From Healing to Whole: A Game-Changer for Adoption Professionals

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Messed up last week. Two goes at it. Got it right this week. So welcome to From Healing to Whole. From Healing to Whole. So some of you who were here last week. Will recognise the odd slide or 2 that we're looking at and a couple of ideas as well, but it's about 95% different to last week's, I would say. So I've put a lot of time in to make sure that it's spot on and it's different and it's not going over old ground. So, from healing to whole— who doesn't want to heal, right? Well, I guess not everybody likes the word healing, um, because it, it implies a wound. But that's what, um, that was Nancy Verrier's book, wasn't it? Um, The Primal Wound. Trauma is the Greek word for wound. That's where it came from. Okay, trauma is a Greek word for, for, for, for wound. So whenever I get anywhere near this word healing, the word how comes up to me. How do we heal? And the other thing that follows pretty quickly on from that is that phrase, right? That phrase, um, time is the greatest healer. So I want, I want to ask that, you know, I want you to— I want to— I'd love it for you to mull that over, whether you think, in your opinion and your experience, right, your, your, your lived experience, if time is the greatest healer. Um, or, or if it isn't, and, uh, if there are any caveats to it, or if there are any conditions to the way that you see that. Um, is time the greatest healer? So I've thought a lot about this, and I, I think If there's no change, there's no healing. If there's no change, there's no change over that time. So healing does happen over time, right? But it only happens if there's change over that time. And that might feel like I am, uh, splitting, making unnecessary distinctions. I, I don't, I don't think I, I don't think I, I don't think I am. I think healing is all about change. I think healing is all about change. Uh, so the more change that, that, that there is— change, you know, check— I'm talking about change in a good way, right? A lot of people are scared of change. People are frightened of change. I'm talking about good change here. Healing is about good change. It's feeling better about ourselves, perhaps would be one way of looking at it. Or it's about less intrusive thoughts. It's about feeling better more of the time. It's being— feeling more comfortable in our own skin. That's the sort of change that I'm talking about here. So time is the greatest healer, in my opinion. No, unless there's change. It's not the time that changes us, it's the change that changes us. So change, it's all about change, and that's what we're going to dive into today, right? So Looking at change at different, at different levels. So the first level looking at it is a change of our, a change of our view, a change of our view, a change of perhaps a change of perspective, a change of the lens through which we are looking at Healing. So most models, most models around mental health and those sorts of things come from a— most, yeah, come, come from a, uh, yeah, physical health is the model that most people look at mental health. From, right? So the if you're in in the States, or I think all the all the mental health specialists have trained certain mental health specialists, not all of the mental health. They they they they become a medical doctor, doctor about the body before they talk about being you know a doctor of the mind or something like that. And a lot of our look— a lot of the people look at trauma and healing from a psychological model, right? So this, this is the psychological view of trauma in one slide, and this is just my summation of it, right? So we're saying Trauma is the Greek word for wound. Wound is the aftermath of a cut, right? So my little circle here has got a big piece cut out of it. And that is, in my opinion, a psychological view of trauma. And most of us, I think, look at trauma and healing from a psychological perspective. Because those are the leaders of the pack. I was thinking about song lyrics, you know, the leaders of the pack. I know, some '50s band anyway. So I'm, I'm— today I'm talking about a, a change of view. I, I, rather than psychological, I'm talking— I'm looking at a psycho-spiritual view of healing and, and trauma. And this psycho-spiritual view, uh, and I'm largely basing my, my presentation and this part of it in particular on the back of something called IFS, which is called Internal Family Systems, right? So Internal Family Systems, it sounds like it's about a family dynamic, and it is, and that's where it came from. But it's also about, uh, the relationships within ourselves, the relationships between what Dick Schwartz, Richard Schwartz, calls our parts, okay? So he contends that the trauma is in our parts, and that is— and but, but, but, but, uh, our parts are not the core of who we are. So you see here a pink circle, the pink circle and the word us, right? It's an uppercase S. So it's an uppercase U for us, right? Dick Schwartz talks about the uppercase S self, so self with a capital S, and he's distinguishing between the lowercase s self and the uppercase S self. And he's saying that the uppercase S self is the core of our being, the core of who we are, and most notably in this sense that it is unwoundable, it is undamageable, it is untarnishable. So it's unwounded because it's unwoundable, it's undamaged because it's undamageable, and it's untainted because it's untaintable. So what we're saying here is that rather than cutting into us on a psychological model, it's concealing us when we look at this from a psycho-spiritual view. And this psycho-spiritual view is the one that I find most reflects what I've learned through my own experience and through the adoptees that I have spoken to. That it— the, the healing space, psycho-spiritual, a psycho-spiritual, a psycho-spiritual view, a psycho-spiritual selective, is far more healing than a purely psychological Okay, that's, that's how I would sum this up. And I'm just asking, this is my view, and I'm paraphrasing Richard Schwartz here and other psycho-spiritual people here who, who— that, that our views coincide, our views coincide. And I'm just putting that out there for For you, because clearly we have to make up our own ideas. This is my view.

If you—

I'm— if you don't agree with the view, my view, that, that is totally the way that the world works, right? I'm not trying to impose my view on anybody else. I'm just sharing my view in case You find it more helpful. So what I would suggest, if I, I'd ask you if you could, maybe, if you think I'm completely off track here, you know, I, I can't see anybody joining or leaving this, this, this Zoom call, because all I can see is the— all I can see is the slides, right? But I guess if you think it's total bunkum, Uh, um, then you will have left by now. Uh, I'm just leaving this out. I'm, I'm gonna back up my argument, um, for the next 50 minutes or so, and then you can take your own view on that. And clearly, that's what we all have to have, our own view. What I'm saying in more— a more simplistic metaphor is that although trauma is a toxic cocktail, as you see, this cocktail glass has got shame, anger, and fear in it, and those are big parts in the— big, big parts of the, of the trauma jigsaw, right? I'm I am not denying trauma. I'm just saying that we are not our trauma. I'm saying that our trauma conceals us. It doesn't harm us, and by us I mean the uppercase S self. I'm saying the uppercase S self, ourself, is still.

Intact.

And one of the reasons I'm saying this is because we are not our feelings, nor are we our psychology. Okay, so I want to evoke this within you. I want to give you a taste, a taste of this. Undamaged self. The the the true uppercase S self, I believe, lies underneath our psychology. So, as some of you may know because I've talked about it before, we watch a lot of American cop shows. We watch a lot of Brit cop shows as well. So this is inspired— this metaphor, this analogy is inspired by me watching too much NYPD. So yeah, Blue Bloods, a very cheesy program with Tom Selleck. It's basically like The Waltons. It's a merger of The Waltons and NYPD Blue. So it's got the family of the PC, Tom Selleck, Anyway, I got into too much detail. So imagine, imagine that you are a beat copper on the streets of Manhattan. Your ultimate boss is Tom Selleck. No, um, he is the police commissioner in this show. You walk past a The end of a darkly lit street. It's more like a, a footpath, right, rather than a road. So an alley, perhaps you would call it. And you get a feeling that there's something wrong, so you double-track, you double back, and you walk down that darkly lit Street. There is one streetlight, and it is flickering on and off because the fuse isn't working quite correctly. It flickers on, and when it flickers on, you also catch a flash from underneath the streetlight, and you're Fear goes through the roof as you see this dark shape running towards you, and you feel a— the pain of a very sharp implement landing in your chest. And next minute you're on the floor. You feel hands going through your pocket, um, and, and then it's all gone. And you put it together that you felt, you felt this sharp pain because of the flash that you saw in the streetlight, which was the flash of of light coming off a blade, and you put your hand inside, um, in, inside your, your, your, your jacket. And because you, you know it, you, you've known it's a, a blade, right? And you felt the impact, and then you You pull your hand out of the jacket and you look at your— you're right-handed, so you're looking at your right hand. And at that moment, the light flickers and stays on, and you see no blood on your hand. And you're thinking, how can that— how can That be? Well, the, the reason that there's no blood on your hand is that you had a stab vest on. You have reached underneath your stab vest to your skin, and there's, uh, the, the, there's no blood because the knife didn't pierce The stab vest you had on underneath your uniform. So it, it felt like it hurt like hell. It felt like it was a cut. You were convinced you were gonna bleed out until you realize that that, that the, the being— that your skin had not been broken because the chainmail of the stab vest had protected you from the knife. So that's what I'm saying, right? The— it, it— trauma hurts like hell, but it doesn't pierce the essence of who we are. It doesn't cut into the essence of who we are. Another way of another metaphor for looking at this is the kids' game, the rock paper scissors game. So you if you were on last week, you'll have seen you'll you'll have seen this metaphor. So rock paper scissors, kids' game. The rock is us uppercase S self us our true essence our the core of our being who we truly are. What some people call spirit, other people call awareness, other people call consciousness. What Richard Schwartz calls the uppercase S self, right? The rock, the rock is the uppercase S self. In the kids' game, the the scissors beats the rock because scissors can't cut into.

Rock.

I'm saying, and Richard Schwartz is saying, is that the scissors is not a good— are not— the scissors are not a good metaphor for trauma. What is a far better metaphor for trauma is the paper. So the paper conceals— the paper conceals the rock. in the kid's game, the paper beats the rock, right?

So we—

healing is about unfolding the, the paper which has got trauma written all over it, right? It's got all that shame, anger, fear, terror, insecurity, all the different Things that make up trauma, or the different horrible feelings that make up trauma. Um, the paper is covered in trauma, and the paper covers the rock until we unfold the paper back off the rock to reveal the undamaged stone. So this is— I'm saying the same thing over and over again in slightly different ways, right? Trauma conceals us like the paper conceals the rock. It doesn't harm us. It doesn't harm us. It doesn't cut into us. So another way of looking at this, we've got a section through, a section through the Earth's core. Um, and we're look— we're saying that the layers of, of the, of the earth are the different parts of, uh, different parts of trauma. And down at the bottom, we've got the, the, the, the diamonds here. Um, and then alongside that, you've got us, or you've got U.S. It should be us, uppercase U, lowercase S. It should be us, like uppercase U for uppercase self, right? So what I'm saying is, you know, we have to dive deep. And that we have to dive deeper and we have to excavate. So healing in this sense is an excavation job, right? It's an excavation job. It's seeing, it's seeing the, uh, the beautiful diamond which is us, okay, that has been buried in it deep in the earth. As diamonds are buried deep in the earth. We're buried deep under trauma, so we have to excavate. So we've looked at change of perspective. Uh, we're saying change is a theme of healing. I'm talking about here of a— now about a change of mind. Okay, uh, and a change of mind. So you could talk a change— you could talk about change of mind in terms of a change of thought, or you could talk about in change of beliefs, like the thoughts that have got congealed together. So a change of mind is a change in your belief. Am, am I healing or am I whole? Are we wounded or are we unwoundable? Do we believe that we're broken, or do we believe that we're complete? Do we believe that we are damaged, or do we believe that we are intact? This is really important, especially for professionals. Especially for parents of adopted kids, especially for us. For I'm talking about for me and my fellow, my cribmates, my fellow. Because well, why why why is it important? Because of this. If we think they are broken. They will, especially here if we're thinking about infant adoptions, right? Where they, they take their lead. Kids, kids take their lead from us if They— if, if we're, if we're parents, or if we're professionals, adoption professionals, if we're adoption counselors, therapists, social workers, if we think that they are broken, they will, they, they will take their lead from us, I guess you could say. Not all of the time, but— Some of the time, and the question would be then, do do? And we we will leak it. You know, I've I've sat in I've sat in a in a church with um with some this was actually in a a children's home. Um, that on the children's home estate there is a church, and kids from the church, kids from adoptees who were in the children's home because their adoption had disrupted and broken down, that they were in the congregation and people at the front were talking about broken kids. And I just, I'd had, I had a brilliant week that week, um, working in, in, in that place, working in, uh, in the place, uh, apart from 2 things. Uh, number one, the sweet potato with marshmallows, that just didn't work. Uh, but on a more serious note, this thing, right? talking about broken kids in front of broken kids. But we, we don't, we don't need to— that we, we don't need to talk about— we don't need to talk about the kids being broken for the kids to pick up on it. Kids know how we feel. We adults. Kids know how we feel. They've got this incredible, um, BS detector in their solar plexus. They can— they know exactly how we're feeling about them and how we're judging them, how we're rating them, uh, and they pick up on it. Um, so, uh, if it's a big danger, right? So we've looked at change of perspective, we looked at change of mind or belief, and now we're talking about change of heart. Okay, so I'm, I'm talking about here about the shift from the false— we're going to get on to identity in a minute, right? But we're talking about the uppercase True Self as that we've been talking to, like from, from an IFS perspective, uppercase S, uppercase S equal True Self. And we've got this false self, what other people might call the Ego, right? So here, here, here, here are feelings that sit with a false, a false self. So anxiety, confusion, set in our ways, stuck, worried, separate, scared, selfish. Selfish is, is like we think the whole world is about us. Scared, clearly a big one for big crossover here. You know, I, I put a question to you to, to think about, perhaps to what extent is, uh, the false self— so to what extent is the false self actually the traumatized self or the psychological self? Question for you to mull over. But you can see I've put separate in, highlighted that in pink, and that's because of something that's that's really fresh for me at the moment. And one of the reasons I was late onto the call was because I was putting some extra slides in here, because I think that this is perhaps one of the most— one of the biggest parts that we need to see, if I put myself in the adoption professionals' shoes. Yeah, because, because I am one. I do trainings. I do trainings on, on this. I do trainings on this stuff. So to that extent, and with the Thrive framework, I am an adoption professional. So if you're looking for somebody to talk about adoption to your colleagues if they're adoption professionals, or to your, to your clients if, if you run an agency and you want somebody to talk to adoptive parents about the truth of, uh, truth of the adoption and, and how adoptees thrive, then, um, I'd love to be in, in the running for that, for that speaker slot. I do a lot of speaking and training anyway. Back to the bit— it's the biggest thing, right? Because as, as adoptees, you know, separate, um, other, different, disconnected, um, lonely, I guess, um, that, that, that's That's one of the biggest feelings that we have as adoptees, right, is that we feel, we feel separate. So I know we have some adoptees on the call, and we know have some non-adoptees on the call. What I want to give the non-adoptees, uh, a, a taste of Is how we feel like. So when, when do you feel separate? Or when did you— when did you feel separate? And when do you feel one? When do you feel at one? When do you feel at one with the rest of the people. And you notice— well, let's— I'll go into some common feelings, uh, some common, common incidents of, of separation, right? So a lot of people have been bullied as kids, and we're bullied. I was bullied too, but I wasn't bullied because I was adopted. I was bullied because I had Buck teeth. That was one of the reasons that I was adopted, right? We feel it's we we feel othered. We feel different. We feel separate. We feel scared. We feel lonely whilst we're being bullied in in in in and afterwards, right? It's it's one of the most common trauma, uh, experiences, I, I think. And hopefully— trauma is quite, uh, used quite freely, but hopefully I'm not using it too freely here because I know that a lot of stuff sticks with people that have been bullied. So we're bullied because we, we're different, and if we're different, then we feel separated. And, and I heard that somebody beautifully expressed this: we feel like we we're gonna be thrown out, thrown out of the gang, right? So we're gonna be thrown out of our tribe. We're gonna be left. We're gonna be left to fend for ourselves. And if you think back to, uh, previous, like our forefathers back years ago, if we were alone and we were gonna get eaten by those saber-toothed tiger and all that sort of stuff. So, uh, The feeling of aloneness and separation is, and it comes off the back of bullying, very painful. Um, when else do we feel, feel separate? Well, I remember if you've been, if you pick, were you last to be picked for a, um, a sports team? I mean, I, I remember seeing a kid who had turned up for the swimming gala, swimming, swimming competition, and then he kind of— he got dropped at the last minute. He wasn't— it wasn't— was told he wasn't going to swim. And I remember seeing the little kid's face, and I was a little bit older, but I remember feeling the same way as he felt. I, I remember being dropped. The same thing happened to me, you know, in rugby. Before a game of rugby, I was dropped from the team. But I wasn't just dropped from the— I was dropped from the first team, not just for that match. Well, maybe it was just for that match, but I felt it was— I was dropped forever. And I think I was 13. I remember, I still remember the prickle of the tears in my eyes. I was 13, turning away because at 13 you're a boy and you definitely don't want to— you don't want to be seen to be crying. But I remember feeling separate and alone. So that's— that gives you a feeling of— that's an insight into feeling separate, feeling like some of us adoptees feel some of the time, right? Or most of the time, or much of the time, whatever it is. There is no one primal wound, right? Everybody has a It's a spectrum. So for some people it feels like a, a paper cut, um, for some people it feels like a, a flesh wound, for some people it feels like a, a great white shark has bitten half their leg off, like Jaws. When do you feel one? When do you feel one? And I was thinking about this. Today before I sat on the call.

We—

I, I, I, I feel one, and I feel one, it's a lot to do with music, right? Um, rock concerts, singing at a— singing the national anthem before a rugby match, uh, seeing Uh, Beyoncé sing the Star-Spangled Banner before the Super Bowl, even that brings me to a, a felt sense of, of oneness. And I, I've got a relative who sings in a choir, not because she's a churchgoer, but because of that feeling of, of oneness. People go to church for that and, and sing together. They feel Oneness. This is a felt sense. So for me, healing— did a podcast earlier, episode earlier on— healing is, is, is feeling one more of the time and feeling separate less, less of the time. Um, and It's about a— it's about an old feeling going out and then a new feeling coming in, right? So the new feeling has to be more powerful. The feeling has to be more powerful than the old one and So I have felt that separation between, uh, I, I felt some separation between me and my birth mother until I read a letter from her. I, I felt that, that she didn't love me enough to keep me until I read the letter that showed me exactly how much she loved me. Uh, I felt that this teddy bear that I'd had from her was a consolation prize until I felt that it was a symbol of her love. I felt that I was separate from her until I felt at one with her, and I felt at one with her 10 years after she'd died. So this was a non-physical thing. This was a non-physical connection. I lost that non-physical connection when I was 5 weeks old. So I'd lost the physical connection when I was 5, 5, 5, 5 weeks old. So this is all pretty fresh. I'm struggling to put it into words. But I'm basically what I'm saying is the healing is a felt healing is a change of feeling, and and that old feeling of separation from my birth mother got completely blown out of the water, completely superseded by this new feeling. And what I'd 10 years on, I'm still struggling to put it into, into words. Um, I've come up with a new word because I have to talk about if time isn't the greatest healer, what is? And I, I will say insight, but it doesn't really capture the power So I've come up with this new word this afternoon. It's called a felt sight. So it's about a change of— it's a change about of how I see the world, of how I see things. But it's not just about a thought or a feeling. It's about a feeling. And it's about Yeah, this thing, it's about the kind of truth that doesn't arrive in the mind but is felt through the body, right? So, so much, uh, of what we're discovering in trauma healing is somatic stuff. I've talked about this all the time. I've been seeing a somatic experiencer for the last year, once a month for the last year. And it's incredible in terms of busting pre-verbal trauma, healing people, right? So it's felt through the body. As I read this letter from my birth mother, I, I just— I was in, I was in, uh, floods of tears, right? And, and the floods of tears kind of washed away this, um, washed away this feeling of separation.

Yeah.

What I'm talking about, I felt like it doesn't, it doesn't argue with false beliefs. It dissolves them by revealing something deeper, something truer, right? And what is it that it reveals, that something deeper, something truer? It, it's back to that thing that we said about psycho-spiritual. It's about The core of the spirit underneath our psychology. So we're going through the layers of trauma, we're looking underneath our psychology to look at something true, because we're not our psychology, right? We're not our psychology. So we've looked at changing, changing view. Change of mind, change of feelings, and now we're looking at change in identity. I'm talking here about a shift from the false self. You see the lowercase s self? We looked at the false self a while ago in terms of the attributes. If you remember, I've just flipped past.

Oh, there we are.

False self, right? False self, ego self. Okay, changing identity from the false self to the true self, uppercase S Self. So obviously you've seen the theme I keep on going about Richard Schwartz and his uppercase S Self. It, it, it's just to, uh, to substantiate my, my, my points, because if they were just my points Why would you want to listen to them? I don't know. So these— this is how our true self feels. Hi, Dinah, could you just mute yourself please? I just saw that little thing came up. True self. Calm, clear, curious, creative, confident, connected. Yeah, connected. We're all one. Courageous, compassionate. Our true self is the man himself, Richard Schwartz. What he, what he says, as I mentioned earlier on, this is a, you know, the Trivial Pursuit thing. You might have heard, seen this last week. I think I put it in the slide deck. Right. So trauma is in the parts, the parts of ourself. So the 5-week-old Simon that's wondering where his mum's gone, the 10-year-old Simon that's being bullied by the guy on scout camp. Um, so the, the trauma is in the parts, and the parts are fighting it out between themselves and protecting— they're trying to— yeah. Um, he goes into a lot of depth about the, the parts. What he goes into In less depth is, is, is this— is the self. It's the, it's the core of who we are. So the trauma's in the parts, not in, in self. And just to say, yeah, I'm not denying the trauma. I'm just saying that the trauma is in our parts, not in the uppercase Self. And that's what Dick Schwartz says too. Um, so from healing to whole is about— it happens through insights or felt-sights, right? I came up with that new word earlier on, and I didn't change this slide anyway. So I'm going to take you through a process here, right? It starts with an idea about— it starts with openness. I, I'm open to the idea I may be whole.

Right.

I've, I've seen some telly series recently where the therapist, the, the, the clients going to therapy and, and I'm not a therapist, right? This is just, all of this stuff is just based on my experience and what I've learned from other people. I see therapy, the clients arguing with their therapists, you know, like we, we have to have a certain idea. We, we have to have a certain amount of openness or else we're gonna remain set in our ways, right? I don't want to be called a gom. I don't want to become a gom. A gom is a grumpy old man. I believe they're not, uh, unique to the UK. I believe there's some of them in the States as well, and Canada and places like that. I would believe it's a worldwide thing, right? I, I don't— I'm, I'm still looking for my blind spots where I'm not open. I'm, I'm, I'm still ready, ready to see things differently. I'm hopefully trying to— what? Yeah, I'm hopefully there aren't too many sacred cows still in my cowshed. Um, And to to show what the opposite of this looks like, I got I got an email, and it and it it started like this. Thank you very much. And then how how on earth can I feel whole when?

So.

Like, we, we need the, the, the— we, we need to remain open if we want to change. Healing is about change, and if we're resisting change, then what hope is there for us? How on earth can I— Well, um, well, it, it's a, it's a, it's a I— it's a process, right? I don't think, I don't think we can, I don't think we can feel whole before we've perhaps glimpsed the fact that we're intact. Have I seen my wholeness? Right, so glimpsing, seeing, we've got— there's a way to go. I don't think we can jump straight to Feeling whole. I, I don't think I have. I don't think I've met anybody, interviewed anybody that has just jumped from I'm wounded to I feel whole. I think it's, it's a process. In fact, pretty much every adoptee that I've spoken to on the subject of healing has said it's a process. I'm setting out my view of the process, right? Glimpsing, seeing, and we— all right. So if, if I, if, if I see my home, if I see— like, this is an eye-popping moment, right? Like this, this character from Canva is— that is literally— is his eyes are popping out. This is a big moment. This is An epiphany, not an epiphanette, right? I see my wholeness. Jeepers creepers! And and what does that mean? But whole. There's a there's a there's a contradiction here. I don't need anyone or anything to complete me. I'm I'm whole. That that doesn't mean I don't love anybody. That doesn't mean I don't love spending time with the people that I love. This isn't— this is, this is, um, stopping— this is Rupert Spira— stopping using the world in service of our happiness and using our happiness in the service of the world. This is stopping Looking for the world to make us complete, and using our completeness in service of the world. Because if we're waiting for somebody else to complete us, what happens when they don't? How how could we extract? And put it a different way, how could we extract? How can I extract my completion from somebody else? It just doesn't work. I believe I am whole. Glimpsing, being open, suspecting I may be, suspecting I might not be wounded—that might be another way of saying. I believe I am whole. Believe in capital letters. Believing I am whole. So believing. We talked about a shift of belief, shifting from I am healing, I believe I am healing, to I believe I am whole, to feeling whole. I feel whole. Realizing this is a huge one, realizing I can feel all my feelings. So much time— we have a multi, multi-billion, trillion-pound industry about people, uh, for, for people trying to numb, to avoid feelings, whoever they are. What if I can feel— I shouldn't have put this in red, I should have put it in pink— I can feel all my feelings? I can feel all my feelings. A metaphor I have for this, I think, is, um, like doing a, a tightrope walk, a high wire rope. That is Life feels like a high-wire rope walk, and we're scared about falling off it until we fall and we bounce back off the landing. What do they call it?

Safety net.

We bounce with the safety net, and we're not quite as scared the next time. The more we do it, the more we fall off the high wire, but more often we bounce back off the safety net. The safer we feel about our feelings, we, we come— we become less emotophobic. Right, emotophobia, a phobia of— I used to worry about worrying, and then I'd worry about worrying about worrying. And it just, uh, to, to quote a mentor of mine, Michael Neal, we just become a moron, right? I, I just became a moron. I had more on my mind. The feelings were more on my mind, more on my heart. Moron, right? Um, and knowing deep down that we're whole makes us less worried about feeling wounded. So when we feel wounded, it's less of an issue. We have psychological flexibility. So that's a change in our change how we feel about our feelings rather than changing the feelings themselves. And, and the, the change, the shift from the false identity, the false self, to the true self, from the ego to the truth of who we are, from our persona to our essence, is accompanied by all these Great, um, great emotions. The ones that have been shielded, the ones that have been concealed by trauma. So I'm going to go into— I'm going to give just give you some metaphors and then we'll wrap up. Um, I'm going to give you a metaphor too. This is, this is, for me, this is Richard's part of Richard Schwartz's second part. Richard Schwartz's, uh, genius is he characterizes what the true self, the uppercase S, is like, right? And I'm just going into more depth to give you a metaphor for each of them, right? So the eye of this, the eye of the storm is the peace that's me. In the eye of the storm, all is calm. You know, we're going to heaven in a handcart, as people are saying, right? There's— look at the, the chaos in the stock markets over the last few days, um, on the back of the looming trade war, right? It's a storm out there, right? But we're the eye of the storm. Uh, all, all is peace. All is at peace in the eye of the storm. The I, the I am doing a word game, right? The I, the eye of the storm is the peace that is me. Me, I am, I am calm, right? Calm, calm peace sit together. Another way of looking at this: trauma is a cloud. And I am the sky. The cloud— the clouds come and go, but they don't damage the sky. They don't taint the sky. They don't wound the sky. They don't define the sky. They don't mar the sky. The sky is completely unbothered. by the clouds. The, the sky is not trying to resist the clouds. The, the sky is open. The sky is open to its— to feeling its trauma, right? It's, it's not bothered about its trauma. It's not trying to resist the trauma. It's not trying to chase the cloud away. It's not trying to stop the cloud appearing at all. It's simply not bothered. It knows it's okay even when it doesn't feel okay. So here's a question for you, and we're all, you know, it's another word that's used a lot. How are you? How, how, how, how are you, right? How, how are you before you are triggered? This is not a mistake. Before we triggered, we're peaceful, right? And then explosion.

Before—

how are you before you're triggered? Calm, peace, peaceful, content, not bothered. Boomf! Then it comes in, right? So what's aware of the explosion? You are. You, uh, awareness. You, uh, you, you consciousness. You Uppercase S. We've got to be— we're creative, right? One of Richard Schwartz's 7 Cs is creativity. So how about we find some new ways to heal, right? So perhaps talk therapy hasn't worked. Well, it won't work with non— with pre-verbal trauma. So let's find some new ways to heal. Let's, let's try some somatic stuff. I tried some EFT the other week. Brilliant. And I was, yeah, I was, I think I would have been really, I was really skeptical about EFT, um, a year or so ago, a year or so ago. Um, but I decided to give it a go. Got some big stuff out of it last week with Danielle Goddard. If you're into, if you want to do some EFT, um, reach out to Danielle Goddard or reach out to me and I will introduce you Creativity is is moving from a mind that's set to a mind that's fluid. Big book, Carol Dweck, Growth Mindset. I would have called it Growth Mind Fluid, but that's just me. Um, here's one for you in terms of thinking: Does my therapist think we can heal? I know therapists that, that say that we can't heal. All that we can do is learn coping strategies. Um, yeah, I don't think— do I need to comment on that? Do my friends think we can heal? I Do they? There's a lot. And friend— by friends, I'm talking friends in the broadest sense, like Facebook friends. Do they think we can hear? Question for— there's a lot of people that don't. Growth mindset, as opposed to, as applied to this topic. I can't see myself as whole. I can't see myself as whole yet. This is about persistence, folks. I've been looking at this stuff for 18 years, and yet today I created a new slide. So There's, there's one thing, there's one thing about wholeness is one thing. Being able to talk about it is a whole different thing. And I, I'm still on the steep part of the learning curve. We're coming up 6 o'clock. Um, here's this connectedness, right? We're not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual being, one spiritual being having 7 billion human experiences, right? So this is connectedness, um, as connectedness in a metaphor, in a saying from a chap whose name I can never— Courage. I don't need anyone to validate me or my feelings. I am valid. You are Valid. You matter. Why is this? Why am I saying this? Well, because, um, uh, validation cuts both ways. That's a double-sided sword, right? It brings relief. You, you mean you feel like I do? Um, but then it can keep us stuck. All right, other people feel like I do, and they feel that they can't heal. And I'm hanging around with them, and it's making me feel that I can't heal. Uh, question— last question for you, I think. Uh, why do I— why do I feel their pain? Why do you feel their pain? Why do we feel their pain? Well, because, um, love is seeing that we are All one. That's it. Stop sharing. Stop sharing button. Hey, Diana. So some people still— I don't know how many people are at the start. Um, anybody want to share anything? Let's just wrap it up. Anybody want to come off mute, say something?

Simon, thank you. You only lost 3 in that process, so that's not too bad.

Oh, okay. Well, As I say, that's good, right? 3 out of 13. What's that? It's 30, 40%, is it? 30%?

Only the last couple of minutes. I think everybody—

Okay, so maybe they had other things scheduled. You see, that's me taking it personally, right? Lunch break was over. Lunch break was over.

So I think you did a great job with the presentation. You know, and I, you You and I spoke for the first time probably two, three years ago, I think. And you know, I was gifted with adoptive parents who who gave me a very strong sense of self. And you know, I waited till I was sixty-nine years old to express any interest in who was that would possibly have have relinquished me. And and I've learned a great deal in between. I've you know, and I've I've come to greater understanding of what what other people go through and what they deal with. And I, you know, I, I'm concerned that there's lots and lots and lots of discussion about, I think, as you put it, dealing with the trauma rather than dealing with the healing. And I think there's just a reinforcement, particularly through social media, that, you know, I feel miserable. Let me tell you just how miserable you really are. And I, I, that, that troubles me. And I'm not sure there's an answer to that. But I think there's a lot of reinforcement of the, you know, yeah, I feel just the same way. And I'm comfortable because now I've got a buddy.

Yeah. Well, I guess the only thing is we keep on doing our thing, right? We keep on doing things. Yeah. And I do think, I do think it's, it's if we look at the trauma, it's like a multiplier factor. So if— let's just strip it down to 2 things, right? Let's— for the sake— it's not 2 things, but just for sake of simplicity, it's the relinquishment, and it, it's, you know, it's how we were relinquished and how we were parented. And I think those 2 things all get wrapped up, and I, I think that poor parenting kind of gets— poor parenting gets, gets brought in, gets, uh, confused with, gets tied, congealed with relinquishment trauma. I, I believe anyway. And that, I think that's why there's such— so it's one of the reasons for me there's that, that there's such wide disparity, because if it was all about the relinquishment, then I don't think it would be I don't think the disparity would be as about— would be as wide. I think you're right about parenting. Sorry, Doris.

I think you are very right about that, Simon. Um, yeah, from my experience, I've, uh, um, it's more than parenting as well. It's, it's— yes, the adoptive family, the collective family. I have, you know, like 300 People in my adopted family, about 200, 300 in my natural family.

Wow.

A lot of them have died. Yes, of course, we're getting older. But it's the impact of all of these people coming down on top of me in 1974. I'm 18 years old, can't talk about what I'm feeling, can't talk about the, the being found and, uh, You know, carrying around this trash, what other people are dumping on me. I'm not allowed to be me. And I've discovered me over the course of decades. So I'm feeling part of that wholeness right now.

Yeah. Me too. Yeah. Thank you very much, listeners. And just before Because I know I normally ring my mum at this time of night, right? So I've got to go ring my mum. Um, but anybody else want to just bring— anybody else want to share quick thoughts? Um, want to give— that's okay, cool. Lots of love. I'll be sending the recording out to you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Simon. And if you know anybody looking for a speaker, I'd love to be considered. Awesome. Take care. Bye. Okay, bye-bye.