no good here, but it is a lot of agency and having a voice and knowing when to say no or knowing when to add bad words to that and raise your voice and say why the F?
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: Are you following me or whatever it would be where.
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: So I was just watching a video, a real, a woman who had about a woman who had taped some guy following her and she went and hid by a bystander and she had no agency whatsoever.
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: She never at once said what are you doing?
• 38:55
  Speaker 2: Like, why are you walking so close to me, why are you following me?
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: And said she was recording this, recording her feet, and it was really frustrating to me to I'm like turn around and toss at him or something Blast.
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: I'm on live right now.
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: Everyone's seen your face.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: What the hell are you doing?
• 39:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think that that's unusual, like when we're by ourselves and we're not thinking like, oh okay, I'm gonna do this when the guy comes up and I'm gonna do this when we're not thinking about those things.
• 39:25
  Speaker 2: You just want to be polite and that doesn't always work out in our favor.
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: And we have to normalize that standing up for yourself and saying that this is my boundary and I'm nervous, I'm not comfortable, is not rude.
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: We want to say I was taught to be polite and this person's walking too close.
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: They thought me down to every aisle.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: But what if they're not a bad guy?
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: What if it's just a coincidence?
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: Fine.
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: But if that's the case, then they will be able to say you know what?
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: I probably am a little too close and didn't realize.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: Please excuse me, I'm so sorry.
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: And they will move on Like we have to normalize it being okay to say you're in my bubble and I'm nervous, like I don't like this.
• 40:21
  Speaker 2: I just had to tell that to somebody at the post office.
• 40:24
  Speaker 2: I'm still trying to keep some social distancing from people, sure, and he was creeping up and creeping up and so every time I scooted forward, just like when you're at a light and the car in front of you moves forward.
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: So you move forward.
• 40:36
  Speaker 2: And he was scooting forward and I'm scooting forward, and finally I'm standing in the middle of the aisle where the people are at the post office booth and I'm like, and I turned around and I'm like, pardon me, I'm trying to get away from you and he's so sorry, but it was.
• 40:56
  Speaker 2: And I had some time to think about that and instead of scooting up maybe twice and then saying, oh hey, keep in distance here, I scooted up and kept scooting and scooting until I was uncomfortably close to the person actually at the booth and nothing happened.
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: This is, it was totally a minor situation, but I thinking about speaking up, I didn't, and I just kept thinking, oh, I'm just going to get away, I can just keep going further and further away, knowing this guy is just going to keep scooting and scooting and scooting.
• 41:32
  Speaker 2: So that is a thing I'm going to work on.
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: But I think it's all in how you handle it, and I could not see you handling anything with nothing but class and compassion.
• 41:47
  Speaker 2: When I said I'm trying to keep away from you, yeah, he had a good understanding and I could tell that he wasn't.
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: I knew he wasn't trying to get up on me, but he just didn't realize that some people don't want to stand right up on you.
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: I think that's so great when we can respectfully have those boundaries and still have that sternness of if you cross the line, I'm not going to be the only one making that.
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: Everyone will know that I don't feel safe.
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: I will allow you this opportunity to correct yourself and when those moments are realizations for people like that guy will probably be more considerate every time he's in a grocery store line, at the gas station, whatever, and he'll probably be thanking you without you and you will never even know it.
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: So, moving forward a little bit, I have a strong opinion about the word forgiveness and I've had a lot of feedback on other people's opinions on forgiveness.
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: I would love to know what that means for you, what you have found that means for others.
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: When I think about forgiveness, we forgive.
• 43:03
  Speaker 2: People talk about finding peace.
• 43:06
  Speaker 2: When they forgive their ex, fill in the blank they're a silent, they're abuser, they're a perpetrator, they're somebody that was the bad guy.
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: So you find peace when you practice forgiveness, and forgiveness is for us, for me this is only my opinion, but forgiveness offers the person doing the forgiving offers them some solace.
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: It offers them some comfort because they say that they are not holding the anger anymore because they forgive this person.
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: And I don't really love that because then the person let's just call them the bad guy, right, whoever that is to us the bad guy gets away.
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: We don't say anything about the bad guy and we make this forgiveness thing all about us, and I don't love that because they are still walking around with the bad guy and we are living with whatever it was that they did to us.
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: We still have that loss, that damage, that fallout.
• 44:26
  Speaker 2: And when I think about the person that would be my bad guy, the one that is still alive is my mother, and I have a lot of situations with my mother.
• 44:37
  Speaker 2: I'm estranged from her and I have a pretty good way forward that I can't quite stick to.
• 44:46
  Speaker 2: But that's a whole different episode when I think about who is the person that would get forgiveness.
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: It would be my mother, but she was a really crappy parent and rather than saying I forgive her for that because I don't there's no excuse for those things but what I have found some this is a big aha moment.
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: What I have found a lot of not really even comfort, but a lot of understanding is and a huge light bulb moment to say that my mother is a flawed human being.
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: And if we think about the people that have done things to harm us or to harm those that we love if it was violent and dangerous and all consuming, saying they're a violent or saying that they're a flawed human being doesn't give them a pass, but it explains that and we can put any word in flawed, we can say a terrible human being.
• 45:58
  Speaker 2: It for me, offers a bit of an explanation, and I know that not everybody has a problem with their mother, but when I think about my mother saying that she is a flawed human being, I think about how she was working with the tools that she had, and she just didn't have all the tools, and so when you look at other kinds of people that have done things to us.
• 46:24
  Speaker 2: There are opportunities that are operating on, if you compare it to not a full set of tools.
• 46:30
  Speaker 2: They're operating with a lesser sense of humanity or a lesser sense of things that we need to be good people in the world, and that doesn't give them a pass, but it, for me, offers an explanation, because so many of the things that happen to us, we don't know why, and some of us may wonder why did my mother do those things but not someone else's?
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: Or maybe why did my mother do these things to me but not my sister?
• 47:04
  Speaker 2: Or why did this atrocious incident happen to me?
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: And it's because our paths crossed with a person that was operating on a lesser plane, and so maybe if you say, oh, they're a flawed human, that could be a way of forgiving them.
• 47:32
  Speaker 2: Like I said, I don't love forgiveness because it takes it off of it, takes a responsibility off of them.
• 47:41
  Speaker 2: But calling them out and saying they are not, there's something in them that's lacking and our paths crossed, that to me is much more comforting than basically giving up this anger and saying, oh, all is well, you're forgiven.
• 48:04
  Speaker 2: So I don't know if that resonates.
• 48:09
  Speaker 2: I think that if there are people who have issues with their parents or their family.
• 48:13
  Speaker 2: If we think about ourselves as adults, so many of us have children right now and we have likes and dislikes.
• 48:24
  Speaker 2: We have interests and things that are not solely devoted toward our children.
• 48:30
  Speaker 2: We are people outside of being parents, and when I saw my mother for the first time as an adult person that was not just my mother I looked at myself and I thought, oh okay, I am a person too.
• 48:50
  Speaker 2: And when I realized that my mother, my parents, were the instruments of my creation and not just existing to be my parents, it really allowed me to accept that these were just flawed people, not single-minded parents out to do bad things to their offspring, and I hope that anybody who has some issues with family they might think about their parents less as parents and more as people that didn't quite get all the tools they needed to nurture young souls.
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: I.
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: To put a different side of things is my attack happened by a stranger in my adult life, and I've always been taught that you're supposed to forgive and forgiving will set you free.
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: But you know how they say how can I love you because I don't know you?
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: So how can I forgive you?
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: I don't know you.
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: And all I know is, as far as my story, all I knew about this guy was not even from memory of a bad one night.
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: It was what everyone had told me that they thought had happened.
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: So I'm supposed to have compassion, I'm supposed to have even anger or be mad, and I'm supposed to forgive, and all I know you as is a monster underneath my bed.
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: And so I've battled with forgiveness for so long, and then one day, there's how you could hear a song a million times, and there are certain times in your life you hear it and you're like almost like you're hearing it for the first time.
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: It hits you differently.
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's this song.
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: I love female country music and I always have since I was a boy.
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: But there is this song and she says forgive.
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: That's a mighty big word for such a small man.
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: And she goes, and I heard that song one day.
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: I've known it for years, but I heard it during this whole.
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: I'm supposed to forgive.
• 51:19
  Speaker 1: That's what the Bible tells me, that's what the society tells me I was supposed to do, and I can't do it.
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: So I'm now the bad person.
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: And I heard this song and I was like, oh shit, and there's more to it.
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: That kind of woke me.
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: But I remember when I was really sitting down in the corner of a bathroom, because that was the only room I ever felt safe.
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: There was one window, there was one door.
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: I could see all corners.
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: It was big enough for me to breathe in, small enough for me to feel safe, and so I spent time just sitting in the bathroom floor and I thought about the word forgive and I was like I need to forgive myself.
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: I have become a David that no one knows.
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: I have become a David that I don't know, and what changed everything was me forgiving myself for the person I became in that victim mindset that I didn't like.
• 52:20
  Speaker 2: We can be so many different people and it's tough when you can look at your personhood and say this is not the personhood for me, when you have a voice inside you that says this person is not me.
• 52:38
  Speaker 2: It's so difficult when we find ourselves there because you have to not only recognize it, but you have to find, you have to want to get out and you have to try to figure out a way forward, like reinventing yourself.
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: Well, I think this is a beautiful segue into.
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: The last thing that I would love your opinion on is we had both mentioned the word unpacking.
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: We've not really went into depth of what the word unpacking actually means.
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: You need to allow yourself permission to visit these places.
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: Just don't unpack your suitcase and live there.
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: What gets dangerous is when we unpack your suitcase and live there.
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: So can we talk about that?
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: Your thoughts on that?
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I want to talk first about when you're talking about, like literally visiting a place Maybe that is going to see your childhood home where there was incredible amounts of violence or anger or something Going to see, you know, a physical place where something happened, and sometimes people will say you know, why would you want to go there?
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: That is a place of bad memories.
• 54:03
  Speaker 2: But when we revisit a place like that, that is controlling the narrative.
• 54:11
  Speaker 2: Sometimes women who have been sexually abused will become promiscuous and one of I'm not an expert, but I've heard that is controlling the situation.
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: Or, if you have any sort of a history with a thing that is making you uncomfortable, if you go there and revisit it as a normal person of sound mind and body at the time when you were visited, you are able to exist in that space and control your feelings about it.
• 54:50
  Speaker 2: You're able to say I'm here and intense trauma is not happening to me right now.
• 55:01
  Speaker 2: I am near a house that I lived in right before I got put into social services custody and the house has long ago been bulldozed.
• 55:13
  Speaker 2: It was a shanty, a bit bulldozed and the yard has been completely destroyed and there's like a McMansion on this tiny lot now and going there.
• 55:27
  Speaker 2: It was this I lived super close to it but I had never been there because they didn't want to go.
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: It was like a thing.
• 55:33
  Speaker 2: But I went and I'm like I'm a different person.
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: I'm going to put this into a short story and I am here not as a 12 year old girl who's got a really crappy home life.
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: I'm here as a grown up, a middle-aged adult, and I'm a different person now.
• 55:53
  Speaker 2: So that's the thing with returning to the scene.
• 55:57
  Speaker 2: So unpacking we talked about this.
• 56:00
  Speaker 2: Unpacking, I think, is we say that we've got all this baggage right, we're carrying around emotional baggage and what's in baggage, but things that you have to unpack, and so I think unpacking I guess the meaning of it, if we want to be literal, is taking out all of these demons that we've got in our suitcases and shaking the wrinkles out and going okay, demon number one, you are my uncle.
• 56:29
  Speaker 2: That one time at Thanksgiving I'm going to handle you, and now I'm fixed.
• 56:34
  Speaker 2: Now I'm going to unpack my third grade teacher and I don't think it's that easy.
• 56:39
  Speaker 2: For the things that we have trauma over, it's hard to unpacking them.
• 56:48
  Speaker 2: I don't think it's as easy as taking it out of that proverbial suitcase.
• 56:52
  Speaker 2: I think we're going to be unpacking these things for a long time.
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: What you said about hearing that song that you've listened to over and over again, hearing that song and suddenly realizing, hey, this has hit me at a place where it's never hit me before I think that's you unpacking something over and over again.
• 57:17
  Speaker 2: When we start really working on our issues, sometimes we have memories pop up that we didn't remember before, or we see something and it brings up excuse me, like emotions or things that we hadn't thought of.
• 57:37
  Speaker 2: That's unpacking.
• 57:38
  Speaker 2: And so baggage when we visualize baggage, it's like a pile of suitcases, right, but what if we were to visualize our baggage as one of those old-fashioned just-married cars from maybe the 20s or 30s where they have all of these cans tied on a string and then when the car drives, you don't see it because it's from the 20s, right, but when the car drives, the cans will make all sorts of noise, rattling down the road.
• 58:14
  Speaker 2: If you imagine your baggage as those rattling cans, the more you have that you're keeping near you, the louder the cans rattle.
• 58:24
  Speaker 2: Imagine them being tied to your waist, so you're just walking around to the store to work to the gym, rattling these cans.
• 58:33
  Speaker 2: The strings are getting tangled, they're louder on the gravel than they are on the grass, but they're still making noise.
• 58:40
  Speaker 2: And maybe unpacking them means snipping one thread and saying, let me try to manage this one today.
• 58:51
  Speaker 2: And you brought up, when we were talking about this earlier, some really good points about getting rid of these.
• 58:59
  Speaker 2: And they don't make noise anymore.
• 59:03
  Speaker 2: I think you said something about if one of them is bothering you, but the cans are all tangled up and they're making so much noise you get mad at something else.
• 59:11
  Speaker 2: But it's really that one thing.
• 59:14
  Speaker 2: It's just that you have so much debris around you, this dark cloud over you, that it's hard to see things.
• 59:25
  Speaker 2: I don't think I offered anybody a solution right there for how to unpack stuff, but I think that this is just a different way of looking at it.
• 59:33
  Speaker 2: Rather than saying, okay, let's unpack things.
• 59:36
  Speaker 2: What I think in a nutshell, when we look at, okay, how do we unpack our baggage?
• 59:44
  Speaker 2: I think there's not one way to do it, it's just being a thoughtful person.
• 59:51
  Speaker 2: It is just examining what comes up in our lives, what triggers us, and trying to be less triggered by it.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 2: I was just talking to my therapist about triggers and something had triggered me and then for the whole rest of the day I just felt awful and I said to my therapist oh, maybe it released some chemicals and it just sent them through my bloodstream.
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 2: And she said when you're triggered, your body goes to the same place that it was when you had the initial incident and then you just have to get through the day with your body's physical reaction.
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 2: Unpacking is maybe just handling these things and being exposed to them until they're not a problem for you anymore.
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 2: I hope that was the right answer.
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 1: I don't think there's a wrong answer, and I think that everyone is going to find their own way to unpack.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: Sometimes it's just let me just reorganize and let me just fold up my shirts, let me just match my socks, and they're all still in a suitcase.
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: But it's a little bit more organized and that's okay too.
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: None of us will ever say my path is 100% right.
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: We're saying that this is what worked for me, and so take a little bit of this from my story and a little bit of this from TJ's story and create your own path.
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: The last thing that I want to say is, when I hear a song that I've known my heart for years and I hear it again and it means something different, I had my head set in and there was a song that came on and it's by Ashton Shepard, who I love, and the song she says I'm good and getting better at being myself, but for whatever reason, I remember exactly the plant I was planting in the flower bed when I was like, oh my God, I'm good and I'm getting better at being myself, and it was just so powerful to me.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 2: Things from my lives just differently.
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 2: I don't love platitudes, when somebody says, oh, these things were meant to be.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 2: I just don't love those because they haven't worked.
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 2: They don't work for people with a lot of trauma.
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 2: But I think that song you were in the headspace that you needed to be in to get that message.
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: This is probably one of my favorite episodes.
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: I'm so excited about this one.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 2: Thank you.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 2: I have met with a couple of hosts and some of the hosts are very tiptoeing around because I think that some of their guests, their trauma is so fresh that they I've almost felt that if I were completely honest with, oh I did this and I did this and this happened to me.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 2: And here's everything open on the page.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 2: I feel like it would be too much because they're so accustomed to guests, the wounds being so fresh that it's so people need to talk about their traumas for various reasons.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 2: But my wounds were fresh decades ago and I'm still managing this thing with my mother.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 2: I was furiously texting with my aunt about my mother right before we got on, but so my mother thing is not done.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 2: But I just have the clarity now to be able to, and also I've normalized it so much, which we all have.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 2: We've got this list of bullet points where we talked about this so much with therapists and relationships and people that we open up to that we can go.
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, this happened and this happened.
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 2: I felt this, I thought this thing happened, and here's exactly my deal and talking with you.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 2: You're just so awesome and so welcoming and it's just.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 2: I can see your community really responding to that because in light of your trauma my trauma, everyone's trauma you are such an upbeat, sunshiny guy.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 2: I think that people respond to that.
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 2: It's the podcast hosts with the super soft voices and the non-threatening demeanors that almost make it not uncomfortable, but they're like so gentle with things that I'm not sure if I'm going to say too much.
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: They're absolutely.
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 2: But there's a place.
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 2: There's a place for podcasts that people are not yet okay and they're trying to get there and there's a very real need for that kind of podcast.
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, thank you for this.
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 2: This was just super awesome to end my day with you.
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely.
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: And that wraps up another powerful episode of Surviving Abuse.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: I want to extend my deepest gratitude to our incredible guests for sharing their transformative journey with us today.
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: Your bravery is an inspiration to us all.
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: Here we go.
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: I want to remind you to stay connected with us on our social media platforms.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: Follow us on Instagram, twitter, facebook and TikTok, where we will continue the conversation, share resources and provide support for survivors like you Remember you're not alone.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: To all of our listeners, thank you for joining us again.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: Your resilience and willingness to heal is what makes this community strong.
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: As we embark on this journey together, let's remember that there is life.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: After trauma, we can rise above it and create a future filled with hope and joy.
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: Join us next week as we dive into the healing process and share more incredible stories of triumph and resilience.
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: Until then, take care of yourself and remember you deserve love, you deserve happiness and, above all, you deserve an abundance of healing.