Use These POWERFUL Tips to Overcome TRAUMA

You know, abundance comes from being able to get into the depths of your soul. When you're, like, really disconnected from your true, authentic self, you're not living abundantly.

Hey, guys, thank you so much for being here. A quick message before we dive in. You may be watching the show, but haven't taken a moment to click the subscribe button below. So if you've ever gained value from this show, it would mean so much to me if you click the subscribe button right now. And not only will this allow you to subscribe, see these messages first. All this great content we have, you're going to get notified first when it comes out. But the bigger our subscriber base grows, the more people we can impact and the bigger the guests we can get on this show as well. So, again, thank you so much as always for your support. It means the world to me. Make sure to click the subscribe button below and let's dive into this conversation. What's the difference between the traumas that happen to us and the generational trauma that happened to our ancestors?

So the major difference is placed in biology. So there's a genetic component to intergenerational trauma. And so intergenerational trauma has this way in which there is a genetic transmission that happens from parent to child, really. And so it creates a predisposition to vulnerability, to stress.

Give me an example. What's a common example you see in your practice that is a generational story?

Well, I mean, you know, there are people that will come in and say, you know, ever since I was a child, it was, like, difficult to soothe. And I was, you know, I had, like, this hyperactivity. There's a lot of trauma survivors that also, like, believe that their symptoms are coincide with adhd, because there's a lot of overlap in the experience and in the symptomatology. So there's a lot of that. There's, like, people that reflect back to their childhood, and they say, I've always had this experience that felt like I was always anxious. When we dig into the layers and we dig deep, we start noticing. Okay. Especially because I do a lot of family tree work and really going down the lineage to know, well, what are some of the trauma responses or what are some of the responses around also inflammatory responses like depression or anxiety or other kind of mental illness kind of experiences that were held in the family. And when we start going down the family line and we start exploring not only their childhood and how they responded in their childhood, what their attachment patterns were in their childhood, but also How? Perhaps like their mother had an inner child wound and the mother's mother had.

An inner child and they never healed.

It never healed. It expressed it as a trauma response. Yelled and screamed in the home, had emotional outbursts. What did that do? That actually created a disruption in the attachment that you could have had, like in your childhood. It created an insecure attachment. You then went out into the world and experienced bullying, a pandemic, like all kinds of things. And then that trauma, that trauma, propensity or vulnerability got triggered out. And so now you are continuing the cycle of intergenerational trauma because it was modeled to you genetically, it was passed down.

And then now is it genetic or is it, let's say the mother breaks a cycle before she heals her trauma, the generational trauma, before she has her child, she can and she creates an environment of peace. Is it the environment or is it the biology, the genetic code that is passed down? Because it's like these environments are kind of passed down. You witness your parents doing it. You just follow the pattern and you follow the environment pattern.

Yeah.

Is that genetic? Is that environment? What is both or it's both.

It's like, you know, for as long as psychology has existed, we've had like theories on nature. Nurture, Darwinism also kind of just started that. Right. Like way back when. So nature being like the biological aspects of our experiences and then nurture being like the social aspects of our experiences and intergenerational drama is really the only trauma that is situated at the intersection of both. So we have the nature side. Yeah. So, you know, on the nature side, the genetic expression, like we're getting a lot of information from like the field of epigenetics, which helps us understand how behavior like impacts genes. And so basically what happens is that let's say a mother, a mother has stress and depression in her life. Let's say that this mother is actually pregnant at five months gestation. So she's pregnant, she has a baby in utero. And because she's at five months gestation, that baby also has all the precursors, sex cells that they're going to have for their lifetime, regardless of the whether it's male or female. They already have those. So the mother, she experienced chronic trauma her entire life. And so because that became the status quo, her genes re expressed. So her genes said, okay, okay, this is the way that things are. We are a stressed body. And so because her genes are now saying we are predisposed to stress, that's being handed down to the baby in Utero actually at conception.

Wow.

So the baby is conceived into genes that are predisposed to stress. And because she is already still stressed while she's having this baby, all those stress hormones, namely cortisol, those are being passed down to the baby in utero. And what's happening to the precursor cells, those are also ingesting a lot of that stress environment. So you have three generations in one body genetically being passed down. The stress vulnerability, but also the social piece, the mother's stress. She has all her things going on. She's predisposed to trauma. She's got all these things going while she's still pregnant.

Her environment is still stressful.

Yeah, yeah. And so everybody in that lineage of three generations in one body is experiencing stress.

Is it just three generations or is it like every generation that's had it?

Well, you know, like, I mean, I'm. I think it's, it's a little bit of a chicken and egg kind of phenomenon when it comes to intergenerational trauma.

Right.

Like, it's like, who started it? Right. But I think I illustrate that because it's, I think, a little bit easier to see. Like, oh, well, maybe it started with mom. Maybe she was, you know, the person.

That maybe she had an extreme trauma and there was a reaction response.

Exactly right. And so now we at least get to see where the genetic line started from the, from the trauma trauma perspective.

When you think about it that way, you're like, man, I'm carrying the weight of multiple generations of trauma in my genes. Like physical weight, actual weight, that could get a little dark and heavy if you really put the emphasis on that. So how do we actually break that cycle once and for all where none of that trauma stays with us and we don't pass it down to our kids?

It definitely has to be a very like, whole system overhaul for most folks. Like, it has to be, you know, an integration of holistic practices in our day to day lives.

Every single day, like a daily practice.

Every day. Can't waver on it because we got to think about what we're undoing. We're not just undoing the decades of.

Trauma that you experience.

Yeah, you're doing, you're undoing all the.

You really need to have a rebirth. It's like a spiritual, psychological, emotional nervous system rebirth, in my opinion. I feel like I've had a couple of them in the last decade. Ten years ago, kind of opening up about my sexual abuse trauma. And then in the last few years just dealing with all relationships in general. Like all intimate relationships that I've had, I've never really faced them until a couple years ago. And I feel like I had to re. I had to emotionally, spiritually die, in a sense, psychologically, I guess.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Allow it to burn and then build from the ashes, kind of psychologically. And it's a process. I'm not saying I finished it or whatever, but it's like a constant journey of going back to the different stages of childhood, healing each stage and integrating that age with my current self. So there's full integration and healing of every different memory from my life. That was a traumatic response, and it's been a beautiful journey that has allowed me to have peace and harmony on the inside, which I never had that until really 10 years ago. I didn't start feeling it, but until a couple years ago when I started feeling more and more peace on the inside. And it allows me to again see the world differently. I'm not saying I'm not triggered by things, but allows me to see it and say, okay, this sucks. How can I consciously communicate what I want to change? Not from a reactive, overwhelmed, stressed, traumatic state, which I feel like you can't really get much done from that state.

No, I mean, you can, you know, you can push things down and numb and still operate, you know, fairly well, but you can survive. All of that will come back because you're in survival mode still. Because numbing is still survival mode, but you're not thriving.

You're not creating an abundant life for yourself when you're in a traumatic response, are we?

No, not at all. I mean, I think, you know, abundance comes from being able to get into the depths of your soul. Right. So I love that you're talking about the more, like, psychospiritual angle, because that is definitely. I operate from a holistic angle. And so, like, a lot of the work that I do is very mind, body, spirit. And the spiritual piece is really essential because it's not, you know, just your. Your connection to higher power. It's really just also your connection to yourself. When you're, like, really disconnected from your true, authentic self, you're not living abundantly.

Yes.

And if we want generational abundance, then we have to get into the depths of everything that's there. Into the mud, if you may.

Yeah. And I think if you're triggered or have a nervous system response to a lot of things, you're constantly in a survival mode.

Right?

Yeah.

And it's hard to create an abundant. It's hard to dream from a place of survival. It's hard to create something beautiful from that place.

I mean, it makes a lot of sense even like, you know, from a biological perspective. Like when we're in a nervous system response and that's, you know, survival mode. You're in a chronic nervous system overhaul. Right. So our nervous system is designed to actually make it so that whenever we are in a fight, flight, freeze or fawn, any non essential functions, any non essential, like organ functions, bodily functions, our brain, even like the cortical region of our brain, all of that is mildly shut down. So if you're talking about like alchemizing and creativity and like all these things, those things require a lot of cortical, you know, structure, like manifestation of like, you know, all the things that you want, like really requires for you to get into your creative mind. And if your cortical brain is not fully functioning in the ways that it, because it's in survival mode, then you're not really going to get to that actualization.

The brain has the ability to heal from traumatic, from trauma then physical and emotional trauma. Because I feel like the emotional hidden trauma can be more painful and harder to recover. For some the psychological emotional trauma than the physical trauma. You can, you can see it, you can treat the physical trauma in a sense, but depending on how intense it is. But the emotional psychological, hidden traumas I feel like are invisible. And people don't think they need to treat it because they don't see a broken arm and say, I need to go to the doctor because my bone is sticking out. Let me put a splint on it and heal it up. We're not trained that way.

There is no easy answer. But what I will say is that trauma, these are my concepts. There's therapeutic trauma and what I mean by that is resetting a bone after it's broken. The pain of a cancer surgery. But then you know that your cancer has been cut out like that. That's good pain.

Right.

And we're just talking about physical trauma.

Yes.

Then there's emotional trauma if people are attacked. That's also intimately connected to emotional trauma. Right. So the people who don't have memory after certain injuries or operations, they never have PTSD because they don't remember it. So the emotional context and memories related to trauma, be it emotional, physical or a combination, requires memory. That's cool. I like to think about like as a concept. I don't have a solution for. I don't, hey, don't do these three things. You'll be better sort of not My approach, because when people did that with me, I was like, how do you know what I'm going through, man? You look at me, you think everything's good. Are you sure? Are you sure I wasn't attacked last night? Are you sure I didn't find out that my patient didn't do well last night? Are you sure I didn't find out a loved one was diagnosed with something? You know, like, I just don't want to put people in boxes. In fact, I want people to know that they are new every day. I'm not even the same version of myself I was before the last few years. How can I be understood as a. A group of people, a man or a surgeon? You know, I just want people to think as of each other, as individuals, dynamic. That said, I never judge people's trauma to be better or worse. People are looking or stronger or justified. They're looking at. Everybody's going to have a traumatic event in their life. Whether it's a car crash or hearing this, it's unavoidable. It's partly because we put ourselves out there. It's partly because the way we approach the world is to be completely adaptive. Right. If we're rigid, then there's less chances for trauma, but that's a life less well lived. So when you put yourself out there, traumatic experiences are unavoidable.

That said.

Okay, so that said, yeah, you get a bruise.

What I'm hearing you say. But what I'm hearing you say is that if we don't have the memory of the traumatic event, we don't have ptsd, we don't have trauma, we don't have a trauma tale.

Right? So that's the concept that I want people to walk away, say, memory is important. Memory is the thing that determines whether the event remains traumatic in your life.

Whether it's painful still for you.

So let's get into that.

So we just need to heal the memory of the trauma.

That's exactly where I'm taking it. Very good. So memories are not files in a cabinet in the brain.

How is memory categorized?

Again, there are some regions that if we remove them, you would lose memory. But memory is not only there. It relies on pulling from memories of smell to new. Like, for example, smell is very interesting. It's one of the five senses that we can't tamp down with our thinking. So the perfume or cologne. Smell and memory are intimately intertwined. And so you're pulling from all different parts of the brain. Again, memory is a certain electrical flow in the Brain. But it's not. It's malleable. It's moldable. Just because you have a certain memory today doesn't mean that that experience, good or bad, will remain good or bad. Our positive vibe right now can be made negative. Our negative vibe right now can be made positive as we look back at our day to day. So when you see memory that way, then you, then you say, okay, wait a second, I was attacked or I was hurt or something really traumatized me. And when I think of it, when I smell that smell, when I see that color, I'm traumatized again.

I clench up. I have stress, fear, anxiety.

So the emotional context to a memory is what you can change. You don't want dementia. You don't want to delete the memory because that's a different problem.

Yeah, you don't wanna block it.

You don't want. Yeah, but what you wanna do is change the emotional context attached to that memory.

What happens if we. You hear this from people a lot who might have been traumatized as kids, where they forget, they kind of block the memory and then they remember when it resurfaces. They resurface. It's raw. It's very raw. But they've stuffed it, they've blocked it, they've numbed it, addicted it, whatever you.

Wanna call it, driven it to addiction.

Yeah, exactly. So what happens when.

I don't know, I don't know about the kid stuff as much. Cause that's. And I don't want to, you know, I want to stay where I feel real comfortable with what I've been reading and learning. So emotional context to memory for adults in the right setting, with the right person through, you know, they have their techniques. You can actually work through the trauma of the memory and experience by going to certain therapists who help you get better with that.

To process the memory.

Yeah. Just to take, take the emotional pain. Right. The emotional trauma and dampen that. So you can say, for example. Yeah, I was, you know, I'm just bringing examples from my world. Yeah. When I was, I was diagnosed with cancer. That's a traumatic event. And then you see my, my patients, you see them over time through different ways. When they say, they say, I was, you know, I was diagnosed with cancer and I did this. Their face is different, describing it later than it was immediately after receiving the diagnosis. So through that, that, that's a real life example. Right. I'm not. It doesn't have to be all the stuff, you know, related to violence and all that. The traumatic experience of a Cancer diagnosis and how patients cope with that immediately. And then you see them months later, years later. Because I'd be a mess, right? I'd be like, okay, this is. I wouldn't be able to cope. But they. Surprisingly not, some of them. Most of them cope. They get dressed, they come in for their three month scans, which to me would be a traumatic experience every time. Is this guy gonna tell me it's back or it's bigger? I mean, think about it, like getting that. Getting that thing in your mail or email. I gotta go in for this news again. But somehow they cope.

You have an amazing book becoming the one that has taken over the world by storm. An amazing community at rising women. And you have this really interesting story that I started to read more about where you were in and out of foster care for a while. Is that right up until you were 16, I think.

Yeah.

You grew up without a father.

Yeah.

And your mother was also kind of having some challenges, so it felt like an intermittent mother kind of off and on.

Yeah.

How does someone who grows up in foster care has to work multiple jobs at 16 to survive and doesn't really have the mother that maybe they desired? How does someone turn out healthy, conscious, and in a loving, committed relationship with a beautiful child? How does that happen?

Well, you know, part of it I can explain, and part of it, I feel like, is just grace. I often wonder that myself because I think so many of us go through these things and I wonder, you know, what's the difference between a person who experiences just as much or more trauma and doesn't make it out versus a person who does? And sometimes I feel that it comes down to knowing that we were loved. Because even though I went through so much pain and I experienced a lot of abandonment and abuse and all of these things, there was this part of me that knew that I was loved.

Really?

Yeah. Like, I knew that my mom loved me. I knew she couldn't care for me.

When did you know this? How old were you, like, your whole life?

I think I always knew. You know, even though there's a lot of wounding and a lot of relational rupture and virtually no security at all, I still knew that she loved me. And so that, I believe, is one of the most important things that we carry with us is to know that we are loved. And so I always carry that as a relational principle as well. It's like how we remind people that they're loved and that they're cared for, even if we go through hard things together or we have Traumatic experiences. Just having that as a base, I think is what allows us to survive it.

How did you. I mean, so you knew that like in your core you knew that you were loved even though your father wasn't around, your mother was off and on and you were in foster care, you still knew it.

Yeah. You know, there's something about growing up with a single mom. And I think most people who have experienced that dyad know it's a very deep, intimate relationship. I mean, all relationships with our parents in some way are very deep and intimate, even if it's just in our own hearts and minds. But I had this very deep relationship with my mom, and because she experienced mental illness and all of these developmental issues, it was more like having a friend. So when I look back at my history with her, there are a lot of good memories with play because she was more like my age so we could have a lot of fun together. She just couldn't care for me or create a safe container or boundaries or be consistent in any way because she wasn't able to do that for herself. And so we did have a lot of fun in those moments where, you know, we were being kids together. And I knew that she had a lot of love for me. And also I saw a lot of suffering.

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There was a lot of self harm and a lot of her having to be in somewhere else so that she could survive. Right. And so that helped me build a lot of compassion once I moved through it.

But, I mean, how old were you when you started to understand how to have compassion for your mom?

True compassion? I was probably 28 years old.

Okay. Yeah.

Yeah.

It took a while.

Oh, yeah.

You weren't like, I'm 12, and I need my mom to be there for me, and I have compassion that she's emotionally unstable in this moment or suffering.

I mean, I knew that she was, but it was more painful for me. So I remember packing my whole world into my backpack and running away in the middle of the night from foster homes and walking for three to four hours in the middle of the night to show up on her doorstep.

Really?

And sleeping outside on her doorstep, wanting her to let me in. Or her. You know, she was in the hospital a lot, and so often she wouldn't even be there. So I was just a kid looking for the love of her mom, you know, And I loved my mom a lot. And so eventually that sort of turned into bitterness and a really rough exterior, which is how I started, which is a lot of anger.

So you were very angry, kind of your late teens, early 20s even.

Really, as a kid, that was my main mechanism. Like, I was much more comfortable sharing anger than sadness. We all have this. It's either anger on the front or sadness on the front. And what's underneath it is the opposite emotion. And because of the environment I grew up in, vulnerability wasn't safe. And then As I hit 12 years old, I was drinking, sleeping on couches, hanging with people who were five to 10 years older than me, in and out of jail, doing drugs. So being vulnerable was not safe. And so anger was all that I knew how to show. I really didn't know how to let love in at all.

Wow.

So you were craving love, but you didn't know how to let it in because it wasn't there consistently. Also, maybe it was there when you were playing with your mom from time to time, but it wasn't a consistent feeling. Yeah, it wasn't safe.

It wasn't safe. And as I got older, I represented a lot for her, too. And she wasn't mothered past probably nine at all. She was never mothered, but.

So she was looking for you to help her a lot.

Exactly.

And be strong for her and help her. That's a lot of weight, though, on a child.

Yeah. Yeah, it was. Yeah. And it was also sort of a gift in disguise. Now, you know, she said to me when she was visiting last, she said, how do you love me? Like, why do you still Love me after everything that I've done and put you through. And I joked with her and I said, well, now I have a blossoming career, you know, but the reality is, who knows who I would be without the gifts of those lessons? And I always felt, even at a very young age, that these lessons were experiences for me to gather so that I could be of service.

Wow.

Not so that I could just sit in suffering.

You had that feeling like, I'm going through this pain. This is going to help me one day.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah. I had visions of it when I was very young.

I never had that thought, literally until maybe five years ago, where, when challenging things would happen in my life, I was sad, frustrated, you know, anxious, depressed, whatever it was, upset, angry, all these different things. I wasn't thinking, this is happening for my future self to, like, serve in a greater way. That wasn't until about five years ago when I. When I kept going through breakdowns, and I was like, every breakdown I've had in my past has helped me now. Like, it's given me some wisdom or lesson or experience or something, or compassion or whatever it might be. And so then I started looking at every breakdown in the last five years as, this is exactly meant to help my future self serve greater, understand more how to take care of me or others. And I stopped fighting those moments. But you knew this at an early age. That's crazy.

Yeah. But who taught you this spirit?

Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I always loved to write, so that's where I channeled it. You know, I was with my thing. And so I think in some ways, as you know, that artist archetype, I would enjoy some of those moments of suffering because it would make me very creative.

Like, okay, I mean, my pain. Let me draw. Let me write something.

Yeah. You know what? I was like, maybe 17, 18, in this really situationship that's lasting many years, very hot and cold. But I kind of loved it because I was like, oh, this is good writing. You know, you have to work through some of that stuff.

Sure. The suffering artist. Yeah. Now, how did you learn? What were your relationships like with, I guess, men in your teens and twenties without having your father really there at all? Your mother, hot and cold, being in foster homes. How did you have relationships early on? Were they healthy and conscious, or were you attracting people based on a wound?

It was complete chaos. It was complete chaos. Well, when I was a kid, I was actually really scared of men because my mom came from a lot of abuse and she didn't have a healthy template. And so the things that she said about men were not good scary. So I didn't hear any good things about men. And I never had a dad that came home at the end of the day. So I would be at a friend's house, and the moment the dad would come home, I would be terrified, and I would always leave.

Really?

Yeah. I was really scared, like. Like as if they were some sort of wild animal, so I couldn't be in the room with them. And so what I realized later is that because I grew up without a father archetype in my life at all, didn't even have someone holding that role.

No dad. He was never there.

No dad. Never met him. Never seen a photo. Don't know.

Is he alive?

I don't. I don't think so, because I had a dream. I asked Spirit to. I asked Spirit to put a dead butterfly in my hand if he was passed. After I had a dream while I was in Hawaii a few years ago that he had died. And in the dream, I was grieving a lot, and that's strange for me because I never dream about my father, and I never knew him. But in the dream, he had just died, and I was very sad. So I woke up and I said, okay, Spirit, if this is true, if he's passed, put a butterfly in my hand. And two days later, we were walking down a pathway to the beach, and I found this dead monarch butterfly. And I put it in my hand, and I took a photo because I was like, ooh, it's such a beautiful butterfly. And I didn't think anything of it. And then when we got home later, I was looking through my photos, and. And I saw it, and then I realized that I had asked that question. And so for me, that was as much confirmation as I could get. And.

But your mom doesn't know if he's around or no.

And he was a lot older than my mom, and they were really just. It was a very brief, unsafe encounter. So I don't know. Yeah.

So what did that feel like then? Not having a, you know, a healthy father figure in your life. And then how did you learn to trust men?

Initially, when I was really young, the father wound was quite deep, so I always carried this feeling of not being good enough. So I created a lot of separateness between me and other people.

Men and women, everyone.

Yeah. You know, we grew up very poor, had no money. I'm a very small. I'm always the smallest person in every room. And I didn't have a father. There was so Many things that were different about me. And so I didn't feel like I fit in. And so I felt quite insecure about whether or not I belonged anywhere. And over time, that turned into the defensive survivor mask, that ultra independent mask, you know, that many of us end up putting on. And my learning happened through really painful, unsafe relationships.

Really?

Yeah. Well, I was really looking for someone to affirm me from a very young age. And so all of my relationships up until my early 20s were very abusive or really unsafe. And there's one particular relationship that I was lucky to have survived, but it was in that relationship where I actually remember looking in the mirror and I didn't recognize myself. And all of a sudden I had this opening and I just saw myself on stage speaking to women about abuse and healing and recovering. And this was like, almost 10 years before I ever began rising woman or started anything like that. But I had this feeling, and I remember telling the guy who was, you know, he was my abuser, and I said, I'm actually going to be speaking on stage one day about these experiences, and I'm going to be helping women.

He was like, okay, while you were with him?

Yeah, that stayed with him for a little while.

Why do you think people attract someone that can be abusive and then stay in that type of relationship once they've been abused?

Yeah.

Where does that wound come from?

I mean, it's almost. It's almost harder to leave once there's been abuse. Because when you look at the brain, and this is just the science aspect of it, is the brain changes when there's abuse. And it's sort of like these highs and lows that create deeper bonding. So the more ups and downs we have with somebody, the deeper we bond, which is like the trauma bond that we all hear about. And, like this toxic relationship, which is why so many people are like, oh, well, you know, the sex is so good, or we're just so passionate together, but everything is chaos. And the deeper we go, the harder it is to get out of that. And on top of it, a lot of us who have experienced abuse have sort of normalized chaos and dysfunction. I grew up witnessing abuse. I grew up witnessing domestic violence, you know, in homes that I was in, you know, or around me, because I didn't grow up in safe areas. And so for me, I knew that it wasn't a good thing, but it also wasn't that different from what I had known.

It was familiar.

It was. And that was a nervous system pattern that I was working with. Wow. And so A lot of the work that I've done has been to reclaim my own inner mother and father and to heal my nervous system to actually be able to feel happy and comfortable in safe, secure situations rather than actually unconsciously craving the chaos and dysfunction that I was so used to.

Yeah, I think I was very used to that as well. And I don't. I wasn't looking for chaos, but I somehow always attracted it.

Yeah.

And I don't know what it. Why. Why that was the way. Why I kept repeating that cycle until I really said, okay, this does not work. Like, when I meet someone, I shouldn't have these crazy emotions or these crazy butterflies anymore. I should have a feeling, but not some crazy feeling.

Yeah.

It should be more of a conscious approach to getting to know someone and seeing their total behavior. Like how they're. Their words, meet their actions, meet their behaviors, and how the whole package. And as opposed to going into something super fast and explosive.

Yeah.

Like go slow and conscious.

Yeah. Falling into relationship versus consciously choosing it.

Yeah, exactly.

Something that I really never did until I met my husband.

Really? Yeah. I never did either.

Yeah.

So how. When did you finally wake up and say, okay, I've been attracting these types of men that are chaotic or maybe some were abusive or they had abusive tendencies or explosive. And when did you finally wake up and say, okay, I need to do things differently?

I was in my mid-20s, and I ended up actually marrying somebody from another country who was American. And we didn't want to get married. It's just that we were together for many years, and in order to try to make the relationship work, we needed to both be in the same country. And so we got married, and quickly. Right after that, things just turned for the worse. It wasn't good already wasn't an abusive situation. We were both in our mid-20s. We were very immature. Both had very deep mother wounds and deep father wounds. Neither of us had a father. So you want to talk about projections? We were just projecting all of our parental wounds onto each other. I don't know if we knew each other at all, truthfully. And in that relationship, I was deeply betrayed. There was a lot of betrayal. And it was as if the rug was ripped from underneath me at the time. I lost all of my money. I. My. My cat, My soul cat ran away. He left with another woman. And I gained, like, £20 in a month. My hormones stopped producing because I had experienced so much stress from my abandonment wound being triggered. I went and tested my hormones, and all I had was cortisol. I was physically sick. My body physically just stopped. Everything stopped. And I remember a moment where he had come. He had been back and forth very sporadically. Not in communication. We had shared a home. Obviously, we were married. And he came to get some things. And instead of being vulnerable, because, of course I didn't know how to do that, I just yelled at him and chased him out into the road without my shoes on and said, don't ever come back. I never want to see you again. Which was not true at the time. And as he drove away with his new girlfriend, I remember feeling like I was three years old. And all of a sudden I had this flash of when I had been dropped off the first time at a foster home when I was 3, and I saw my mom's headlights pulling away, and I remember screaming and crying, and all of a sudden this relief washed over me, and it was just like, this is not about him. This is not about them. This is about you and your mother wound. And this is what you need to heal. This is about your own inner stuff. And even though it was so painful in that moment, I was so grateful because I knew that I could get through it. Because the pain was so deep that if it had been about him, I might not have survived it in my mind, but because it was about me and my inner work, I felt empowered. And so I just dove in. And that's kind of what kickstarted my healing journey.

Yeah, because you'd been essentially abandoned or betrayed by your father, who was never there. You've been betrayed by your mother, You've been betrayed by friends and, you know, foster individuals and boyfriends and the. Everyone. And then now your husband you're being betrayed by. Yeah, but it sounds like you realize you were betraying yourself as well.

Yeah, I was repeating.

By making unconscious decisions based on wounds as opposed to. Based on a vision of what you wanted, a healthy vision. And there's no, you know, I'm not blaming you. That's something I did most of my life, too.

Yeah.

And it's really cool that you've. That you got that awareness then, because a lot of us, myself included, repeat these patterns over and over again until the pain is so deep, until it's like, ah, I just feel like I've ripped open everything in my body. I have nothing left.

Exactly.

Then hopefully you can wake up and have some clarity what happened for me. And it sounds like it's what happens for you. What was the next step after that? So that you could get to a place of conscious, healthy relationship.

Most of us hit that wall in crisis, and that's the opportunity. We can go down the path of bitterness, or we can be like, okay, you know, this sucks, and I never want to experience this again. So let's feel all of the feelings that I've never felt before. And that's probably what you experienced. I know it's what I experienced. All of a sudden, this hardened, ultra independent survivor mask was just ripped off. And all of a sudden I had feelings that I had to feel and vulnerability that needed to be expressed. And I had no idea how overwhelming that was going to be. And at one point, I just laid face down on my bed and closed my eyes, and I felt like I was on a psychedelic journey just from the pain. And, you know, I would go to bed at night and think I might die in my sleep tonight because this hurts too much. That's how deep the abandonment wound had been ripped open. And so I started doing deep mother work. I started doing a lot of transpersonal therapy, you know, kind of Jungian style. I did a lot of medicine work, a lot of medicine ceremonies over and over and over again. I spent all day in nature. I did breath work every week, and I just worked through it. And it was hard and so painful, but that was my only option. It was like the thing that I had to hold on to was this belief that eventually the pain would go away.

Wow.

And I remember writing a date on my calendar and telling my friend, like, I'm gonna be done grieving by this date.

Good luck. Good luck.

And I kept having to move the date, and eventually I stopped setting a date.

You know, healing's a journey.

Yeah.

It's not like this destination like it's gonna happen by now. I've. I've said the same thing to myself in the past. I'm like, I'm gonna make a decision by this, and I'm gonna be fine by this time. It just keeps getting pushed. Right? And I think it comes to you when you're ready for it, when you're ready and willing to fully receive all the lessons and you're willing to surrender, you're willing to drop your ego and feel all the emotions and keep making consistent, daily good decisions that are based on a conscious vision of what you want as opposed to a past pain. Before the interview continues, if you feel like you're not living your most authentic life, not leaning into your purpose, and not living the life that your future self would be extremely proud of, I've written a new book called the Greatness Mindset and I think you're gonna love this. Through powerful stories, science backed strategies and step by step guidance, the greatness mindset will help you overcome all the different challenges in your life. To design the life of your dreams and then turn it into your reality. Make sure to click the link below in the description to get your copy today. Okay, let's get back to this video. How do you think we heal trauma if we don't have the resources to go to therapy or do workshops or whatever it may be? Even if we do have resources, we don't have the courage to put ourselves out there. How do we start to heal trauma within our body?

Excellent question. So we did a whole project for Audible Original called Take Control that was all about the thesis. Was this any area of your life that you're stuck? I am willing to bet everything I have that you have a trauma pattern from your past that you've never healed. You got a boss that is abusive. Guarantee you this has to do with a trauma pattern from your past. You can't succeed in the areas you want, you can't lose the weight. There's some pattern from your past. So the first thing is recognizing that you actually experience trauma. And I am a huge proponent, as so many people are, of widening the definition because I think up until about five years ago, most of us thought that trauma just meant, okay, you were in active duty or you were in a huge accident or incident that was highly traumatic, or you survived some sort of physical, sexual, whatever. Abuse. Trauma is just about any kind of experience that you witness or you absorb that has your nervous system light up on edge and start warning you. So if you've ever had like you could have a critical parent, you just brace for them. You could have a parent that drinks like crazy and you brace at five o' clock because you know they're coming home. You could have been abandoned by a parent, or have a parent that was mentally ill, or have a parent that was so on your because they wanted you to be a pro football player and so you were constantly on edge. It's when your nervous system fires up to a state of alert that now gets programmed into your body as a response. There's a reason why so many couples at 5 o' clock at night start bickering. And it has to do with the fact that at 5 o' clock is typically when a lot of parents 20 years ago were coming home from work and that's when the arguing would start. And so what happens when you witness that or you feel it Is as a kid, you're now in a state where you're on edge. I see you rocking in your chair.

Wow, that's crazy. Well, I mean, I just remember, you know, it's funny, there's a lot of good things that usually happen to our childhood, but we just seem to remember a lot of the bad stuff.

And it's because it's, you know why? Right?

Because the trauma, just like in your nervous system, I guess.

And also your mind is wired in a way to prioritize the negative as a means to keep your ass safe from not experiencing. Correct. Which is why you got to work on your positive mindset because your mind defaults to negative. So you got to build up the programming deposit. This isn't just woo woo, this is actually science.

I know. So I remember, you know, my, the memories of the past. I always have to remind myself of all the positive stuff that, you know, my parents did all the time and what they were going through and giving them grace and all these different things. But I remember, you know, when my dad would get home, it would be, it was, you didn't know what type of day it was going to be for him. You know, it was like either thunder coming through the wooden floors with his wooden shoes and like being angry and upset, or it was like the loving father that would take me out and play catch in the backyard. So I have to constantly remind myself of like the positive, which I'm certain it was 90% of the time was good. But those 10% of the time, you know, creates that clinching mode like you said.

Well, let me explain what happens. So this really interesting concept called ghosts in the nursery. And so trauma patterns get automated because they're not experienced in your brain, they're felt in your nervous system. And so it's why you can have a pattern from your past, but be completely unaware that it's running your life right now. Because it's stored not in your conscious thought, but in your nervous system. And you feel it in your body before it even gets into your head. And so there's this concept called ghost in the nursery, which basically means there's all kinds of that goes on when you're little that you may or may not remember in your mind, but your body remembers it. So for example, if you had parents that were just stressed out and they come home and they've been busy and you're sitting there playing on the floor and there's toys everywhere, and mom or dad's reaction to a mess is to scream, that creates this kind of thing in your nervous system. Now, you may not remember that episode that happened on May 17, 1972, but your nervous system remembers what it's like. So fast forward, you're now 51 years old, and you walk in the house and there's a mess everywhere. And even though you have said, I'm not going to bulldoze and yell at anybody, my body recognizes the situation. So what do you do? You repeat the pattern you saw. And so what I'm working on right now is a pattern that is encoded in my nervous system. I was trying to create a video. Yes. Or two days ago. For Share the mic. For share the mic now. Trying to create a video. And I'm like doing take after take because I want to get it right. And my daughter comes waltzing into the room and was like, how long you gonna be doing this? And I was like, I literally, like, screamed at her. And she looked at me, Louis, and she goes, you have a real problem.

Wow. How old's your daughter?

20. And I said, I calmly said, you're right, I do. When I get interrupted, I lose control of the response. And I'm working so, so hard. And the way that you. And I'm clearly not mastering this yet, but the way that you do it is as you feel it rise up. You have to, you know, you can use the five second rule. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. You can use. Just take a quick breath. You can notice the pattern. And you've got to create a pause between the emotion rising up and the reaction that gets automated. And for many people, the reaction, Lewis, is to run away. It's to leave the room. It's to avoid the confrontation. The. It was just easy, you know, hold on, let me let the clock go.

Even though you. You hate being interrupted by anything, this is a great interruption.

I did, like, I didn't do. I didn't do the bulldoze. I was, I was calm because it wasn't a human being. I'm only mean to human beings. Like, I. A lot of people run away. They avoid conflict. They say it's just easier. But if running away and avoiding conflict continues to create a pattern where you feel invisible and your boundaries are tromped on, that's a pattern. And, you know, here's the other thing about patterns. Running away and being quiet might have saved you when you were little, because if you were quiet and out of the room, you didn't get hit, you didn't get yelled at, you were out of harm's way. So when you were little. It was a genius pattern because it protected you. But the issue for adults is that again, we walk around with the patterns that we created when we were 8 years old in different situations than we are in now. And now we are completely a robot to these patterns.

I love that you. You had a great tweet the other day about boundaries. Because as, as individuals, both of us who try to help people break boundaries, try to break their mindset that's holding them back, try to get them to become greater than their past, all these different things. You wrote a post that said your boundaries are there to serve you. As you grow, so will your boundaries. What boundaries do you need to set up in order to help yourself grow? Why are boundaries important when we also have the mindset of like, you should be breaking your boundaries all the time?

Well, I wouldn't say that breaking your. Like, I don't call the obstacles or I call them excuses. And so I think the hardest boundaries, honestly are the ones to set with yourself. To not drink during the week, to not tolerate the bulldozing and immediately apologize and try to do better, to not waste hours on social media. Like all the things that the small promises you need to make in order to create boundaries with your old patterns and your excuses. To me, the hardest boundaries to set are those with myself. I. What was the question again?

You know, breaking. We encourage people to break boundaries. You know, they feel like they're limited, but you talk about your boundaries are there to serve you. So obviously it's a different type of boundary, but you know.

Yeah. So here's the thing.

What boundaries do you need to help yourself to protect yourself? And which ones do you need to grow past that are holding you back?

I think that the definition with boundaries that has helped me the most is understanding that boundaries are for me, they're not for you. And the single biggest mistake that we make in any relationship, particularly romantic ones, but also work related ones, is we do not express what we need.

That's so true. My girlfriend was telling me this the other day. She's like, I really want you to tell me what you need and when you want it and feel comfortable and confident saying it. And for me, I go back into trauma of past. Like when I used to say what I want, need and it didn't get met, it would. I'd have get let down my expectations, I'd get hurt. So I was like, screw it, I'll just do everything on my own. Which leads to resentment or whatever else.

Yeah, how's that working out for you, it's like, so Louis, that's an example of 8 year old Louis created a pattern that worked when you were 8, but now that you're in your 30s and in a relationship that you really care about, you've got to identify the pattern and break it and replace it. And the good news is any pattern can be replaced. Change isn't personal, it just feels personal. Change is just about identifying patterns and replacing them with new ones. That's it. And it'll take a little while because they're encoded in your nervous system and your default is to just do it yourself. But you have to, you cannot, as a rule, punish other people for you didn't communicate. So I'll give you the perfect example. So Chris and I have been married for 24 years. And when I was before the talk show and I made my living mostly by, you know, doing 100 speeches a year, I would be on the road 150 days a year. And when I would come home, there was always something that pissed me off.

Like what? Like, ah, the trash isn't taken out, the clothes are here. Or is it something else?

Oh, no, I'm way worse than that. Are you kidding? I would walk in after being gone for five or six days, and there on the island in the kitchen was a vase that had dead flowers, the ones that I had bought for myself a week before. And it was as if everybody in my family had been walking around the island for six days, as if there was some dead flower sculpture in the middle of the island. And so I would come home and first of all, the only person that's really excited to see me is a dog. And my family did sit me down at one point. They said, you know, you realize when you're not here, we have our own lives. So you don't put your lives on hold while, you know, for us. And we're not putting our lives on hold. So it's not that we're not excited to see you, but we're not organizing our whole lives around when mom comes home.

Right. To be like the dog. To be like the dog. Excited and running up and jumping in your arms and kissing you. Yeah, yeah.

No, no, but that, but I think that's cool because that means that they're independent and doing their own thing.

They've set boundaries.

They've set boundaries with me. Perfect. So for probably six months, I would get pissy and I would walk in and put my bags down and I grabbed the flowers and I demonstrately. How many times has everyone done this? Throw them out loudly.

Like, everyone hears you.

Communication. Yeah, I'm getting my communication. Just throwing these dead flowers out. Communicate to you that you should buy me flowers. Like, I'm not saying that, but that's what the body language is, right? How dare. I have been off. I've been in four cities and then you become a mart. Like, ugh, I'm disgusting when I tell this story, but this is it. This is like so.

Well, I see you've got some lovely flowers behind you that look alive. So that's good to see.

Aren't they flies? So I do love flowers. So finally I just said to Chris, you know what would make me feel amazing is if when I came home, you had just bought some flowers. Just go to the gr. Just when you're at the grocery store, you don't have to order. I'm saying, buy the five dollar pack of half dead tulips. Just something. Okay? And then he said, why? And this is the most important part of expressing. And look, you don't have to give an explanation if you're trying to, like, cut off a toxic person, but if you want to express boundaries with somebody because you want them to understand you more deeply, give them the why. I said, because it makes me think that you are excited for me to come home, that you knew I was coming. Because I'm starting to feel forgotten. So underneath the anger, Louis.

Wow.

Was hurt and feeling like I didn't matter. And so I'll be darned. I walk in and there they are. And I literally feel so seen. And, you know, the other thing to do is. And like, another thing for us too is like, Chris and I learned on my talk show because Chris was on it and we did a show all about men and what men think and the secrets they keep. I learned for the first time that my husband prefers to have sex in the morning.

I get a lot of men do.

I didn't know that. Well, see, I didn't like it because I don't like bad breath in the morning.

My girlfriend says the same thing.

But.

I'm like, why didn't you tell me? And the reason why is because we're so funky about asking for what we need. We're so afraid of getting rejected or denied or whatever, or being vulnerable in that moment. But the greatest thing that you can do is ask for what you need. Your friends need to know what you need. Your lover needs to know what you need. Your kids need to know what you need. Because then they can show up in a way where you feel Seen. And then you're gonna. And they're gonna feel incredible.

Yeah. And you can't expect people to know what you need or them to know what you need by communicating it through anger and this frustration of, you know, whatever, like, you're throwing away the flowers. That way of communicating. Really unhealthy. I'm to blame there as well. And I think it's. That's not a healthy way of creating love within a relationship, whether it's a friend, a family member, or a loved one.

But here's the thing. You want to know why? Let me let everybody off the hook.

Yeah.

Because here's the reason why this happens, and this is what I want everyone to know, what we're up against. So, Louis, as you and I sit here talking about the flower thing. Right. And you got to communicate your boundaries. As we're having this conversation, we are present, and we're using the thinking part of our brain. When I walk into the kitchen, I am not thinking. I am in the emotional traumatic nervous system, robot part of my body. And that's where your feelings and your triggers take over.

Yeah.

And if you can start to identify the bulldozing, the anger, all that stuff, you will literally change your whole life by just changing one or two patterns. The other thing. And, you know, you asked me about the talk show. The single greatest gift of the talk show, content wise, is something called the word wheel. So I don't have it right here, but if you Google word wheel or wheel of emotions, you will find that if you ask somebody, name as many emotions as you can. Most people can name three. Happy, sad, angry. There's literally like 113 of them, from disgusted to hopeless to. And if you. If you start with a core, this thing allows you to start with a core emotion and go out. Because back to the flower example. I was expressing anger. That's not what I was feeling. I was feeling invisible and forgotten. And so the word wheel is something that we used several times a week to help people go from the thing that they are expressing to the roots to communicating what you're feeling, which is a lot like the work that you wrote about in your book, Wearing Masks, getting to the root of the core emotion you're feeling but not expressing. And that goes back to the pause thing. What have I seen that I am busy, that I am so. Have you ever wanted something so bad that you become paralyzed?

Yeah.

I so want to end the mental pain and suffering that people feel. I so want to help people heal their minds and to have the Power to create a better future. And I get so overwhelmed by how much I want to see that happen in the world that sometimes I become paralyzed. And what happens for me a lot of the time is I feel insignificant and my ability to move the needle on that.

Yeah. Because there's billions of people who are struggling.

Yeah.

And it's like, what do you do to make the maximum use of your time, to make the maximum impact and also create resources to create more impact? I get to feel.

I yell at my husband to buy me flowers. That's what I do.

I get to feel. Is this wheel of emotions, is this something you created or is this something else?

No, it's in the public domain.

Wow, that's cool. I never heard of that.

That's really cool.

Now I've been, I think I mentioned this to you. I've had some, I guess I've had some paralysis or just a lack of focus around completion of my book proposal I've been working on for about a year as well. About Dyslexic unite. Exactly. About, you know, eliminating self doubt. I think self doubt and mental challenges kind of are cousins, maybe of each other, family members in some way. And I think self doubt, I think self doubt is the killer of dreams. I believe when we don't believe in ourselves and our abilities, eventually we're going to sabotage something. And I hear you talk about confidence a lot. A lot of your social media posts are about this. You say it a lot better than I do. But what do you think are the reasons we doubt ourselves or what do you think is the steps to gaining more confidence in ourselves when we doubt?

So I always thought that confidence was a thing that you feel and I have come to prefer that confidence is something that you do, meaning that, you know, a lot of people like to think, okay, well, you're going to feel confident first and then once you feel confident, then you'll take the action. And that's wrong. It's not a chicken or an egg in my mind. I think what happens is you have to force yourself in a moment of self doubt to do something. And when you see yourself taking action, the confidence follows. So I have created my own definition of confidence, which is confidence is the willingness to try and you display the willingness to try when you take action. It's a lot like the relationship between courage and fear. You can't have courage without fear. Courage isn't the absence of fear, it's acting in the face of it. And confidence isn't the absence of self doubt. It's being willing to try even though you doubt yourself.

That's beautiful. That's going in the book. I'm quoting you in the book.

Make it your own.

I love that. That's powerful. Yeah. And I think, you know, I'm sure you probably. We're very similar in the sense that we do a lot and we build confidence because we would take action. You in law school and public defending and all these different things you've done, which like, okay, I'm afraid, but let me go do it and do it. And now, okay, I'm getting better. Now I feel more confident. It's not just. It's not just let me learn something or let me read a book. And now I'm confident in a skill that I haven't applied. I must apply it and fail a bunch and realize, oh, okay, I've gotten better. I have fallen over and over and now I'm standing and I'm actually doing okay. And I'm doing even better now. Let me build my confidence there.

So.

Yes. And look, you know, here's the thing. I think that preparation and studying something so that you feel like you have an understanding of something can be an important first thing that you try. But don't let the studying of something become the reason why you don't actually take the next action.

Well, I need to get my master's, I need to go to business school, I need to go to whatever and then never actually do it when you can start doing something much sooner before needing to have all the credentials necessarily.

Yes, there's very few things except for.

Like being a doctor. Okay, maybe don't do surgery.

Correct. Yeah, yeah. Chemist, a doctor, something that requires you to actually have accreditation and specialized knowledge, an engineer, whatever. But most things that you will master in life will not be mastered by reading a book. You cannot learn how to ride a bike by reading about it.

Big thanks to Jesu Joe, licensed therapist and head of clinical operations at BetterHelp. Jesu Joe is not my actual therapist and we are not in a therapist client relationship. Also, just because you might hear something on the show that sounds similar to what you're experiencing. Beware of self diagnosis. You'll want to find a qualified professional to assess and explore diagnosis if that's important to you. Welcome everyone to this special episode. We have an inspiring guest, Jesu Jo in the house from BetterHelp. And I wanted to break down this episode to talk about different topics around mental health, emotional well being, and really getting clear on how to optimize your whole body connecting Your thoughts, your emotions, and your body, and integrating your life with authentic alignment. When we are out of alignment with our thoughts and our emotions, and we store memories from the past that hold trauma inside of us, it holds us back. It makes us feel more fearful. It makes us doubt ourselves. It makes us feel overwhelmed or stressed or anxious in times where maybe we don't need to feel those things. There's different times when, you know, stress and overwhelm is a good signal to get you to relax and calm down, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there is a threat in your life. And sometimes we live with this fear inside of us, this ongoing anxiety inside of us that makes it feel like fight or flight constantly happening in our lives, and that doesn't allow us to get into a relaxed state of being, a beautiful state of being that allows for creativity, abundance, flow, prosperity, and the ability to feel and receive love. And I think a lot of us, including myself, have struggled with some of these things over our lifetime because we've never been taught the tools, We've never been given the training, and we haven't understood the science or the research behind how we can optimize things to flourish better in our inner world and also in our outer world. And our life is really made up of moments of memories and people. And when we have moments that stress us out or we have memories that cause us to feel anxious, then typically our relationships don't go as well as we'd like them to go. And so our intention and our goal, and my intention for you is to really reevaluate the memories that might have caused you pain or trauma or overwhelm or stress and anxiety and allow you to reinterpret those, create new meaning behind these memories that have caused your nervous system to be stressful in the present so that you can have more beautiful moments. Right now. Right now is all we have, is these moments and start interpreting and creating more joy and freedom and love within these moments so that the relationships we interact with, whether it be in your career, your family, your work, and your intimate relationships, they can thrive. That's what we want for everyone. Everyone listening, everyone watching. I want you to feel joyful. I want you to feel healthy. I want you to have a healed life, and I want you to feel free. But we. We must learn the skills on how to do that. And I'm so excited that you are here, Jesu, to. To support us with this. You know, in my book, the Greatness Mindset, I really talked about going deep in the moments along My own personal journey because I was extremely, on the outside, successful in creating results and accomplishing and working hard. But on the inside, I was struggling in life, I was struggling in relationships, and I was creating breakdown after breakdown, even though on the outside things seemed to be good. And it wasn't until the last couple years when I really dove into intentional conscious therapy and coaching that allowed me to go back into the memories, create new meaning, and rewrite the story of my life so that I have more peace in the present moment, to give me more clarity about my future as well. And it hasn't been easy, Jesuit. It's been really challenging, actually. It's really scary to go back and face the parts of myself that I'm ashamed of, that I'm insecure about, that I feel like I don't want anyone to know about. It's probably the hardest work I've ever done in my life. And I was a professional athlete and training physically. But the emotional and mental work that we do, I believe is some of the hardest if we have certain pains and things that we don't love and accept about ourselves from our past. And so in my book, the Greatness Mindset, I talked about this journey and I wanted to break this down with you. As a licensed therapist with better help, someone who's been there for six years at the company and with the brand and really seeing the evolution of society's dealings with mental health struggles, and as a licensed therapist, again with better help, how important is it taking ownership of your mental health in order to live happy, fulfilling and balanced lives? What would you say, Jesu?

How important? On a scale of 0 to 10, 10 being the most important?

Yes.

11. 11. I don't think anyone should ever be blamed or seen as the person at fault for being the victim of trauma, being a survivor of abuse. However, I think we all have a personal responsibility to ourselves to take ownership of mental health, to live a happy, fulfilling, balanced life. That also looks like the acceptance that we're not going to be happy all the time. But, you know, I think we've all kind of seen and experienced this in our lives. If I don't take care of myself, sure, other people can provide me with support. People can do things that are helpful to me, create a system of support around me. But ultimately I have to be the one to take charge, to get myself out of a hole, to get unstuck from a rut. Because if it's not me, then it's not as meaningful, it's not as impactful, it's not as powerful.

So no one's coming to save us. No one's going to just do it for us is what you're saying.

I mean, you know, if a bunch of people are coming to save us, but we don't even want to be saved, everyone's going to have a hard time there.

Ooh, yeah. And I also think that we've got to own these things. We can't. You know, there's so many people that I've tried to help, people close to my life, friends, family that I see struggling. And I want to go in there and give them some feedback, give them some coaching, give them some tools, give them some exercises, you know, a seven day program to just get started. And if people aren't willing to dive in and do the work and be consistent with it, it doesn't matter how many people are trying to help them. Also, what we can do is really be the example, be an inspiration, be encouraging and supportive. But each one of us has to take ownership of these things. And that's why I think it's so important to have some type of therapy. And obviously BetterHelp does an amazing job of doing that. I'm curious. One of my favorite chapters in my book, the Greatest Mindset, is about developing and cultivating a meaningful mission. It's about getting clear on the path and direction that you want to take. Your personal life, it can be for personal life, for your career, for health and things like that. But what am I? What am I about? What am I up to? What am I creating in this world? And it can be for the next six months or the next six years. It doesn't have to be what am I going to do the rest of my life, but what season am I in and how can I get very clear on the direction I want to go in? I'm a believer that when we aren't clear on the direction, we have less purpose and meaning and we're more stressed out and just kind of anxious and not sure. I'm not saying having a clear path forward is going to answer all your problems, but not having a meaningful mission is going to cause more stress and anxiety. I'm curious, how can better help online therapy help listeners and viewers really clarify the purpose for their season of their life they're in right now and really figure out how to get to the next season and the next season. What can online therapy with BetterHelp do to guide people to getting that clarity?

Big question, and before I try to answer that, I do want to let folks know that BetterHelp online therapy is an option, but there's so many different ways to find therapy. There's so many different venues. So I want folks to know that even if BetterHelp is not the right fit for you, that doesn't mean that there's no other option. And so I really encourage folks to explore, to find what works best for them. But, you know, once you've decided that you want to seek some clarity, you want to try to define some kind of purpose in your life, I think the ways that therapy can help with this is to help you start uncovering, unpacking, processing, exploring a lot of stuff that many of us have pushed away. We've done these things like repress memories or create things that some folks will call defense mechanisms to protect our feelings, to protect ourselves from very painful things of the past. We become avoidant of things that might be triggering to us in a therapy journey. You kind of already alluded to a lot of this. It's about finding alignment. It's about finding authenticity so that the outward presentation of who you are, how you walk through this world and connect with other people, it matches your insides. That's where a lot of dissonance comes for us, is that our insides are not matching what we're doing outside in everyday life. So in therapy, we're aiming to integrate these things so we feel good about what we're putting out there into the universe.

What is it like now that you've hung up the awards, that you've gone through different challenges in your personal life, and I'm sure you're having career stuff up and down? What are you doing to stay mentally strong post career?

I mean, similar things. I started working with a new psychologist, which was really good. He kind of focused on more like, athletes and had worked with other athletes that have retired, which was, I think, really helpful.

What's his name?

Dr. Armando. Yeah, he's awesome. And again, we're with a lot of athletes, and he kind of also had a different technique of, like, processing things, which is really good.

What's. What was the technique?

That's called brain spotting.

Okay.

But it's also. It's kind of hard to explain, but basically, you sit there and you really focus on the thing that really makes you emotional, whatever that is, like retirement or, you know, whatever. And your brain has to actually process it to be able to. To, like, unload it. Otherwise it's just gonna sit there. Because he has a theory that, you know, you're like, your body keeps score.

Absolutely.

So any It's a great book called the Body Keeps the Score.

Oh, really?

It's amazing. Yeah, it's called the Body. It's called the Body Keeps the Score.

Okay.

Physical, emotional trauma. It's like stored in the body until you process and heal it.

But he did say that I don't store my trauma from my crashes.

Which you don't.

No, I don't.

You don't? Physically or emotionally?

Both.

I mean, physically I do, obviously.

Right, right. But you don't keep it emotionally?

No. I don't know.

How'd you do that?

I don't know.

Short term memory, concussions.

I always watched my video. I always, like, I processed it. I was like, this is what I did. This is what I need to do better. And I just moved on. The more you like you, you don't address it, the more it becomes a problem.

Absolutely.

So, yeah, so he was like one of the best things that happened to me.

Brain spotting.

Yeah.

So you think about the. The moment of sadness or pain or frustration or.

Yeah, like the emotional trauma or whatever. Whatever it is that, you know, is really causing you anxiety or emotional, like.

You know, frustration or sadness.

Yeah.

So you think about it. How long do you think about it for? What's the process then?

It could be a couple hours. You know, it's. It's. He usually comes to my house for a few days and, like, we have good sessions and kind of work when we have time when we can, and it's really different, but it's really great. And. Yeah, he's awesome. You should look him up.

I'm gonna check him out.

Yeah.

So what happens at the end of the 30 to 60 minutes when you're thinking about. Are you supposed to put your attention on the feeling on the event, Everything.

Like, visualizing what happened how. How you feel and, like, the more you think about it. It's weird. I start with something that's emotional and it's very triggering. And then by the end, it becomes less triggering and less triggering. And then by the end it's like.

Okay, you let it go.

Yeah.

It's when we resist something where it continues to kind of fester and be suppressed inside of us. But the more we actually pay attention to it and go through different scenarios and process it, then we can let it go. It's not as scary any.

Right.

So brain spotting. What's another strategy you've used to help?

Surrounding myself with people that, you know, really support me and for me, who I am, like my sister and my family and, like, really good friends. I have a very small group of friends. You know, I mean, I travel all the time. I have a crazy lifestyle, but I have really, like, a couple friends that I grew up with in Minnesota since I was 7 years old. And, like, we're solid. And it's just, you know, spending time with those quality people. Allowing yourself to be you and not having, you know, any fear of judgment, I think that really helps, you know, I don't know. Be yourself and then be around other people is easier.

Did you feel the fear of judgment when you were competing ever?

Not really. I think when I was competing, I had the most confidence, you know, Like, I felt like on any given day, if I was healthy, I could. I could win. It was a different. Totally different than what I am in, like, real life.

Really? Yeah. In competing mode, you were super confident.

Yeah.

You're talking about. But then you walk off, harness all.

Of my confidence that I ever had, and I put it right in the skiing.

What did that look like?

More shy. Like, I'm not really. I'm like. I feel like I'm more right now. This is, like, media mode.

Yeah.

You know, and. Which is still me, but I'm just. I don't know, I'm. It's different when I'm at home or, like, I'm at a dinner or I'm at a, you know, a function. I'm not the person that's, like, overly, you know, talking to people. You know, I'm like. I hang back. I wait for someone to come to me.

Like, interesting.

I don't know.

Well, the next time I'm on an event with you, I'll make sure to.

Come up to you.

I'll give you a hug and say, what's up, Lizzie?

I swear, I'm not, like, trying to be my. Like, you know, some people think that I'm just, you know, they don't want to come say hi. And I just. I'm not trying to be, you know, negative. I just, you know, shy in my corner.

Do you feel like you're. You've been able to translate that confidence into your life now, or do you feel like there are more times?

It took me a while, really, but, yeah, I feel like finally I'm kind of spread out the confidence so it's not, you know, solely in one place, but it's like, you know, sprinkled everywhere.

What do you do on a daily basis to build confidence?

Honestly, I think working out is one of the best things that's happened to me.

The greatest.

Yeah.

I thought for a While, you know, I don't want to work out, I'm retired, really, I want to, you know, enjoy it because I've been working out my entire life and I stopped working out, like, wow, I really feel like, you know, I felt miserable and then I got back into it and the more I did it, the better I felt. And so now it's like I prioritize working out because it makes me feel so much better. And I like working out first thing in the morning because then it sets my day up for success and I feel confident and, you know, better and clear minded and it's just, it's awesome.

It's the greatest feeling ever.

Yeah.

And when you can look yourself in the mirror completely naked, stripped down and be like, at least I'm proud of the process. Maybe I'm not proud of the result right now, but I'm proud of like showing up for myself today. That feels good.

Well, I feel like no matter how you look, as long as you like, you're putting your best effort forward. Like when I work out, you know, six days a week, you know, and like, the scale says something other than what I feel like I put in. Like, I mean, sometimes it still bothers me, but, you know, I feel like that's not a testament to, you know, the effort that I felt like I gave. And also like how that made me feel from a confidence perspective. And so you always got to keep that in mind. It's really more about, I don't know, I feel like it's more about mental.

Absolutely. Mental confidence.

Yeah.

And physical confidence. What would you say are the non negotiables? You've been living this life for a while now at a top level. 20 plus years you've been competing and now transitioning. What would you say are the non negotiables? Three to five things that have helped you become successful and that will help you to continue to be successful. If you had three to five habits or things that you must do non negotiable in your life to support your success, what would those be?

I mean, work ethic in general, but at the same time, you know, if you want to succeed at anything that you're doing in life, you know, you, you have to be willing to put in the work and make those sacrifices. I honestly feel that the most successful people aren't the most talented, they're not the smartest. They're the people that are willing to go the extra mile that the other people are not. What else? I think rituals are habits that help you get to the place where you can work hard. So whether that's working out or journaling.

Or going on a walk or you.

Know, meeting your friend once a week or whatever it is, finding habits, like healthy habits like that that, you know, put you in a mental place that allows you to then work harder and again then be more successful.

Right.

And then surround yourself by people that believe in the same things that you do. So that will help, you know, facilitate your success and not bring you down. You know, I think it is oftentimes really hard to actually find people that want you to succeed.

Really?

I think.

Why is that you think?

That's just human nature, I think.

Or jealous or.

Yeah, I mean, and honestly I haven't experienced that a lot, but sometimes it like creeps up on you and you're like, wow, you really didn't want me to succeed.

Really?

Yeah. So it's just kind of like people.

You'Ve hired on your team or friends or peers.

My internal team, we're tight. You know, they've been with me since I was 16. I'm a very loyal person. Like we're a very tight knit group and, and, and I like to keep it that way. But yeah, there's, you know, there's extra friends. Yeah. Coming in that, you know, pretend to be one thing and they're not. And so it's good to make sure you keep, keep yourself surrounded by people that want to see you succeed and will help you get there. And you know, if you have to make a sacrifice, that they're going to pick up the slack for you.

Right.

You know, because you, you can't do everything alone.

How quickly can we heal something that's been inside of our body, inside of our mindset for decades, that we've never let go of? Yeah. And it's a part of us. How quick are we able to do that from past trauma?

Yeah. Well, here's the deal with trauma and it's kind of an interesting thing because when you're traumatized, some threat or some danger or some condition in your outer world through your senses is changing how you feel in your inner world. And the quotient of change between the way you normally feel and some alarm state, when you change your internal state and move into that emergency mode, you narrow your focus on the cause and the brain freezes an image and takes a snapshot and that's called a long term memory. And now that image is branded holographically into the brain. So then we remember experiences better because we can remember how they feel and that memory then changes the person's biology. So they think neurologically within the circuits of that experience, and they feel chemically within the boundaries of those emotions. And how we think and feel becomes ourselves state of being. So now the person biologically has changed. And many times it's the strong emotion that begins to select and instruct the gene that creates disease. Why? Because if the environment signals the gene, and that's the truth, that's epigenetics. And the end product of an experience in the environment is an emotion, the emotion that you feel from that event is literally selecting the gene for you to begin to change. And genes make proteins. And so the person, if it's strong enough, begins to wear their trauma not just in their brain, now it's in their body. Because every time they think about that trauma, every time they review it, every time they keep creating the imagery, they keep firing and wiring the circuits in their brain, and they keep feeling the feeling emotionally in their body. And their body is so objective that it's believing it's living in the same past experience 50 to 100 times a day. And all you need is a stimulus and response, an image and an emotion, a thought and a feeling. And you're conditioning the body into the past. Well, you're conditioning the brain body into the past.

And it doesn't matter if the actual event happened to you or not, because if you have the image, what I'm hearing you say it's still going to connect to the body. So, like what's happening right now as people are consuming probably more than 50, 100 pieces of media, talking about trauma in the world right now, is that causing more physical damage on our bodies without actually having it physically hurt us?

Well, let me finish that thought and then we can answer that question.

Mind blowing.

So then you asked if, is it possible then that people can heal that quickly in one week? Yeah, because what if they create an inner event that carries an amplitude of gratitude or joy or freedom? Breakthrough from the chains of the past. When the body is liberated and you feel that elevated emotion, the stronger the emotion you feel from that breakthrough, the more you're going to pay attention to the image in your mind. And now you're now beginning to brand new circuitry in the brain and your body's being conditioned into a new future. And the stronger the emotion you feel, and the more you pay attention to the picture, the more you're conditioning the body over time to the future instead of the past. So now you keep knocking on that genetic door emotionally, then that Emotion ultimately signals a new gene that upregulates that gene to produce better proteins. And the person then all of a sudden starts healing. We have research to show that people can do that in four days. Signal genes to reduce cancer cells, to signal stem cells to suppress, to go to active tissues and repair them and regenerate them and suppress inflammation. We have research to show that you could change the number of brain cells you have just by doing this properly. And so now all of a sudden.

A person, in four days you can start to reverse some of the damage you've done in your body, depending on the degree of damage it sounds like. But in four days, by simply replacing the imagery, the visualization, the acknowledgement to a different emotion, an emotion of joy, gratitude, peace, perspective, acceptance, and assuming these.

Things, a vision of your future, a.

Vision of what you want that's positive as opposed to a vision that is tied to a negative event of the past. Over and over, every single moment of the day, your body will start to heal, your immune system will start to heal, and you'll start to get, you'll start to shift your genes, gene expression.

Absolutely.

What's the difference between gene expression and just genes?

Well, you know, you come with a lot of genes and they're just a library of potentials, they're just a storehouse of information of possibilities. So then you got to get the right signal, the right lock into the key that begins to select and instruct genes that cause genes to make different proteins. And you can regulate so many different genes, the same genes, you can regulate them differently. So when they upregulate, they start producing really healthy and robust proteins. And that's enzymes, that's tissue, that structure, that's function, that's hormones, it's immune immunoglobulins. When they downregulate because of some alarm, when there's not a lot of energy for long term building projects, well, then you keep doing that, then the body starts producing cheaper proteins. It's a different signal, it's not a time for growth. And so, and so now, to answer your other question, then it makes sense then that if you have been an experienced, if you had experience of trauma, say for example, and it's created the feeling of fear, and your fear is that it could happen again. And you don't know this, but every time you think about that future, that possible worst case scenario scenario, and you feel the emotion, you're conditioning your body to become the mind subconsciously of anxiety. So now all you need now is some cue in your Outer environment that says it's unsafe, that there's damage there, that you are a victim. Something's bigger than you that could have an effect on you. Well, now that feeling of fear is going to cause you to think thoughts equal to it. So the person then no longer needs the environment to feel that fear. They just have to have the thought about that condition now. And now they're literally knocking their brain and body out of balance by thought alone. And the body's constantly living in emergency mode. And it takes a lot of energy, a lot of resources to live in emergency mode all the time. Guess what system becomes compromised by immune system? Your immune system. Why? Because you have two protection systems. You got a. You had a system that protects you from dangers in your outer world. That's the gas pedal. That's the sympathetic nervous system. That's the fight or flight nervous system. Danger, threat out there. Use all the energy because you got to survive. And when you survive, you got to take care of your body. Now that system can work really well short term. It doesn't work really well if you keep it on all the time. Because if you're mobilizing all that energy for some threat in your outer world, there's no energy in your inner world for growth and repair. There's no energy for long term building projects. And energy leaves the brain and it leaves the heart and it moves into these lower centers. Because now you're tapping the body's resources because there is an emergency. But whether the emergency is real or imagined, whether your anger is valid or justified or not, that you're tapping the body's very energy to heal by doing this. And the immune system says, well, we're part of really the other nervous system. We're the brake, we're the clutch. We need to get into relaxation, we need to get back into balance again. And when we do, then we'll metabolize, then we'll assimilate, we'll reproduce, we'll excrete properly. So now you got this kind of battle between the gas pedal and the brake. And the immune system says, hey, listen, if there's foreign agents, if there's viruses, bacteria, molds, funguses, listen, we don't have a whole lot of energy here to deal with them because we're fighting this war out there. There's no homeland security. They shut down certain receptors in the immune system. They shut down function of those lymphocytes, those white blood cells that are your inner army of protection. And it takes a lot of energy to fight a virus. And a bacteria. But if there's no energy. Hey, listen. It takes energy to raise the body's temperature. Where do you think that comes from? That's. That's part of that branch called the autonomic nervous system. And the sympathetic, the gas pedal is part of it. And the parasympathetic is. The clutch is part of that autonomic nervous system. And it's a check and balance. But so you stay in emergency for an extended period of time, and now you're exposed to some antigen or some external substance, some foreign agent, and there's no. There's no energy to deal with it, then you are victim.

Yes.

To your environment. Because every time you react to your environment and you say that person, that circumstance is controlling the way I feel and the way I think. If something outside of you is controlling your feelings and thoughts, then it makes you a victim to your environment. So then. Yes. So you will be more victimized or more. You could be more of a victim to other things in your environment. People don't understand this consciousness because it's a program subconsciously. So now if you begin to strengthen your inner environment. Now, this is where our work comes in. Because we have research to show that when you place your attention right here in your heart, this center right here, this is the beginning of our divinity. This is our center of oneness, our wholeness. This is where we begin to feel love, gratitude, compassion, kindness, care, freedom, joy. It's all these elevated emotions that are heartfelt emotions. But our research shows that when you begin to teach people how to open this center and you teach them a formula on how to practice it, that if they did that for four days, that they would begin to strengthen their immune system by 50%. And now let me tell you why. Because in the center, your heart. But what most people don't know, there's another gland in there called the thymus gland. Thyme leaf. It's named after the thyme leaf. And the thymus gland has two functions. It has an endocrinological function. It makes growth hormone. That's our youth center. And it makes strong immune chemicals. And it has an immunological function. So when you're living by stress and your heart is racing and you're stepping on the gas and the brake at the same time, because you can't run, you can't fight, you can't hide, and you got the gas in the clutch going, energy is going to leave the harness going to the adrenal center, and you're going to cause contraction in the Arteries in your heart and this center will shut down from blood flow. And so there's no energy in the heart. So you teach a person then how to begin to open the center and to start feeling elevated emotions through their heart. And you teach them how to switch or convert from the sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic nervous system. Well, all of a sudden, now this thymus gland, which normally shrinks with age, starting at puberty, the fountain of youth now all of a sudden begins to get new blood flow and there's new hormones that are signaled like oxytocin and vasopressin and all these different chemicals called nitric oxide and endothelial derived relaxing factor. And the arteries and the heart begin to swell with energy and blood flow and this center switches on. And now it says, man, this feels good. And this is the time for us to really get back into balance and really let's strengthen our inner world now. And now all of a sudden, this thymus gland begins to make thymosin, which is an important agent that begins to make T cells. And T cells have little receptors on them called T cell receptors. And when those T cell receptors are robust and strong, those cells make proteins and they make what's called antibodies or immunoglobulins. These little Y shaped proteins block the receptors coming from the virus that are trying to attack the white blood cells. They have a shield. And now they're immune to the virus and its attack with its receptor. And it can literally begin to inject it with these immunoglobulins, primarily immunoglobulin A. That begins to cause the virus to not survive. Then that white blood cell will pass another white blood cell and pass on the memory to it. So it already knows what the coming. So now all of a sudden you're making these immunoglobulins. And now your inner world now can combat anything that's, that's a foreign agent.

Our purpose, we believe, is much deeper than that. It's to say that we see women and that we want to do more. We're all about community. That's a huge, it's just as important as the shoes that we create, you know, bringing women together and learning for them. And so I think the way that we can, people can get involved is to support.