PEG Podcast With Rebeccah Silence Self Healing and Relationship Expert

This is Family Electric Ghost, and we're live on the air with Rebeccah Silence, a self-healing and relationship expert. I want to thank you to the Family Electric Ghost being a guest on the Family Electric Ghost podcast. How you doing right now?

I am so well and grateful to be here. I'm excited for a potentially super elevating and maybe even life-changing conversation for our listeners.

Well, I thank you again for being on the show. We want to let people know that we are a featured podcast on the Newsly Network. You might see a little icon up there says listen on Newsly, and scrolling below there, there's a coupon code for those who have never checked that out. That's an audio-only platform. We are a featured podcast on there. So if you use the coupon code of GHOST, you can check that out for a month, no cost to you. And we will be on Newsly later tonight. So the other thing we do have is your, your rebeccahsilence.com/masterclass URL. And that will be fully clickable on all the platforms that we're on. So you don't have to remember that, that will be up during the show. But you know, you don't have to worry about trying to write it down, you'll be able to click through on all the platforms that we're on. But again, I want to thank you for being on the show. And one of the first things we always ask people who come on the show is two sets of questions we always ask is like, what motivates you? And why do you do what you do?

Yeah, and just so everyone knows, this link that I have for the masterclass, it's my free gift to you, so enjoy it and, and check it out. And here's my answer, Phantom, to what motivates me: being fully alive is what motivates me. I want to get the most out of life. I want every life I touch to be elevated because they got to experience me. And I'm a cancer survivor. I was given a 5% chance to live when I was 34 and pregnant with my second baby, and getting diagnosed with cancer at 7 months pregnant, and then a 5% chance to live— talk about motivation to just get the most out of my life. I'm not even supposed to be here, I feel like. I'm so grateful to be, and now all I want to do is live. And enjoy and not just the moments that are going well. I want to enjoy it all. I want to get the most out of every moment, every drop.

That's really interesting because I'm at age 27, I'm 56. I had a level 3 sarcoma and I survived that. So that kind of the reason I'm doing what I'm doing today is that was like a sea change in my life. And I was a very shy person and I never would have done what I'm doing now. But then I said, well, if I survived that, I can do other things. So I understand that some, you know, sometimes that significant event like that in your life can really kind of really, you know, change your direction and change how you see things and how you feel things. We can talk more about that. But also, I have kind of like the focus of what we want to talk about today. So Finding Calm in the Chaos, Daily Habits for Family Serenity. And sharing strategies for creating a calm environment at home that fosters emotional well-being, reduces stress. That's one of the topics, you know, we can get into. But that was like a focal point that I wanted to point out for the show. Other than that, we usually start also is like, like, how did you find, you know, that drive after going through something so significant? Uh, because just, you know, how did you want to go and pay it forward? Is that part of the motivation?

Absolutely. And what's really interesting is I've been helping families heal since 2002. I started out as a music therapist and my initial motivation to just help and encourage healing, especially in families, was my childhood. And interestingly, all of the trauma and abuse that I had survived as a kid in a domestic violence alcoholic home is what I really believe kept me alive when I had cancer. I tapped into this ability to overcome and survive and elevate my circumstances that I had learned I had in me as a little girl, and it came into play when I was sick very unexpectedly. I remember thinking, this feels so much like my childhood abuse and trauma when I was sick. And then I realized this isn't me needing to do more healing on that. This is me knowing I have it in me to survive basically anything and everything. If I could survive that childhood, I have evidence I can survive this. And as I share this with you, Phantom, I have chills literally because I didn't expect, oh, this me that was so resilient as a kid is the healed me now in charge of the mission called my life. And I can use this evidence to not just survive this, but become even more alive and a next level version of me I haven't met yet.

Yeah, you can always thrive. Like, you can take— like, a lot of times, creative people, we take things that happened to us, right? And sometimes there's a lot of negative things or pain involved in artistry. I've dealt with a lot of artists, and their ability to take something that was very traumatic and turn it into art is like the resilience of, um, trying to— you know, it's like art therapy. Like, why, why do people go to art therapy? Because they figure out, like, well, maybe I'm not a painter, but painting helps me helps me work through these issues, or playing a piano helps me work through it, or writing a poem helps me work through it, or doing theater, whatever, you know, crochet, whatever gets you involved where you find a positive way rather than a negative way that might go into addictions and other things that aren't really positive for your life.

Yeah. Well, and there's always possibility, right? I think for a lot of people, the idea of trying to access positivity in a really challenging circumstance like cancer— you and I are both cancer survivors— can be daunting. Why should I be more positive? But what I love to teach is, but there's always more possibility. So what possibility can I access? And for me, in the face of a cancer diagnosis, what was possible was that I could live. And I knew I had the ability to choose to live and to live like I was going to live, knowing it's not really up to me. It's bigger than me, but it's possible that I'm gonna live. So every breath, every bit of energy I had, I put into the direction of more life. And we always can do that. And another thing I think is really important here is we don't need to wait for some extreme crisis or breakdown to motivate ourselves to live more or to experience more or to access what is possible for us. It can just be a decision. Don't wait for that rock bottom. Just choose more for yourself because you can.

It's a mindset, uh, mindset shift. Because like, if you get into a— like, you know, a lot of times people have the, you know, the imposter syndrome, and so they don't feel good enough. I've run into artists, they're on stages and they have the imposter syndrome. They, they, they're very down on themselves, but then they can kind of put this mask on, but they are having a problem like all day until they get on stage. And it seems to go away. But like the rest of the day, 80% of their life, they don't feel good. They don't feel like they're actually— they feel like they're faking it. And so like when, as a producer, when you deal with people, you start to uncover like the levels of like masks that people have on and you're like, wow, I never realized how, how, how broken this person really is and try to help them and not take advantage of it. Right. Because sometimes if you work with people, the industry likes to take advantage of vulnerabilities. So you have to try to be more empathetic and not just be a predator.

Well, yeah. And Phantom, we all have a survival self that we created to survive our childhoods and our families of origin. And when it comes to imposter syndrome, I think our survival self is just winning out because we don't trust it can be better than what we've known. Or what we're actually comfortable with, even though it may be dysfunctional or toxic. We're comfortable with survival. We know we can survive survival. What we don't know is we can survive alignment with the truth of who we are and with our soul. And I think it's even bigger than mindset when we decide to embody the truth of who we are. That is a way being, and imposter syndrome is just a comfort zone. And I encourage all of us to recognize, essentially, I'm just going to be controversial for a second here. We're all bipolar. We all survive and we have that version of ourselves. And then we're all the best of who we can be. And they're very different. And we have that, again, ability to choose either one anytime. But what's more comfortable is survival and imposter syndrome. And if, especially when it comes to family, we just default to survival. We get more of what we're used to and more of how we grew up with the family we chose, and then we wonder why we're disappointed and unhappy.

Yeah, I think a lot of times it's like what I've seen is self-actualization, you know, when I, when I see somebody that actually can, you know, connect with their real self or their true, true per— you know, then it's all cylinders firing, like They— yeah, it's all— it's working there. If you really, you know, you pick up vibes from people. I'm a big believer in like, you know, energy and frequency. I'm a synthesist, so what I, what I can see is like, if I in front of a crowd and I'm using a dissonant frequency, it causes kind of like a punk reaction. It's kind of, you know, people are kind of like, you know, they're not hard— they're not in a harmonious point of view. They're kind of like in the, in the, in the mosh pit. Versus people who have the candle and, or the, or their, their lighter, and they're in this harmonious kind of wave versus a dissonant wave or a noise type of thing. So frequencies, if you have a person that is pulling off a bad vibe, they're real prickly, and you can't— you didn't even— you just feel it. You walk in a room and you feel that they're like, that's radiating. So they're not— there's like the law of attraction that's going to maybe draw more people that create that, you know, that situation where the prickliness is going to draw what, what that draws, versus somebody that's going to draw things that are going to maybe lay them on a path that where they're going to increase their, their, you know, growth. They're in a growth state where they're going to continue to maybe have challenges, but you continually try to move forward rather than relying on the past.

Yeah. And we can have that dissonance just like in music, even within ourselves. And it's not just about, oh, I'm not a vibrational match for this person. We can be dissonant internally. And when we are, that's the opportunity to decide, okay, who do I want to be now? I don't think we wake up one day, Phantom, and just know who we are. I think it's a decision. We can know, wait, I feel dissonance inside. That means I must be in survival, and there must be more for me. And when we're there, it's about deciding, who do I want to be? And it's simple. It's not easy, but that's always available to us, deciding who we want to be beyond just who we've known ourselves to be.

I think a lot of times people have phases, you know, with artists. You can kind of clearly see it where they, you know, the 17-year-old artist is in a certain place in their life, right? By the time they get in their mid-20s, they change to another place, and they get in their 30s and another place. Another example, like, again, a guy like David Bowie, he used to say, I like to go and tread water from an artistic point of view. So what does that mean? I like to go somewhere where I'm not that comfortable with, with what— and I, I get to the point where I'm very comfortable with my craft And then I go challenge myself and go to a place where I'm not comfortable. And treading water is how I actually do growth in my, in who, who I am as an artist. Because I'll try something I'm not that good at. And, and then I'll learn to master it. And then I, then I'll master it and then I'll go to the next thing I'm not good at. And then he goes through phases and you would see these phases. He's Ziggy, he's the Thin White Duke, he's Vlad. And so he would change. And he didn't care if he dropped off an audience, right? Because he changed his whole persona, he changed the whole style of music, and sometimes the audience wouldn't go with him. But he's like, um, that's where I am. And so he would change his life doing that. And I've seen a lot of artists aren't afraid to do that. And I think there are a lot of people in life, you, you kind of do that. Like, you're, you know, if you, if you're in touch with who you are, you, you might not stay in a stable, like, version of yourself. You might go to different phases, and some points you're not that comfortable because you're learning. It's not— you don't have to be comfortable with everything if you're always trying to grow. You're trying to learn new things or learn more about yourself.

Yeah, and that's fully living and letting the world and people in your life adapt to you versus you trying to be who you think you need to be to be well received, to be loved, to be liked. That's living. And it doesn't, again, have to take a crisis to go, wait a minute, my life is supposed to fit in with me, not I'm supposed to fit in with this big world. Let life fit in with you, but you have to fit in with you first. And that does require risk, and that does require courage, because not everybody's going to be down with you fully aligned with you. And that's okay.

Yeah, it's like a poetic thing. I'm always, always into the Victorian poets. They had this idea of the looking glass self. So if you check like William Blake and Tennyson and all these, all the great poets and Hawthorne, Longfellow, they always had this idea of the looking glass. And they would look at it and then they reflect like the deeper inner personal demons or things about yourself and it would radiate through their poetry. It's really kind of like that. So, you know, when you're creating something and you're an author or you're an artist, you're trying to dive into like those pieces of you that create the work, right? So you're connected with the Muse, which means you're getting this like external stuff out in the world, in the macrocosm, but you're also getting the stuff that's in the microcosm and stuff that's like in your subconscious, and you're— you can channel it. And when you start to realize that you're, you're investigating your deep thoughts or your unknown, you know, kind of things in complexity of your character, you actually start to, you know, want to analyze it. You're doing like self-analysis and then you're sharing it with the world. That's a vulnerability. It's hard to do. A lot of people don't like that vulnerability because they're scared of what the reaction is going to be.

Absolutely. But it's so liberating. And there is so much mindset work out there, right? And I just think that's the beginning because the true goal, I believe, is full self-expression and connection to our own spirit and our own soul. And for me, it took cancer to be able to access my own spirit. But when I was able to access my own spirit, I was able to access my own guidance and divine guidance. And from there, there's no threat. I wouldn't be alive if I didn't know how to connect to my spirit. My spirit guided me so that I could live and be my own advocate. And I just think that is the most beautiful gift we can give ourselves and especially our families. This ability to be fully expressed means I don't need your validation because I already know I'm not actually broken. I thought I was. I was whole the whole time. Now I have connection to that wholeness. From there, that's freedom.

Yeah, the freedom to, you know, really give yourself the permission to not feel shame about it. Yeah, I think a lot of people, they're stuck in the shame and the guilt, and they're in the comparison trap, and they're into these, you know, truths that are really, you know, just beliefs. And when you start to actually, you know, push on that, well, there might be people that fall off when you start to uncover, you know, who you are, because they're not— they can't accept it. So if they can't accept it, like, well, you, you have to be who you are. And if other people can't deal with it, you can try to work with people as much as you can. But there's a point where it's like the law of attraction, you see, they're going to come with you or they're not.

Yeah, it's true. And I think one of the misconceptions about, okay, if I'm, if I'm really me, I might lose people. I think the misconception is, okay, I'm going to lose people as the default. But what I found is the more aligned you are, the more attractive you are. You don't lose the right people when you're aligned. And when you're misaligned, you have a lot of that dissonance you were talking about earlier because these relationships aren't even a vibrational match. I just don't want to lose you. And I think it's way worse to lose ourselves so we can preserve a relationship that isn't aligned than it ever will be to be the full truth of who we are. But I want people to hear you're most attractive and you'll have more relationships when you're aligned. And the ones that want—

Yeah, because the codependency happens, like, you might be comfortable in the codependency. Oh, yeah, there's a lot of people, and then they eventually hit the breaking point. And it can, you know, you never know what somebody's breaking point is. But then they realize that it's even though there's fear and getting out of that and not knowing, you know, what the known discomfort, right, might be comforting. And that seems kind of counterintuitive, but it is, you know, that's what it's like a thing. It's like your known discomfort is comforting. So you don't go out of it. You don't get out of the cycle. But when you choose to go out of the cycle, there is some fear because that's unknown, right? And we, we as humans, that we're always kind of running from the saber-tooth, running from the wolf. And that wolf at the door might not be the physical wolf, it might be the ideas or the place or the vision of where you could be. And there's a lot of fear in that, just as deep as the wolf.

At the door, right? Right. That opportunity to give ourselves permission to pursue our dreams and our most inspired life. It's terrifying. And we don't talk about that enough. I love the way you're saying this, Phantom, because it's true. Codependence is comfortable and it's easy and it's safe, but that's not living.

Yeah, like a lot of people get stuck. I mean, like, you could be codependent in your workplace. Like you could have a toxic workplace with toxic people and toxic boss. But like, that's a paycheck. That's comforting that I get that paycheck, but you hate it. And it's actually hurting you. It's hurting your immune system. It's hurting your, your balance. You're really probably getting sick. And but you're thinking, well, the paycheck is secure. Well, you know what, if you actually get outside of this, you might get to someplace that's you know, a better opportunity economically than you can even imagine, but you just don't even try because it's so scary. Mm-hmm.

Well, in my definition of healing is freedom, and we get to be free. And any place we feel held hostage, we have an opportunity to liberate ourselves into more and more freedom. And how do you do that? You follow your truth, especially when it's vulnerable and scary, because the only thing we have to lose is ourselves. And I always say, the only thing you have to lose is you. Don't you dare let that happen. And if in a moment you did, you're human, give yourself grace. But remember, I don't owe anybody anything. I owe me everything. And from that place of me honoring and respecting and taking care of myself, That's where I can be the best I could possibly be for every life I touch.

So if we talk about like family trauma and how people can overcome it, yeah. Um, what, what's the kind of common misconceptions about healing family trauma that you've kind of learned, like lessons learned in the way you're approached?

Well, I love this question. And the, the number one misconception is that the trauma can't heal. That we must just live in spite of it, that we must just make the best of it, and that is a lie. The second misconception, Phantom, is that trauma means less of a life, and it's just not true. I wrote my book Coming Back to Life about how the trauma conversation can become an empowering one. I already shared my childhood trauma I know saved my life when I got sick. And trauma gives us an opportunity to emerge at the highest level, the most aligned version of ourselves that we can be. And trauma is not something that can't fully heal or that means less of a life. And I hope that empowers everyone listening right now.

I totally believe that because I think like when you go through life, it's those hurdles that you go through. They like— if people say, I wish my life had been more perfect, like they're always trying to find perfection. But as an artist, what we find is like, it's the, it's the things that you have to overcome that create the work, right? And, and, and when you do that work, it's like you, you're going through it, like you go through that feeling. Like if you get into something that's really melancholy, a lot of you know, artists can, can take a melancholy feeling of something that really happened to them and make it universal. And, you know, a good example is like a Karen Carpenter, her approach to singing. And the, you know, you could feel the melancholy even though she's singing a happy song. There was just something about how she could process that and this universal, like, connection that people could feel. It's like, wow, she's in pain and it's coming through her voice. And it's like, it's artistry that she had. And she wasn't able to like save herself, but you could feel she was trying to do that work and it got out there as her art. But she had places that she needed to work on and she wasn't able to, to, to make it through. But you know, that's, that's the kind of thing the artists go through. And but you also learn lessons where artists, you know, fail. You get the, you know, the Jim Morrisons, the Hendrixes, the, you know, Janis Joplin that didn't make it. Because they, they put it out there, but they couldn't figure out how to survive it.

Well, and we reinforce our pain and our pain patterns until we heal them. And you use the word stuck earlier, and trauma is heartbreak. Where we were heartbroken, we get stuck in a trauma response until we heal. And how do we even know we're in a trauma response? It's the fight, fighting the moment we're in, resisting it. Flight, wanting to run and shut it down and numb out. Or freeze, which we don't talk about enough, where we're just completely paralyzed in a moment. Those are the indicators trauma is running the show. And I don't know about all of you listening, but for me, I refuse for my trauma my past, or my abusers to win. I'm gonna win. And what that means is I'm gonna overcome the part of me that's so comfortable, codependently safe and secure with my fight, flight, freeze coping mechanisms. And I'm gonna use trauma to my advantage so that I can get beyond fight, flight, freeze. And what's beyond it? Alignment with our soul. And how do you get aligned with your soul? It is trial and error and just courage that is unmatched. And your examples of Karen Carpenter and Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, they were fully expressed, but they didn't know how to live beyond and heal beyond the trauma and the heartbreak. And we all have the ability to do that. It's just no one's showing us how. And that is what I teach. I teach people how to get beyond the trauma, to get beyond the heartbreak, how to keep our hearts open instead of defaulting to trying to protect our hearts, right? And we can't be in self-protection and self-expressed at the same time. And we can't be empowered and disempowered at the same time. And we can't be surviving and aligned at the same time. And these are our choices. And again, it isn't easy, but it is the simple.

Well, I think it's also— there's an issue, like, in the world where people trying to be, like, their ideal self, and it may be this vision, but it's not really aligned with who their true self is. Yeah. So they have this ideal. And it might be because they're comparing themselves to the Joneses, instead of actually realizing who they really are. And so they're never satisfied. And they're always never hitting it. Because they're not really aligned. And once you start to realize, am I going, you know, can I live a life where I can actually be happy?

Yeah.

And what actually makes you happy? You know, is it the million dollars? Or is it the things that you could do that maybe it doesn't take a million dollars, but it's like, I want to be independent, I want to be in charge of my life, I don't want to have a toxic boss, I want to be able to, to do these things. And if I put myself in a box just for security, I'm not really aligned with that, what I just said I wanted to do, right? I just go, I'm in the box, because it feels secure from the wolf at the door. But I'm not actually living. Like you said, you'd like to live. Sometimes, like, you're gonna, you know, push a little bit beyond the envelope of comfort. And it might hurt, or it might be hard. But you know, that's life. It gets like ebbs and flows, there's waves. And not everything's gonna be perfect.

And so often, too, we're using metrics that we learned growing up about what we think is okay or acceptable or not versus coming up with our own. And if you think happiness is the result of anything external, I got news for you. You're going to be perpetually disappointed because there's never going to be enough money, there's never going to be the right jean size, there's never going to be the right amount of kudos and accolades to fill that black hole and that void inside of all of us. No one is immune immune to trauma, and no one is immune to heartbreak, and no one got all of the validation externally that they needed from their parents growing up. So what happiness really is— my definition anyway— is emotional regulation. Happiness is about internal alignment, which we can only get from emotional regulation and the ability to validate ourselves. Mindset didn't save my life when I was sick, and I bet it didn't save yours either. Knowing how to be with all of my humanity and all of my emotions so I could connect to my spirit from a clear place, that saved my life.

Yeah. Would you call that emotional regulation, like emotional intelligence?

I call it the practice of emotional healing.

Or is it something different than that?

I call it the practice of emotional healing, Phantom. So what I teach is there's a big difference between our feelings about what's going on externally, our circumstances, our situation, how people are behaving, and the emotions that we need to feel. So my secret magic sauce formula to happiness is a healthy relationship with only 5 emotions. And then what I teach is everything else is learned. So the 5 emotions we have control over, having a healthy relationship with, are anger, fear, grief, joy, and excitement. Anger, fear, grief, joy, and excitement. These are emotions a baby is born with. They're natural. They're human. They're not caused by anyone or anything. They're like the weather. And when we have a healthy, willing relationship with our emotions—anger, fear, grief, joy, excitement—that is freedom. And that's what I mean when I say healing is freedom. Everything else is learned. We were not born knowing we could be abandoned, rejected, you know, dropped, uh, abused, attacked, disappointed. We learn these things can happen. We're not born knowing we can be anxious or depressed. We're not born knowing something's wrong with us. We learn it. And all that can be unlearned. So there's a big difference between our feelings about the external and the internal emotions we need to feel. And I'm telling you, when you are willing to be with anger, fear, grief, joy, excitement, you're free and you're healed. And there's a direct correlation between your willingness to be with those darker emotions of anger, fear, and grief and joy and excitement. And if you want your default to be joy and excitement, have a healthy, willing relationship with the darker emotions.

Yeah, you have to, you have to kind of dive into that, kind of like what the poet's talking about, the looking glass, and diving into that and going into like, the places that you might be scared to go. Because a lot of times, you know, people who are creative will kind of go there, they'll go there, and then can they get back from there? Can they regulate? Can they get to harmony, go from dissonance and noise to harmony? You know, that, that's always like a hard thing. Because sometimes people, like, if you become successful by being in melancholy, and that's how you make your career, then you feel like you have to force yourself into situations that keep you in that state. And then you're— is that really making you happy? Or is that just because that's how the world reacts to your work? And if you try to do work that's happy, they don't like it. So then you stay in a kind of in the down It's like a downward spiral. I was like, is that actually good for you, right? Maybe monetarily it's good for you, but for your soul it's not good for you, right?

Suffocating our soul and holding ourselves hostage is never good for us. And when I'm talking about emotional expression, please understand, you feeling your way through your emotions, it's never taking them out on anyone or blaming other people or the circumstance for the emotion. I am promising you, the other person and the situation, it's never the problem. Stuck emotion is always the issue if you're ever experiencing that internal dissonance we were talking about at the beginning of our conversation. Internal dissonance means emotion to feel. Not take it out on anybody, just express it in a healthy way, release it in a healthy way. And it doesn't need to be dramatic, it can be very subtle. It's just we're born a clear channel and it's our job and our right to stay a clear channel. And if anyone's clogging up our heart, our channel, anything, we just have an emotion to feel. So we can get clear again. Not easy.

Yeah, you got to release it and shake it off, because I think a lot of times you see animals— like, you know, if you see an animal running away from a wolf and then they get away, they kind of shake it. They get— they don't be like shaking, and it's like, well, they're kind of shaking off all that adrenaline, all that cortisol. But a lot of times with humans, we seem to not know how to do that, or we lost how to do that. We maybe knew how to do it a long time ago. Ways we seem to have lost the old ancient ways that we maybe thought, oh, that's like, that's like, you know, we don't need to do that. It's like, well, maybe you do because you're sucking it up and you're not shaking it off, or you're not letting it, letting it kind of flow through. And, and then if you get these issues where you're building up like toxins, toxic things in your, you know, emotions, if you build all these toxicities, just like you can have toxic chemicals building up in your system or, you know, bad, you know, cancerous cells building up in your system and they metastasize. I think it's the same thing can happen. It's like, how, how can you kind of shake that off or live in a way that you don't have these things metastasizing into you? Right.

And we've got to move it and we've got to get it out. So we're not holding onto it. And if we're holding onto it, it inevitably does become some sort of dis-ease. And we don't ever benefit from staying in a state of disease. So the game is to catch it faster and faster and faster. When there's internal dissonance, it might feel like a trigger. It might feel like that fight, flight, freeze default response that would be comfortable. However it is for you, just know you can know the difference in any given moment between when you're aligned and when you're misaligned, when you're emotionally clear and when you're not. And if you're not, no judgment. Get clear, move the emotion that's always available. And there's not always something to do, but there's always an emotion to feel.

So your book or your books that you wrote, um, when did you feel that you wanted to express your concepts in books?

Yeah, well, as soon as I realized, wait a minute, The practice of emotional healing is what saved my life. Just staying emotionally clear, staying emotionally clear, staying emotionally clear. I wanted to start writing about it, and I did. And so what Coming Back to Life is, is an award-winning book where I share my story with the goal of helping you connect to yours. I share my story and how it liberated me, not just the good moments the dark moments, the non-preferential moments, how did they set me free? I share my story in the hopes that you will connect to your story so that you can learn how to use trauma to your advantage too, and you can learn how to emotionally regulate even in the toughest, darkest, most challenging moments. And especially then, we want you emotionally clear and free and at your best. And for me, coming out of cancer with a 5% chance to live, realizing I think I'm actually gonna make it. It just gave me so much inspiration to write and to write and to write, and I'm so grateful I did. And this book has healed and saved a lot of lives and families because the other thing about trauma, Phantom, is it's inherited. It's generational. It gets passed on until someone in the family goes, all right, it stops with me. And I work with generational healers that don't necessarily call themselves a generational healer, but they want better than they grew up with. And it's not knocking how we grew up or our families, but if you feel like the black sheep, if you feel like, I've seen it could be better, why isn't it better? It's your job to make it better and to stop the patterns. And that's really what my book is about, Healing Generational Trauma with you, not so that you heal everyone in your family, but so that you set a new example of possibility for everyone in your family.

Well, you're breaking the cycle. Like, if even if you're the only member that does it, at least you're stopping that, that chain from continuing. Yes. Um, and that's important because you can't always save everybody. Everybody's on different paths. You know, you can try to do what you can Um, but like, there's a lot of times, like, if everybody wants to be, um, the person that's like always, um, giving too much of themselves, and then they, then they resent— they get resentful if, if they can't save everybody. Well, you know, sometimes you have to focus on you, and it's— that's not selfish. I like— some people try to think like if you're trying to do a lot of self-care, so you think you're being arrogant or you're being presumptuous, or it's the diff— you know, maybe they just don't understand that, that way of being.

Yeah. Well, and the 3 things that I want everyone to understand that will just defuse the chaos in your home like that is we must see each other, especially the people in our families, as innocent and as capable and as healed and whole. When you see and treat people like they're innocent and capable and healed and whole, now there is receptivity for relationship. Now we have the ability to communicate and relate and connect deeply, intimately. But you're not going to be able to see people as innocent and capable or healed or whole if you don't see you that way first. Mhm. And I'm telling you, Innocence and treating people like they're innocent is one of the biggest gifts you could ever give. If you want to give, and if you're here, if you care about healing, if you've stuck with us this far in this conversation, you care a lot. And, and giving in the name of self-sacrifice is actually the opposite of giving. What's really giving is seeing and treating people like they're innocent and beautiful and healed. When I was sick, I told people, if you're going to treat me like I'm sick and dying You're not going to get access to me right now. I had to say this to family members, and I quit chemo because my guidance told me to quit chemo. I don't tell anyone with cancer quit chemo. I say follow your guidance, get clear so you can access it. For me, I scared everyone. I was already 34, 5% chance to live. Now I'm quitting chemo, and I had to tell family, I know you love me, I know this is terrifying, but you need to see me as healed You need to treat me like I'm healthy and well and gonna live, or I can't be around you right now.

Mm-hmm. Everybody's path is like— it's like you have to— I know when I had, um, the cancer, um, I had some situations where there are some, you know, I was kind of young, I was 27, and there were people who were in my age group that were kind of terrified of the mortality of it. Of course. So I lost some friends that just couldn't be around me, because it scared them about their own mortality. And so they kind of disappeared. And I said, oh, that's interesting. There's like, these guys can't really deal with it. They can't. So it's like, fine, that's where they are. And then later in life, they might have come— they came, some of them came back, and they were kind of wondering if I was gonna be mad at them. I say, you know, that's where you were. I can't, I can't change where you are, what you did. Trajectory you're on, right? And, um, so that I kind of just accepted, you know, where, where they were, and I went to places where other people came to me through a lot of attraction. But that's kind of the way I am. I'm a Buddhist, so I kind of think in those mindsets. But, uh, yeah, it's a different way of being.

It is. And for me, I'd rather get the information, right? Like, are you going to be here in the hard, challenging moments, or just when it's easy? Are you gonna support me when I'm standing in my truth and my power and doing what's right for me, even if it doesn't make sense to you? It's just information, and this person was going to behave how they're behaving inevitably, eventually. So I always say, when you're super you, people work with you. They get mad and get over it and work with you, or they go away. I'd rather know sooner rather than later.

Yeah, it's better to kind of know the lay of the land and know who kind of have situational awareness of like, who's around you. Because sometimes you have, you might have this big crowd of people around you. You have a dinner party, you think they're all your friends. And then some of them are really not your friends. And it's like, why do you feel the need to have all that around you, that all that edifice if it's actually not actually helping you? Like, so in some cases, some people have this, all these connections, and they don't really dive into, like, what's really going on? Like, is there a situational awareness of what is actually happening around you? Or is it all kind of surface level and you're doing it for certain reasons why you want to have these connections?

Mm-hmm. Well, in family, it's bigger than just the family you chose, your spouse, your primary relationship, your kids, your family of origin. It's your inner circle really is family. And what are your criteria? Do you have metrics? Do you have standards that you're intentional about and aware of? Because family can be what you've wanted and needed your whole life. But you've got to drive it and you've got to be brave and have boundaries and be willing to communicate and show up as who you really are vulnerably so you can get the information about who really gets a seat at your table. And for me, nobody just gets a seat at my table at this stage of my life when I'm in my 40s. You have to earn it and you have to earn the right to keep it. And You know, it's not that I'm cold-hearted. I want relationships to work, but I don't sacrifice me to preserve the relationship.

Yeah, sometimes you have family structures. You know, I was in Japan, there's a lot of— they're culturally, there's some things about like elders, right? So when I was in Japan, I noticed like elders got all this respect whether they deserved it or not. So just because you're older, you're supposed to dictate this level of respect. And I've seen that there's similarities. Oh, that's Japanese. Well, I've seen that in America. I mean, that doesn't— that's not a Japanese thing only, you know. You have situations where, you know, parents and grandparents might say, you have to give me respect. But did they actually deserve the respect? Have they been treating you in such a way that you actually should give them that respect, or they're just demanding respect when their actual actions don't actually reflect that you should give them that respect just automatically. Like, if they've been, like, narcissistic toward you or something, or being very toxic, it's like, should you just give that elder respect when they haven't shown you any respect?

Well, this is so interesting, Fandom, because I love to teach all my clients that, you know, if we're going to be the best of who we are, only when we think someone else deserves it, we actually suffer. So I think I can be respectful and have boundaries. And sometimes the, the most respectful I can be is making the choice to love someone at a distance. I don't need to be close to me, but I don't change who I am, and I don't wait to show up at my best only if I think you deserve it. I'm going to show up at my best. I'm going to be mutually respectful. Respectful of you, respectful of me, whether or not I think you deserve it. And sometimes that looks like me setting a boundary and saying, I'm complete with this relationship. But I don't, I don't become disrespectful and lower myself adapting down to your level. And I think a lot of times we do that, especially with family, and it gets us in trouble. But what I think you're really talking about is false loyalty that doesn't serve us. I'm loyal to my highest and best and to getting the most out of my life. I have standards for my relationships. I'm very clear in my communication about who I am, what I want, what I need. I always recommend giving people the opportunity to grow with you before you just call a relationship, because if you don't give them the opportunity to grow with you, you take patterns with you. And we're trying to break patterns all the time so we're more and more liberated, right? But I think it is okay to give yourself permission to let life fit in with you. It is okay to give yourself permission to have a loyalty to what's right for you and not a false loyalty to family of origin or what you think is right. But we can be respect and our best no matter what, and I think that's really important.

Yeah, I think having like a, you know, just a respect for like civility, like, and, and just being not being rude, right? And, and so, but if somebody has been like a narcissist and they're forcing like family events, and, and those events is like it's beyond your boundary, like that you don't feel comfortable because you had been hurt and you just can't, you can't deal with it because they continue to be that narcissist or they continue to be abusive type of person. Yeah. And they, they— and so it's not that I'm not going to that Christmas dinner is that I disrespect you, but yet that's beyond my boundary at this point in time. Yeah.

What respects me and what respects you is I go to the dinners that I want to go to. And I had a client once who was married to a narcissist, and she had given him everything and anything he had asked for. Their whole marriage. They were married 20 years. She gave up her career, she had the kids, she supported his entrepreneurial dream, and all of a sudden he's cheating and wanting a divorce, and she's coming to me devastated. And when we give ourselves away in the name of love, it never ends well. And whether you're with a narcissist or you're just not happy, it's time to honor what actually takes care of you, respects you, honors you, to make sure your needs are even more important than your desire to make sure other people's needs are met. Because when you come to a relationship and your needs are already met, now you don't need anything from them. Your, your Buddhist phantom detachment is, I don't need anything from you. I and my relationship with the divine, or whatever you you know, rest with that's bigger than you, it's enough. But don't think that you making sure other people's needs are a priority is a healthy way to have relationships if you're not prioritizing your needs being met first.

Yeah, I think it's hard for some people to have boundaries, especially in family relationships. It's like they'll, they'll kind of get dictated to by a top-down kind of hierarchy. And even if it's not, because they feel, well, it's only— it's like, I can't be seen as being, like you said, the black sheep of the family. I can't be seen as being the bad guy or the bad person because I'm, I'm pointing out something nobody else wants to point out. And, and so that becomes like, well, then you're the, you're the one causing trouble.

Cause the trouble.

How do you kind of manage that?

Like, yeah, well, here's how I manage it, and here's how I teach my clients to manage it. I want you to sleep at night knowing you left no stone unturned. You gave the relationship everything you had. You made it very clear what you wanted, what you needed, how you felt, and most importantly, you were solution forward. Boundaries are about you knowing the solution that is needed for you and making sure that happens. Being solution forward in your relationships is everything. So often we just pass the problem around like hot potato. Here's the problem, you can't do this, is not a boundary. Here's what I need from you, are you willing to grow with me?

That's a boundary. Yeah, because like, sometimes you got to have that conversation, but some people, they're so closed, they find it offensive if you even bring it up. And then you realize, okay, how can I even work with this person when I'm trying to be as positive and forward-thinking as possible, and the person just like, this shoots it down? So if you're in that kind of scenario It's not like you're disrespecting them or being rude, or, or you're just bringing up something they wanted to have, like an adult conversation. Exactly. The adults in the room and not play games and to say like, this is what's the elephant in the room. Yes. And nobody else wants to talk about it, but I'm not going to blame anybody, but I'm saying this is what I feel, this is what I hear, this is what I see, this is what the vibe I'm picking up, you know. What's wrong with me expressing that if that's a big— and then they feel like you're attacking me. I was like, well, that's how you perceive it, right?

And how they perceive it, that's obviously not even about you. And if they're offended, they're looking for a reason to be offended. And I think there are a few one-liners let me just share that can make some of these hard conversations a little bit easier for you to sleep at night, even if the other person gets upset, right? So one of the greatest one-liners I give my clients is, "I love you too much to have this fight with you. I want us to create a path forward that works for us both." I love you too much to have this fight with you. I want us to create a path forward that works for us both. Are you open to that? That's powerful. A second one: I care about this relationship so much that I need us to have a hard conversation. Are you open to that? Are you open to having a hard conversation with me so we can be closer? Not everybody's gonna want to do it, but you can put the ball in their court. And the third one is: We deserve better. This relationship deserves better. I wanna work towards that. Do you?

Yeah. Those are all things that really put it, put it out there. And it, it's not like you're not being aggressive, you're being intelligent. Yes. You're being— so it's like if, if, if somebody can't handle that, then good to know. Then you kind of know where you are. You know where you are.

You got that information. You didn't prolong the inevitable. You know, my husband— I married a second time. My first marriage was domestic violence, and I got out with a 2-year-old. And I teach, you know, it doesn't matter if you know how you grew up wasn't healthy, if you don't heal it, you recreate it. We are attracted to— you keep talking about law of attraction— what we haven't healed yet until we heal it, right? So first marriage, complete shit show. Second marriage, I did these strategies I'm sharing with all of you. And every time my husband now would work with me and want to grow, and more now, 14 years into that marriage, it's him saying, hey, Rebeccah, I'm feeling disconnected, I need us to reconnect. It's more him taking leadership and initiating those conversations these days now than me. And in the beginning, it was me for a long time, and he didn't even know what he wanted or needed. He just didn't want there to be conflict in the beginning. And so I would say to him things like, I don't want you to just agree because you want to keep me happy. Don't placate me. Don't agree to anything that doesn't actually work for you or feel good to you. If I get mad, I'll get over it. And he would say to me, Rebeccah Silence, is this a trick? And I'd say, no, I don't want you to agree to things that aren't gonna work for you. For you. Like, we'll figure it out. Let's negotiate until we get to a win-win. Or I'd say things like, I'm not wrong and you're not wrong. Help me understand what's going on with you. And again, he'd be like, is this a trick? Be like, no.

Yeah, because I don't know if people are that transparent, because people— a lot of times people aren't so transparent and they have underlying things, and what they say is just trying to get to— I want to see if I'm going to get the response, you know, that I, I want to get. You know, they, they're not being transparent. They're trying to get an answer to prove something that they think, okay, I'm gonna get this response, and I know then they're gonna go on their attack. It's like you get these kind of games, whether or not— if you're talking about somebody in a situation where you're going to be really emotionally transparent and, and not play games and be really there.

Yeah, and honesty never hurt anyone. Alignment never hurt anyone. Honesty gives you information. Alignment gives you information. This is good because from there you can get closer. And I really believe all conflict, just like all trauma, can bring us closer to ourselves and to the other person if the other person's willing to work with you. And I'd rather know sooner rather than later, is this person willing to work with me or not? And like you, in my darkest moments, I've had people you could have knocked me over with a feather. I thought they'd be there and they weren't. And then I've had people I could have been knocked over with a feather. I was shocked they did show up. Yeah.

Yeah. Because when you choose the path that feels like you're authentic, that is your authentic self, Yes, the people around you are like the right people around you for that time, for that moment, wherever phase you're in. Because we kind of believe there's phases, you know, your phase, you know, we, you know, as the Buddhists, we believe we came from other, other paths, and they were kind of— sometimes they were in alignment with like, like, uh, you know, life kind of trauma, like the multiple lives that were on a certain path, and we didn't do certain things. And we're in this position because of those things. And so you have to understand, like, might not even be this life that put you where you are. Could be previous life that put you where you are. That's our kind of concept. But it's still kind of this idea that you have to understand, like, where you are in this time and point in your travel, like how you could be evolving. Yeah.

And I think we've all suffered and overcome enough And can we just give ourselves and each other grace? Can we just make life from here on out about receiving the good and expecting to, starting with receiving the best of ourselves and offering that to the people in our lives? And if I've been my best and I'm emotionally clear and people have a negative reaction to me, I know that's not on me. And if people have a negative reaction to me, and I'm triggered, oh, thanks for showing me a weak spot. I'd like to enforce that now that I can see it, and I wouldn't have been able to see it without you. So thanks for the trigger. This is just a totally different way of being, especially at home with our families, because nobody's going to trigger you more than your spouse or your kids. I guarantee it. And every time they trigger you, it's an access point to a next level of you, and you can be the mature one, and you can be the intelligent one. Or you can submit and be less of who you are because of their BS. And I think the first one's a little more fun.

Yeah, it's always great to, you know, be at— be in— learn how to navigate family. Yeah, family, family is supposed to be like your safe place. But if you have a family situation where it doesn't feel safe, or it feels chaotic, or it feels like then you're getting like all this dissonance, and then you're probably not healthy. Because like, if you're in your, in your cocoon of your, of your family, you know, structure, if that doesn't feel good, that's where you are most of the time. So how is that going to affect your overall being if you don't learn how to actually manage that? Right? And like you said, not push things down to get along, but to learn how to be, be who you are and then find an intelligent way to express it so that people are aware of it around you. Yeah.

And that's where this free gift masterclass that we've got the link here for you will just change everything. Because let me tell you, there's a direct correlation between how unhappy you are at home with your family now and how unhappy at home you were with your family growing up. And you deserve to have a brand new experience and whatever experience you want to have a family. And this masterclass is your ticket and your guide, and it's totally free. It's the 3 Must-Know Secrets to Heal and Save Your Family. And I am on a mission to help a million families heal in 2024, and this masterclass is how I'm doing I want to thank you for being a guest on the Family Electric Ghost podcast.

It always goes by a lot quicker than we ever imagined. And as you mentioned, you know, rebeccahsilence.com/masterclass, that will be clickable on all the platforms we're on. We were just on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch. As soon as we're off the air, that is fully clickable. We will be on all the major podcast platforms where you can watch or listen to a podcast by tomorrow. And I want to thank you again for being on, on this podcast. We talked about a lot of really deep concepts. I hope everybody took it in, and, uh, you may want to watch it again. And, uh, thank you again and have a good weekend.

Well, my pleasure. Love you all, Phantom. It's been an honor. Thank you for having me.

Have a good night. You too.