Is Your Past Holding You Back? The Science Behind Emotional Healing w/ Janelle Bruland

And it's really getting in and doing some self examination and understanding what is something that has happened in your past that is still holding you hostage. And then I want you to imagine what that would look like if you really broke free of that. That you would have this, this new freedom, this new peace, this new purpose like you've ever never had before. And you wouldn't even recognize yourself. And this is possible.

So. Welcome to another episode of youf Must Be out of youf Mind. And as you know, I'm Dr. Dawn Wood and I always bring on amazing guests. And today, not only is this guest coming in, she's also a great friend and I'm really honored to have her here. So I want to welcome Janelle Berland to youo Must Be out of youf Mind.

Thank you, Dawn. I'm really excited to be here with you again.

I know. Uh, we were just at the Impact forum that you had. And then also you've been on a podcast earlier.

Yes.

And that was actually back in April, I think March or April of 2023.

Does it seem like it was that long ago?

It does not. That's incredible how the time flies.

It sure does. So again, I'm so happy that you're here and I'm glad to see you. So that leads us to obviously the why am I so glad to see you is because you had a recent setback, illness wise. Can you maybe just share where you're at and how far you've come? Which looks amazing. So. You look great.

Oh, thank you. You bet. Yeah. I've been out of the hospital now just five weeks, so I'm. I'm back to. Back to work and excited to be able to do this with you and get back into my regular routine. But I came down with a. A fever in, in early March and didn't know what it was and went to the doctor after seven days, they. They tested me for everything, decided that they thought it was Epstein Barr, which was a virus, and just told me home and take good care of myself, get lots of fluids, lots of rest, and it wouldn't be a lot of fun, but the fever would break and I would get through it. Well, it continued to go on and after 20 days of fever, we went to the hospital and they admitted me immediately. And it ended up that I had a rare condition called hlh, which is very similar to, in the way it looks or shows up to Epstein Barr, but something much more serious which was actually shutting my organs down anyway, life saving efforts. And I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks. And now I am back home and on the way to recovery and truly a miracle that everything happened the way they did. And I am just so grateful to be here with you today.

Well, I am, too. And I think what's so surprising, this is why I think this is a great topic to get on and discuss, is because if you picked people that you would think would never have that happen, you had to be in one of those lists because you're healthy, you eat right, you take care of yourself. Right. And so all. All of those things. And what a good lesson it is for people to say it can happen to anybody at any time. If it can happen to Janelle, it can happen to you. So I actually see another book coming from this. I may be wrong, but no, no.

There'S another one coming. Even a vision in the. In the middle of the night in the hospital when, of course, you can't sleep when. When you're in the hospital, so you're up in the night, and that's when those things come. Definitely. But talking about the health thing, I think to make a point for your listeners out there, is that one of the things that the doctor said me, a couple days, you know, after they had gotten me stabilized and everything, he came and he said, you know, Janelle, the, the reason that you're with us today is because you came in with such a strong physical foundation and mental resilience. And he said, those two things coupled with our efforts is why you're here.

Yeah.

That just meant so much to me because just like you said, we. We can't plan for these things happening. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, but we can prepare for taking really good care of ourselves. So because I was in such good physical strength and mental strength that I. I was able to fight it.

Yeah. And that doesn't surprise me at all. I've been healthy in my whole life, too. And I remember one time I had to go in for some dental work, and the dentist did the work. And then he gave me. He said, listen, I'm going to give you something really, really small just in case you have the pain. He goes, but I suggest you take it anyway, just to be safe. And I take nothing. I mean, zero medications. Right. So I've never been on medication. I don't take any of that stuff. But he said, do it as soon as you get home just to be safe. I did. And, Janelle, I was so sick from that, and I only took half of it. And it had such an impact on my system. And my daughter came in and it scared her dad, I've never seen you sick. And she was like to see that. And I'm sure a lot of people were frightened to see you. Right. Because that's not Janelle. Right.

Definitely. My kids, definitely it gave them a scare. And my husband Graham and family around because it wasn't expected for sure to see me in that kind of condition.

Yeah. And Graham did a great job because I was at the impact. I know you weren't there, but you were with everybody in spirit and everybody was. But Graham did a good job. Would have been great to have you there as well. So you've got a new book out. Right. And so it's phenomenal. I actually endorse the book. You also talk about what we do as well. But tell us the inspiration to your way Back to Happy is the name of the book. And you always seem happy. I didn't think you had to get back to happy. I thought you just lived there.

Yes, well, I did and definitely want to help other people get back there. Well, the purpose of the book is really to help people overcome their past and turn the pain of their past into a future of freedom, purpose and peace. So that's your way back to happy. And there are many people out there today and in business leaders that I talk to in the book. It's not talked about a lot. This, when you have something in the past that has been a problem or a challenge is we're very good as these high performance leaders in just saying, I'm just going to just tuck that over here. Pain. What pain? I'm not going to really pay attention to that. So it could be something that happens in your childhood. It could be a challenge that happens in your adult life. And what. What it is, you tend to just kind of tuck it over here in this little box and you think that it's done. But as you and I both know, that's not the way trauma works. And it can become unresolved trauma within the body that's going to show up in one way or another. So how I came to write this book really came out of my first book. So the success lie. I talked about the lies that people buy into either the circumstances of their life or the pace in which they're living. And one of those lies is I can't get beyond my past. And that just. That just simply isn't true or you're not even facing it. So that book really delves into unresolved trauma and how it can show up in your life as. As it did in mine.

Yeah. And that. And that's one of the things that I talk about, you know, a lot. And one of the things I've just publishing two studies on. On exactly that. So people don't understand how much trauma is affecting them. They'll think, okay, yeah, I'm dealing with it, or I get a little bit of anxiety or depression here and there's. But what I'm showing in this study is we have two defense systems for us as our body and our brain. We have an immune system that is designed to protect us from any viruses, bacteria, even cancer. Right? We've got these T cells floating around, these killer T cells to work on cancer. So that is the way the body protects itself through the immune system. The way the brain protects itself is through neuroplasticity, and that's his ability to rewire. So when something hits us, we're supposed to be able to rewire and build new neural pathways and basically adapt. But what I'm showing in the studies are that this unresolved trauma is actually increasing inflammation. So the genes that regulate inflammation upregulate, which means the genes that regulate your immune system down regulate. It's basically an allocation of resources. We're in fight or flight. We need to be focused on fight or flight, not maintenance. And so now the immune system compromised. So now you're much more susceptible to things entering your system and you don't have the defense that you should have because it's compromised. And then all of a sudden, you know, you've got this huge gap in between the inflammation and the immunity, and we get sick. So I use the analogy of take the US Military, the greatest military in the world, but spread it out over 150 countries. And then we get attacked on our. On our homeland. We probably fall because we don't have enough defense, right? And then the neuroplasticity is that ability to rewire and reset. The genes that regulate neuroplasticity also are downregulated. So now your two best defense systems to protect you are compromised.

Right?

But when the trauma gets resolved, and what we're proving in the study is we're increasing immunity by almost 100%. And so the naive CD4 T cells, for example, increase, you know, one particular person 113%. Now, those are the cells that basically are going to recruit and discover the cancer in your system and then start to train the system to fight it. But if you've got low Naive T cells, chances are it's not going to recognize the danger. And so we're seeing that much of a change in immunity. And then neuroplasticity, we're seeing increase by as much as 46%.

Those are amazing statistics. That is really incredible. And the people that are stuck with this dysregulated system, you don't even really know that. That it's happening. It just becomes a pattern. It becomes something that you're used to. And I use a. A graph when I explain it. I talk about, you know, this is your nervous system in. In harmony, you go from the sympathetic when you're in action to the. The parasympathetic when you rest and digest, and you just kind of have this really nice harmony in your system. But then when you continue to have these traumas, your body goes into that sympathetic and it stays up there, and you're just stuck in that area. And people don'. Realize that they're stuck, like you said, in that fight or flight, and they're just operating that way. They're used to the suffering, if you will. And because it's comfortable, that's. That's what they know because it's just happened over and over, and it feels normal. It feels normal.

So if you walked with a sprained ankle for 20 years and then somebody goes, why are you limping? You'll go, I don't limp. You go, yeah, I can tell you're limping, and it doesn't look like it. And then you watch yourself walking. You go, oh, my gosh, I'm limping. I never even knew I limped. I had a lot of people, I always tell them to journal after you get the trauma cleared, because normal now goes back to normal and not having those things, and it's very, very difficult to sometimes recognize it. So I say, not only should you journal, but also get other people to point out what they're noticing is different. As an example, I had one guy who had a lot of trauma as a child, a very violent father. And so he had panic attacks for, like, 45 years. And so we get rid of the panic attacks. And then he calls me up a few months later and he said, I want to share something with you. He goes, my son was upstairs, couldn't find his headphones, and was screaming and yelling, getting really mad. He says, so I walked upstairs, I helped him find his headphones, and he says, I came back downstairs into the kitchen, and my wife had been sitting at the table, and she got up from the table and Came over and hugged me. And he says, well, that was nice. What was that for? She says, the way you handled it. And he goes, what do you mean? And he goes. She says, when I heard him yelling and screaming and I heard your footsteps going up the stairs, she said, I sat here with my head in my hands waiting for the battle. And even though he was still yelling, you weren't. And he goes, you know what? I never even recognized it. But that's what he would have done before. But it didn't upset his nervous system because he wasn't flooding through the old trauma.

Wow, that's incredible. I tell a story in the book of one of my clients who had gotten herself out of a trauma situation into a safe place. But yet you still, if you haven't resolved your trauma, you still can go back very quickly to that place that isn't safe. And she called me one night and she was very upset. She was shaky on the phone. And I said, abby, what's going on? And she said, somebody came to the door. And I just really got freaked out. I said, well, what do you mean? And she said, well, I was just sitting here this evening, just relaxing with my dogs, and the. The doorbell rang. And she said, all of a sudden I just went into this panic and I got scared. And she said, I thought it was my ex husband at the door coming to get me. And she said, she finally got up and answered the door and it was just a delivery man. But instantly she'd gone back to a situation where her husband had come over and had been a not a good situation. And she immediately went back to that, but her heart was racing. She just immediately felt very unsafe. Even she was completely safe. So taking her through, just calming her down, doing some breathing, helping her get reoriented, and realizing that she was safe. But how quickly our bodies. If we have that unresolved trauma, even if we're out of the trauma and we're safe, our bodies are stuck back.

Yeah, because it keeps looping through the trauma. So the way our brains are designed is to protect us. So what it does is it takes all our experiences and uses them as a resource to respond to a current situation.

Right.

But the glitch. Glitch. This is what I talk about. The glitch is that trauma was stored in high definition. So now when your mind says, oh, how do we deal with the. What do we know about a door knocking? And we don't know who's at the other side? The mind goes back to when that happened before. And Sees it in real time, activating her nervous system, and yet she doesn't know why. She's just feeling scared is because her mind is looking at the old data in real time. So when you resolve that trauma and clear it, we still have the experience to use as a resource without our nervous system getting activated.

Right.

So you got the best of both worlds. A lot of people will say, well, you know, am I going to just lose all of my memory? Am I not going to be able to? And I said, no. I mean, we just don't want it activating your nervous system.

Right. You're not activated by it anymore. That's. That's the important part. You don't have the reaction.

Yep. So I had a young lady came in. She was 21, and her mother adopted her at 3 from a very abusive situation. It was horrible, as bad as you can imagine. And so for years, she was having, especially as a teenager, blacking out and having seizures when she was just out with her friends. And so she'd done different types of therapy, but nothing had ever helped her. And then her mom came in, said, well, why don't you go and see Dr. Wood? And she goes, I'm not doing anything else. I don't want to touch anything because every time I do it, because what does she do? And she's reliving it. Right. And so she said, I don't want to do that. So her mom said, well, I'll go through it so I can explain it to you. And she went through it. The daughter still said, no. And then the daughter got diagnosed with Crohn's, and so they're down in the Caribbean areas. The mother said, okay, we're going to find a Crohn's doctor in Orlando, and you're going to go see Dr. Wood and the Crohn's doctor. So I took her through the whole program. She couldn't do all the testing with the Crohn's doctor because she felt so sick. And so anyway, they had to come back. A month later, she comes back a month later. There's no Crohn's after going through the program. But the thing that was really the purpose of me telling the story is a week later, her and her mom get me on the phone, and they said, my daughter wants to talk to you. And she says, am I losing all my memory? And I said, well, no. What makes you think that? She says, this was such a major event. Couldn't never stop thinking about it. Every day it was on my mind. And now it's not. And she says, and it scared me. Even though I'm glad it's gone, it scared me. Am I losing my memory? She says, I can hardly recall it now. I said, well, no, that's what we were going for. Right. So. But it scared her because, like, that's. That's the sprained ankle she's been walking on since she's been three years old. And all of a sudden it goes. It's a shock to her system.

Right, right. So true.

Yep. So. But without resolving that, she would have continued to have her seizures and blacking out, and it really had a major effect on her life. So. So what. So in. In the book, you know, the, the most recent book, what is the message that you're trying to share? If you could summarize the message, you bet.

Well, the message is, is to really ask yourself the question, is there something, a pain of your past that's holding you back from really living the abundant life that you're called to live? And you may know that there's something that is. Is holding you back, that's holding you hostage, or you may not even realize it. So there's exercises throughout the book to help you discover is there something that's holding you back from really being the person that you're called to be? And then taking steps. And I tell the story of how I came to discover mine. I mean, I had resolved some trauma that I had had in my life. Life very good, happy, kids doing well. And one day on the way home from a retreat that I had been to, I all of a sudden in the middle of the Seattle Tacoma Airport, had a complete. Me in the middle of the airport, just sobbing and crying and just literally a meltdown. And what that was, is it was my unresolved trauma that was. Was coming out once I discovered and went to go figure out what it was. And my body had been protecting me for a very long time. And I was finally in a very safe place in a marriage years and years later, where that unresolved trauma that was left, I was able to actually take a look at. So it was my journey to. To discover the healing process of that and to put it in. In lay terms for. For other people to be able to understand what trauma is at a simple level and be able to know what some of the healing modalities are. And I have several that I studied and researched, and yours is. Is one of them. That's what I talk about in the book. And then also making the choice then for healing and how to do that, because as business leaders, we often try to force healing. We try to push our way to make things happen. And that actually that strength can become a weakness. It can be something that actually keeps us from our healing, that there's a different way to be doing. And then mindset, of course, and how you create some sustainable practices to not only heal your trauma, but how do you prepare your mind and body and soul to build resilience for the next challenge that comes our way? Because we're going to have challenges. So how do we become this. This person who just has incredible resilience and optimism and the right perspective to be able to approach life's challenges in a different way?

Yeah. No, I love that. How often do you hear this? I don't have any trauma.

You laugh because that's exactly what people feel. Right. So have you experienced that? Have you got any stories about people who have said that and then they discover it?

Well, definitely. And I've lear often to rephrase it, I just said, tell me about a significant challenge in your life. So one of the exercises I'll take people through is I'll say let. Let's look at a timeline, decade by decade, taking your life from birth till now, and what are the significant events that have happened in your life and how have they shaped you? And there's going to be some happy things, you know, maybe your wedding day, starting a business, having birth of a child. But then there's going to be difficult things too. Maybe it's a divorce or there's been an illness or something like that. So you get them talking about those. Those challenges, and then it's baby steps to. That's actually a trauma. A trauma is simply where you feel completely helpless in a situation. Well, we've all been there, and it can build, obviously, so. So that seems to be a way to help people get there. For sure.

Yeah. One of the ways I explained it too, is not everything is a big T trauma. True. And so I call them emotional concussions. Can you tell me about an emotional concussion you had? And that seems to be a softer way to say it is like, oh, yeah, you coach that yelled at me or, you know, put me under pressure, or a parent, even with the best of intentions, you know, used to try to motivate you in a certain way. And. And it tended not to motivate you. Tended you to, you know, take you down.

Right.

And the parent's not trying to do that. So. So many times I hear. Well, that's what my parents did for me. That's what I do for my kids. And I go, but what are you feeling when you think about what? Oh, it's horrible. Yeah. They repeat it.

Right.

And I mean, I remember as kids, you'd always hear, I'm never going to do what my parents did, I'm going to do it differently. And then you repeat it.

Yes.

But both of us sort of had pretty good experiences, so really wasn't a big problem for us. I mean, we both lived with amazing parents and we were both adopted, which is pretty cool. Were those good stories of adoption?

Yes, it was. I had a wonderful upbringing as we talked about before and really living in a home where I was very loved and welcomed. And my dad's passed away now and he actually, it'll be two years on June. Yeah. Two years here coming up. And he just was such a wonderful rock in my life. And my mom's, my mom's doing well still, and lots of siblings, so great way to be raised up. But I was adopted when I was 10 days old.

Yep. And I was adopted from birth, so my parents picked me up at the hospital. So we're both pretty young. Right. Probably don't remember a lot. I'm sure it's stored somewhere in there.

And you and I have talked about how you've had some interesting stories that you've shared with me. Maybe you can share one with the listeners about how it's not just trauma, is not just caused by something that maybe we can remember as a childhood event, but it actually can happen at the times in our life where we're too small to remember, but that can still show up as unresolved trauma in our body.

Yeah. And again also come back to meaning, especially when children, they don't have enough life experience so they attach a meaning to something. So I had one lady and she was in her 30s and she says, I don't have a very good relationship with my parents. And it stemmed back to something that happened when she was younger. And what she said was she was 4, her sister was 10. And then they had a young like 1 year old. And so her parents were going to go out one night and the regular babysitter didn't babysit them. Her father brought this young guy from work because they weren't going to go out long. And so they said, we're going to just go out for a little bit. He's 18 years old, he'll watch you. And what happened was, is not a great story. The young 18 year old tried to sexually assault the 10 year old, and as brilliant as she was, she figured out she sort of conned him because he threatened to hurt, throw the baby in the pool if she wouldn't cooperate. And he says, well, don't do this in front of my sisters. Let me put my sisters away so they don't watch this. And she locked them all in the bathroom. So he's pounding on the door, threatening and telling them that he's going to break the door down. And they were petrified in there. And so anyway, he finally couldn't knock the door down or I don't know how hard he tried. But so eventually they heard the parents come in. They just sat in there for like two hours. And the parents came home and he sort of left really quickly. And then they came out and she says, and we told our parents what happened. And she says, and I've never forgiven them for this. They didn't believe us. And so I said, so why do you think they didn't believe you? She says, well, they never did anything. It was never talked about again. It was just like done. And she says, and I've never forgiven them for not believing us. And so she was holding on to that. And so when we get them into that very calm state to start looking at things, into that optimal brainwave state, said, so I wasn't there and I have no idea if this is accurate. However, let me know if this maybe makes some sense. I said, is it possible your parents did do something but you were four and you don't be, you're not brought in on it. What if they called the cops, the guy got arrested, he confessed to it and they never had a trial, never had anything, it was just like done Right.

And didn't discuss with her because she was a child, obviously not going to discuss it.

And again, those days you don't want to talk about that. And she's 4 years old, so you just dismiss it. And I said, did he ever babysit for you again? She goes, no. I said, you ever see him at your dad's work again? She goes, no. And you saw the relief on her face. That wasn't the story she built.

Right, right.

And they never discussed it. So she had almost 30 years of a angry relationship with her parents. They didn't talk about it and she just put her own story together of what happened. They didn't believe us. Wow, amazing how that can happen. And it really helped her sort of come to a resolution that she hadn't thought about. And so we don't know if it's true, but it probably sounds more accurate. And I said to her, I said, what other evidence do you have that your parents were neglectful and she couldn't come up with anything? They took care of her. Right. They were decent parents. They had other issues. But she goes, overall, I said, so we're trying to convict them. And they were on trial for being bad parents. If we take. Take that story out of it, what evidence could you convict them on? She couldn't do it. So that was the resolution that she needed. And it. And it really healed her. But look at how she struggled for 30 years with that.

That makes so much sense. Well, and we've talked about how you have been able to solve and to heal with your work. So many different types of things, illnesses and different things, not just trauma, but illnesses in the body, like your daughter's Crohn's disease. And that there a lot of those that are caused by trauma, that it's creating that inflammation in the body. And so you and I have talked a little bit. Is this most recent health challenge that I had that came out of the blue because I've had trauma in my life. Is there something maybe there? And we talked about it and really don't see anything other than maybe there's something that happened back before I remembered in that adoption period, that 10 days old. So it's kind of an interesting thing to think about that we could have things causing inflammation and causing problems in our body that we don't remember.

I actually believe it goes all the way back into the womb. Yeah, I had a lady, she was pregnant, and something awful happened with her husband and she obviously kicked him out and. But she was pregnant. So as I was taking her and she says, like, it was knock down, drag him out screaming, matches and fighting. Luckily she got rid of them because of what he had done. But now she's really struggling and her mother sent her. Cause she says, I'm so worried about the baby and her.

So she was pregnant when she came and saw you?

Yeah, she was pregnant when she came in and saw me. And so as I sat taking her through the program, she was feeling like the great relief of stuff coming up. And she said to me, she says, can you stick out your hand for me? And so I said, okay. And I stuck out my hand and she put it on her belly and she says, feel that the baby was kicking like, like crazy. Feeling her excitement and feeling her relief, she goes, this baby had never moved. She said, I'm always so scared because I. I Want to feel. I've never felt this before. So the baby was picking up on her and how she was feeling. And it, it just shows you how much, you know. The child, even in the womb, is affected by everything around it. And it's picking up on the mother's condition. And here's what's really fascinating. Janelle. Baby was born dead, deaf.

Really.

So I don't know if that's connected. Right. But if you think about the baby, you know, maybe shutting down that noise, I always think that you never know, it could have been a possibility, but it was. What was so cool as I got to see the mother got the special ear implants. And so I saw her for the first time at 4 years of age hearing her mother speak.

Oh, how wonderful is that?

It was so incredible. You just saw her face go like, her eyes, like wide open. So now she's able to hear.

That's really cool.

Yeah.

I'd like to come back to. You were mentioning the girl that had built up some storylines that she'd been telling herself. And I think we so often do it. And I actually have a chapter in the book called your brain is lying to you. And it's about how we have adopted these storylines and they can be trauma related or not trauma related at all, because we just have this inner critic inside that is going to tell us that we're not good enough. We, you know, we, we're going to fail. We can't do this or whatever it may be, and we need to become aware of those so that we can make changes in our lives and really get to that mindset that has the optimism and the abundance that we're taking steps to actually move forward in creating a life of significance versus all these things that hold us back. So our traumas hold us back. And this negative mindset, we're always thinking that the next bad thing is going to happen is going to hold us back. So I talk a lot about mindset and the way your brain lies to you.

Yep. What's interesting though too, because I have another add on to that is when they say, oh, I sabotage myself. And what I say to them, I said, it's impossible. Your brain can't sabotage you. It's protecting you.

So even the lies are protection to keep you away from something that could hurt you. So if it's telling you you're not good enough, what it is doing is protecting you from failing.

Right.

So it doesn't want you to fail. It doesn't want you to get hurt again. So you may have picked up that from maybe constantly being put down by a parent, a teacher, whatever. You see this a lot of times in public speaking, even with my wife, when she was in elementary school, the teacher stood her up at the front of the class and started firing multiplication questions at her, and she froze. And so she could never stand up in public and talk because her mind was sabotaging her or protecting her. It was protecting her from that shame and that embarrassment. And when she told me that story, she's sobbing because she remembered standing there and seeing all the faces, like, embarrassed and laughing at her. And so her mind says, well, don't do that again. So let's make sure you never want to go out in front of the public and speak again, because we're going to stop that shame and embarrassment from happening. Happening. That's not sabotage. It's protection.

Exactly. That's why neuroplasticity is so beautiful, because that is wired in that we can rewire our minds, and we can have these new patterns that we adopt, and we can really learn how to become present as we heal ourselves. As you help people heal, then as we take steps forward to create this next chapter of our life and let the old chapter behind we create this new beautiful chapter, we can now have these new patterns that we adopt where we're aware of. Of what are we thinking about and are we thinking about. Are we thinking about abundant thoughts or are we negative? Are we criticizing ourself or others? And if we become aware of them, then we can shift them. And so many of us, in this fast pace of life that we live, we're not even. We're not taking time to be present. We don't even think about what we're thinking about. So I really help. We help my clients get more present and really change those thoughts because we allow those thoughts to get in our way, even after the healing.

Yeah. And the mind's, you know, again, running through its resources, trying to protect you. So that's why unresolved trauma has such a major effect. So if you're trying to rewire your brain to do something new, right. And your mind looks at anything that had been bothering you or any kind of emotional concussion or trauma, it won't rewire. But if it's something that you've never done before and there doesn't seem to be any kind of a threat to it, it can rewire. So if you don't resolve the trauma, you're lim. The neuroplasticity and the resilience that you could build. Getting rid of that will allow your resilience to maximize, allow your neuroplasticity to maximize. And that's why we're publishing this study now showing our, our youngest in the study was 15, our oldest was 63. And they were dealing with, some had anxiety, post traumatic stress, depression and panic attacks. So really severe cases. And they gave us cases that were not responsive to traditional treatment. So they really gave us some tough ones. And our 45.6% was the average change in neuroplasticity after resolving their trauma, which is phenomenal. So they may have had 5% or 10% before that. Now they've got 45. Imagine how life changing that's going to be for them.

No, that's, that's step one. You've got to figure out what's in there that's holding you back. No question. If you have unresolved trauma, you've got to figure out what that is because it's always going to stand in your way.

Yeah. And you see it in so many things. You know, people afraid to fly, people afraid to get in new relationships. They just say, you know, this is, you know, the way my mind works. It's just the way I've always been. And when I started doing all my research to figure out how to save my daughter, I came in as an entrepreneur and my, as entrepreneurs, we know, what do we do? We challenge everything. Exactly. I was like, why would you be anxious? What made you anxious? Your mind doesn't get anxious for no reason. And so I talk about anxiety. As I said, think of anxiety as the email that keeps coming into your inbox and you ignore it or you delete it, or you put in antivirus software to block the emails.

Don't shoot the messenger.

The email may be a message from your bank that there's suspicious activity on your account and it wants you to look at it and resolve it. Is there or isn't there there? And so if you don't resolve it, the email keeps coming, the anxiety keeps coming. And so the question is, is what is creating it? Because as you know, you and I are both, you know, pretty spiritual. We know that our minds and bodies are designed to heal. So what's interfering with the healing? We're in fight or flight. The mind doesn't want to do healing as long as there's a threat because the focus is on survival. Maintenance will take care of itself after we get away from the lion.

Yes, so true. Get away from the lion.

Yep. Very good. Well, this is being amazing. I Appreciate you coming in. I know it's only five weeks, so you're. It's a great honor to have you on the show and to spend that time. Do you have any other thoughts you want to share with our, our audience?

I think just the fact that you have a, a beautiful life that you're called to live and so often we can have things standing in our way that really keep us, us from being the authentic leader. We want to be the parent that we want to be the friend. And it's really getting in and doing some self examination and understanding what in your life, what is something that has happened in your past that is still holding you hostage. And then I want you to imagine what that would look like if you really broke free of that. That you would have this new freedom, this new peace, this new purpose like, like you've ever never had before and you wouldn't even recognize yourself. And this is possible. You can put your past in the past and you can have a future freedom, purpose and peace. And that comes from really taking a look at your life and what you need to resolve there. And often that is trauma.

Excellent. Great message. I love what you do. I know you are helping so many people and making an impact on a lot of lives and you've got a great story to tell. Hell. Right. And so I'm looking forward to the next story and the next book on how you're going to conquer this next challenge for yourself.

Thank you, Dawn. Just always awesome to spend this time with you and thank you so much for the work that you do and how you've helped and supported me and so many others on, on their path to healing. And it's just so exciting to see your continued work and success.

I appreciate it. Well, thanks so much, Janelle. Thanks for being on another episode of youf Must Be out of youf Mind. And thanks for everybody for listening and there it is.