Self-Love | Creating a better relationship with yourself

I am Travia Steward, and I want to help you move past barriers and obstacles that are preventing you from getting what you want in life. This is Breakthrough. The writer, an activist, creative visionary, and a trauma-informed peer counselor. Theresa Edmonds lives with chronic disabilities. She was raised in an abusive and suppressive environment that taught her that her body was a shameful horror and a threat to her own safety. She was taught that she should dedicate herself to hiding or controlling or even battling it into submission if she was expected to be worth loving. Deep down in the The trenches is how she learned how to survive through all of the trauma that she endured. And it was one day that she had a moment of clarity when she was in excruciating pain trying to recover from a recent surgery. In an altered, out-of-her-body state, she found the answer. She had a vision in this altered state that changed everything. How do you make peace with a body that doesn't offer anything society seems to value? How do you stop hating a body that doesn't fulfill any of the functions you were taught a body was supposed to fulfill? Theresa Edmonds shares so much on this episode so that she can hope to spare us, spare you, time and the trouble of going through it By yourself. She starts with loyalty. We drop right in to Theresa explaining where she is and how she shows up in the world.

Um, I tend to describe myself as kind of a hard luck kid. I've been through a lot of trauma. I don't have a ton of self-pity about it because the thing is Trauma is not rare in our world. Trauma is not rare. I have lots of companions on this hard luck road, and I have spent my whole adult life trying to recover from all this trauma, accumulating more trauma, working as a community organizer in group therapies, in peer counseling spaces and recovery spaces. So I think of myself as a trauma-informed peer counselor. That is like my social location I come from. So all— as I'm accumulating all this trauma, I have to find something to do with it. And so I have just investigated every kind of healing there is. I've been through every kind, the medical ones, the non-medical ones, every letter of the alphabet, CBT, ADT, DBT, all of them. I've been through them all. So I get to this point a few years ago when really I think what was happening is my body was breaking down from the accumulation of all this trauma, but I go through yet another period of poor health. And as somebody who has an adverse childhood experience score like I do, I have all of the health complications you would expect to see from somebody who has the trauma I walk out of childhood with. So I live with chronic health disabilities, and there are times when that's harder and there's times when that's easier. And I, I went through this one period starting in around 2016 where it started to get real, real bad. And I had to go through a surgery, and then that surgery needed to be corrected, and then that surgery needed to be corrected, and then there was an infection, and there was a hernia. And so for a good 4-year stretch, I was in bed, medicated, alone in my house, trying to heal from all these surgeries and not really able to heal. I just was not recovering. And it became clear to me that the only way I was going to get better is if I managed to do all of those healthy things that we all know we're supposed to be doing, but we all struggle to do. The exercise and how we eat and how we sleep. And if we're drinking water and if we're taking the meds and all of the boring things that we all know is really gonna make a difference, but those aren't the things we tend to sell self-care on because they're hard and they're boring and they're mundane, but they are actually the things that work. So I needed to find a way to actually actually care for myself. But I hated my body with a kind of loathing that is hard to put into words. And not only did I loathe my body, like probably most of us in our culture are taught to, most of us are probably taught to loathe our body because we are taught to hate any sign of our own humanity, any sign of our mortality. Is a sign that we can't be exploited forever. So people really hate that. So we learn to hate it about ourselves. So when my experience of being a human consists of pain and trauma and hatred, why, why am I gonna fight for my life? Why am I gonna put all this work in to recover and get better? Why? For more, for more pain and trauma? Why would I wanna do that? I realized I had to find some reason to care for myself, some reason to think that my body was worth fighting for if I was going to survive. So I'm in that, still in that recovery state, like mulling over this big question. But the thing is, if you've ever recovered from surgery, it gets real weird fast because you are very isolated. You're in your recovery bed. People aren't, you know, life, the world goes on without you. And you are just in this weird, you know, maybe people can't I can understand now, actually. But it's very similar. I was— in 4 years, I was kind of in our current mindset and not sure what was day and what was night because your sleeping is all messed up and you're taking all of these weird medications that are making things kind of foggy. And I am in constant pain because the truth about our current drug policies in America mean that chronic pain patients cannot get their pain reliably treated. We tend to default on the war and not worry so much about the people who actually need these medications. So I'm in constant pain, like half stoned, not know what is day, what is night. I do a lot of meditation. I have a long-term meditation practice as part of my coping skills. So I'm just like in this totally living in my head, not in my body. Space. And so I get in one of those moments, I get this vision or imagining or meditation, something, this image in my mind's eye. And what I see is myself in an orange jumpsuit, and I'm running up this freeway embankment. And there's even this specific— and it's the 2 in Washington State. I'm running up this embankment up the Highway 2, and, uh, in the background I can see that there is a prison van flipped on its side, and the doors sprung open, and I am clearly sprinting for my freedom. But as I'm trying to run up this embankment, I keep getting dragged back because I realize I am still attached to one of my fellow prisoners. And this prisoner is tripping and stumbling and falling and not able to keep the pace that I am. And my response is to just scream and abuse and ridicule and degradate this— degrade this, uh, this prisoner, just What is the matter with you? Why can't you keep up? Da da da da. You know, just treating this prisoner just so horribly. And so finally my partner just sits down on the ground and says, I am not moving one more step until you start showing me some goddamn respect. And I kind of woke up then from that imagining, and I just, it was a complete paradigm shifting moment where I realized I have been blaming my body for every feature of the mortal experience. My one singular individual body was bearing the burden of the entire scope of humanity and my experience in it. Every pain I suffered was somehow my body failing me, was my body betraying me, was any limitation I faced, not being able to run as fast or keep up or something, that was my body failing me in how I envisioned it. And after going through this whole experience with trauma and disability and recovery, I learned a lot about neuroscience. I learned a lot about somatic healing, and I learned about a lot about trauma recovery. And so I have learned that trauma is stored in the body. The body keeps the score. All of these unprocessed traumas that I was not able to find proper medical care for so many years, my body was still expressing all of that. Through this chronic pain that I was feeling, and yet I was blaming my body for it. And so it's like I was blaming my body for the consequences of what it had survived. I was blaming my body for its own disabilities instead of recognizing that this disability trauma is probably the one unifying experience in the human condition. There are a lot of people who go through this life and do not know love. That is a true fact of our world. I do not believe there is a soul that is born and leaves this planet without knowing trauma or pain. That is actually how we are united, is through our bodies, through the cost of being human on our bodies. That is— my body is not the problem. My body is the one who is paying the cost of being human. And I am blaming her for the inconvenience of that. And so from that moment on, everything has changed from how I relate to my body. Everything. She is my partner now. Now, if somebody talks about my body, it's like they're talking about my mother. And if they have something negative to say, then my reaction is keep my mother's name outta your fucking mouth. If they have something positive to say, my reaction is, She's not interested. Why are you talking about my mother that way? You know, my, my body is my ride or die, and I want to defend her from every force out there that would malign her. And those forces include racism, capitalism, ableism, sexism, all of these oppressive forces. That's what teaches us to hate ourselves, because if we hate ourselves, we are exploitable. And so we have to include these systemic oppressive forces in our work around body shame if we are ever going to tackle it. Because as a white woman, the reason I'm experiencing these issues is because I'm collateral damage. If I want to make my situation improve, I need to fight for my Black sisters, I need to fight for my trans sisters, I need to fight for my immigrant sisters, I need to fight for my poor sisters, because those are the targets targets of the things that are hurting me. I am just friendly fire. And so if I want to change what is hurting me, I need to be loyal to my body and its needs as a human biological entity. And I have to be loyal to every other human out there, because that's what's going to get my needs. I'm not going to get clean water if nobody else has clean water. I'm not going to have clean air if nobody else has clean air. I'm not going to be able to have worker protections, weekends off, unemployment, pandemic protection. I'm not going to get any of those things if everybody doesn't get those. And the additional benefit to me for that mindset is that when I am steeped in self-loathing and I'm so convinced that I am absolutely unworthy of love, if I am loyal to other human beings and I truly believe that every human being on the planet has inherent worth and dignity, then that actually does apply to me too. And I actually qualify for having inherent worth and dignity just by the fact that I'm a human.

Good smokes, Theresa. Girl, you know, thank you so much for sharing that with us. And, and just from that vision, right? You shared that dream with us from that vision. How did you go from, because from that vision, you could have easily been someone who goes, you know, I'm the problem here. I need to partner with my body and just let it be about you and your body and your health. How did you make that huge jump to humankind? You're trans sisters, you're up, you know, how did that occur?

You know, I, when I say I didn't invent body loyalty, when I say body loyalty found me, it's because I don't think that anything I'm saying is new. I think that all of us who have been struggling through humanity have been saying similar things. I had, when I was little and I had this horrible, chaotic childhood, nobody loved me and I needed to find a way Well, if I— I needed to find a way to get over, and the, the people who had that guidance and wisdom for me were Black writers. I learned what I needed to know from Alice Walker and Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, and they're the ones who taught me trauma is real, trauma has effects, trauma can be survived, and you can thrive after trauma. And the way you do that is through joy, through art and through community. And I learned those lessons from these Black artists. And so then as an adult, I became a community organizer. And as a community organizer, my leaders are on the margins. So that means that the people who have mentored me have been Black people, Indigenous people, disabled people, queer people. And so I have benefited so much in my own personal journey through that community wisdom that it feels very holy to me. It feels like a calling in the true vocation sense. And it feels like this is like Alice Walker talked about when she wrote The Color Purple, she transcribed it from the ancestors. That is a bit how I feel about body loyalty. I just feel like this has come through me because I had the life experiences to be able to package it in a way that maybe some people can resonate with, but it is ultimately the same source of truth we are all pulling from. And the mentors that have really touched me in my life have told me that you do it for everybody else.

I love that, you know. And again, like I said, everything happens for a reason. The first book that I read from COVID to cover was The Color Purple.

Cover to cover, you know, life-changing. Absolutely life-changing in so many ways.

Yeah. And it became— and as a coach, I work in what is the source, what was the— what were those pivotal moments that helped me to find my purpose for why I'm here, it was reading that book.

Yeah.

And seeing her be seen and heard and appreciated for the first time for who she was. Cuz we all know Whoopi Goldberg plays the main character, but I didn't see Whoopi Goldberg cuz I read the book before the movie. Yeah. But it was having this attachment to someone who wasn't perfect.

Mm-hmm.

But who could now go I do have a place in this world. I do have a home and I have people that see me and uplift me and do all these things. Right. And so I just remember going, that book, my sister gave it to me. It had a profound effect on me. And so it's one of the things that I pull from as a source of whenever I feel like I'm not being seen or heard or appreciated, I go Color Purple, Alice Walker, Whoopi Goldberg, that character Celie, baby.

Sili.

Sili. I love that. So Theresa, I want to go back to so many times in our, my life and conversations that I have, like in my, sometimes in my circle and my family, I have people are like, you know, it is what it is. My body has failed me and I can't change it now. And I just have to just accept it.

Yeah.

What do you say to those people who have that mindset?

Well, this is wisdom I have gained from being a part of the disability community. Everything I've ever learned has been in community. And so in the disability community, um, that is real. And so the way we cope is first of all, morbid jokes. Uh, we tell a lot of real dark jokes amongst ourselves. Uh, with, you know, I mean, that is a great coping skill in my world. Um, but also I think that It is really powerful to learn how— what you do have control over and what you don't have control over. So depending on the person's health needs, they might be right. There might not be anything they can do. They might need to live with the consequences of their disability for the rest of the time that they have. Sometimes that is just true, and they might not have a lot of control to change that. But what do they have control over? Their support system, their community, how they spend their time, what kind of joy they seek out in their life. And that's something I think that is so powerful and so accessible and so easy and yet largely invisible to us because we can do things like, um, as simple as, have you ever been standing at a counter for a long time and then somebody offers you a chair and you go, oh yeah, that feels great. Why didn't I think to sit down? You know, like we all have those experiences a million times, right? Well, like when you are disabled, we hunt for those accommodations for each other. We swap them amongst each other. Have you, have you tried a Snuggie? It fits real great with a wheelchair. Have you tried this timer? Have you tried that timer? So as a community, we brainstorm solutions, we swap hacks. There's a tremendous amount that you can do by making accommodations and And a message that as a disabled person, I'm trying to always spread to what I lovingly, as a term of endearment, refer to as normies. That's people without a disability. You're all normies. That's with love. That's with love. But much, much more of you are disabled than you're willing to admit. And if you were willing to admit that you are disabled, two things happen. One, you become a member of the community. You can learn some of this community wisdom, share some of this knowledge, support each other, and That is something you can control. Even if you are living with a tremendous amount of pain, you can control the community you build around yourself. The other thing is you can join the fight. If you politicize your identity somehow as saying, "I am disabled," as a political identity, then that means you start advocating, and that brings a tremendous sense of empowerment. Disabled people who the world will write off as not being able to contribute anything have changed this world through their advocacy in ways that a lot of people just completely take for granted. But these accommodations should be available to all of us. It's just like, you know, there's this big bell curve of like what humans are capable of. Right. And most of us are in like the big fat bell curve. I'm kind of on the lower end of things dealing with my disabilities and some, you know, Venus and Serena, they're on the top end of the curve and the rest of us are in like the middle bubble. Right. Well, the way capitalism works is it tells you that if you fit in this one bubble, there is one way you're supposed to be. And if you are not that way, it is your personal failing. And there are no accommodations given for anything, including stools, including ladders for short people or more legroom for tall people, like no accommodations whatsoever. Requiring accommodation is considered a personal failing. And if you accept that you are disabled and it is your right as a human to participate in society, and these accommodations are necessary and just and good and part of including all of us together, and the only reason we think they're not is because we are trying to perform our ability to capitalism. Wow. And so So if you give up on that need to perform your ability and just accept yourself as you are, just sit down in the stool. You can just sit down in the stool. It's okay. Just sit down.

I appreciate you. Like, I'm just seeing this from a whole different perspective now, you know, especially when you're like a disability person is in Starbucks and you know, you see another one, then you offer the chair. It's like this unspoken language, like you're connected almost like sometimes when I see another person of color and I wanna go, you know, black fist, even though I'm not the military kind of person, but it's like, I got you, my peeps, you know? And so whenever I'm talking, because I start a lot of my social media posts with yo, my peeps.

Yeah.

Because I'm calling my people. Right. And if you don't wanna be called a peep, then you're probably not my people.

Right.

So, but I love how you opened my eyes to the community of the disability. And so we can have community in so many different ways. Why can't we just have community? Because we're all humans.

Because we all have bodies and all of our bodies have needs. We all need bathrooms. We all need food. We all need sleep. We all need shelter. We all need connection. Every single one of us has these needs. And we are taught that there is a righteousness in pretending that we don't. There's like a righteousness and an exceptionalness to performing as if we do not have needs. So we are taught that we will be rewarded in our society by denying our own humanity and just performing. So we are taught to treat ourselves like coal mines. We are taught to ignore our own needs of our own environment and just strip ourselves just mine ourselves for anything good until we are burnt out and they toss us on the pile. And we are not coal mines. We are human beings and our bodies have needs. And it is our job as the consciousness in the body to be the steward over those needs.

Right. Oh, thank you. So beautiful how you share that. I, so I want to go back to something you said, and I'm 100% firm believer in this as well. That trauma is stored in our body.

Yeah.

How do you experience a trauma that's stored in your body and how can you share that and educate my listeners right now? It's like, this is what you look for. This is what's happening when this happens again.

Yeah. Well, it, the way that trauma manifests is so individual and it can be difficult to talk about in our current moment because there are still so many people who will say things like, it's all in your head. Like I have spent so many years going to all kinds of medical doctors and saying, I am in so much pain, make it stop. And they say, it's all in your head. And the thing is, you know what else in your head, your brain and your brainstem. And guess what? That's where your nervous system is. And so my particular conditions, I have multiple conditions, but one of the main ones is I have fibromyalgia and I have endometriosis. And those are both very affected by my hormones and my nervous system. And Those are— you cannot get a more direct link to trauma than hormones and nervous system. I've even read once that, uh, trauma should start being used as a screening tool for fibromyalgia instead of fibromyalgia being used as a screening tool for trauma, because they are so closely linked, these things. But it can be difficult because so many people are willing to dismiss it and say, just get over it. But I think about my current chronic conditions as disabilities from trauma. So it is like the trauma that I experienced broke bones or left scars. But to my nervous system. And then how that has manifested for me is in these chronic pain conditions. And if, if you research like a childhood, adverse childhood experience scores, there's actually a ton of research to support what I'm talking about. But when we speak about it kind of casually, it can slip into victim blaming so easy because especially in our current medical system, a lot of times you go to a doctor you don't get access to psychiatric care. You don't get trauma recovery. They'll maybe, if you're lucky, they'll give you like, you know, a naproxen sodium, like an Aleve, you know, maybe like if you want to leave as a prescription, but you do not get the kind of healthcare that would actually resolve these things going to a doctor. And a lot of times, especially because our medical system is currently, a lot of the decisions are being made by insurance companies. So you just are told, well, meditation works, gratitude works, journaling works. And again, there's research. It's not that those things don't work. It's that you can't do those things until your pain is treated. And because of where our current policies are, doctors and insurance companies are using gratitude, meditation, exercise, journaling as a first round of defense instead of far down the road. So now I use those things much more frequently than I use medical care, but I never could have gotten to that point until my pain was properly treated. So it's, it's very much like they're entangled together. And since we don't currently have widespread psychiatric care, it can be extremely difficult to get the healthcare required for medical needs that are the result of this kind of chronic trauma.

Okay. So how does it manifest in— I know you said endometriosis, fibromyalgia. Let's say that I'm someone who went through something traumatic, right? Mm-hmm. And so the thing that I think about is because I'm in touch with my body, I believe in being in homeostasis and I get up and I get myself up to a certain number. And then when I know, again, going back to those pivotal moments, when I know that my chest is tight, when I was like, oh my goodness, what's happening right now? I go back to one of those moments of when I didn't feel, when so-and-so made fun of me, when I feel like the walls are coming in, closing, closing, closing, closing. What is your physical manifestation that appears when Something is triggered.

Sweating. So many, so many. I feel, I often joke that I'm like a pain sommelier because there's like so many different types and flavors of pain to choose from. Um, so I get a lot of skeletal and muscular pain because just think about like when you are stressed and you're holding everything so tight and think about what the long-term results of that would be on your body, especially as say you're growing. So, uh, I have muscles that are too short in some areas that can cause some pain. I have joints that are pulled in certain ways that can cause some pain. And, uh, I have done a lot, a lot, a lot through bodywork and learning how to feel what my body— like the actual sensations of my body, how my body is positioned in space, learning, doing disability-informed body scans. So that I can feel and figure out what's happening with my body in a way that still is protective of my body's needs. And a lot of it just becomes developing a habit to, like, unclench, just realizing, like, my shoulders are up by my ears. I kind of just unclench.

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Because I have to remind myself to do that. You're right. Unclench. So as we wrap up, knowing what you know now, all the things that you've gone through, what is your biggest tip or piece of advice that you can offer someone who's going, I feel every bit of that, I can relate 100% to that? How can you save them some time?

You just use magic words. That is exactly what I use. I tell people all the time, like, my authority is that I've learned this the hard way and I'm trying to save you some time. That is the authority that I have.

Okay.

Uh, so, okay. I want to speak to people who have had bad experiences in the wellness space, who have not found the right therapist, psychiatrist, who have experienced malpractice, who have deep reservations because of cultural competencies or marginalizations or anyone who is very, very skeptical of healing. Uh, hi, I'm Theresa. You are my people. Hello, skeptics. I am with you. Um, If you can only start one place, just start with how you speak to yourself. Develop an awareness of how you speak to yourself. Because for one, that really kind of started to poke through some of my skepticism when I realized just how horribly I was treating myself. I was letting all of the horrible abuse that I have experienced in my life reverberate around my ears and just repeat and repeat, even though the abusers themselves were long gone. And so I needed to become conscious of how I was repeating that and find ways to stop. Now, since I'm a cynic, I can't just be like, I am love, I am abundance. I am like, does not work for me. You know, works for you. Bless you. Keep going. Doesn't work for me, you know? And, uh, one of my friends said, yeah, that's because you're not a liar and you don't like liars. And so I feel when I do affirmations, I feel like I'm lying to myself. So I had to find a way to both stop treating myself like shit without going all the way to like the rosy flowery, like peace and love that also felt inauthentic to me. And so what I did was I, one, I started sarcastic. So I found a way to do a like halfway affirmation that didn't feel like a lie.

Yeah.

But I just started sarcastic. I love myself today. You know, but if you do that enough, You get used to the fact that you're doing it. Eventually it stops feeling stupid, you know? Um, but then I also named my body. Now, lots of people in embodiment spaces will recommend this, like Health at Any Size. People do a lot of this. You name your body in hopes that you'll start treating it better because most of us treat other people better than we treat ourselves. Well, for me, uh, that definitely was an aspect of it, but what I found is I needed to create a relationship with my body that allowed me to be mad at it. Sometimes. And so when I named it, I also kind of created a character for my body that I could relate to. Who am I relating to in this partnership? And so the character I created is a horse named Beloved. So when I speak to my body, I am speaking— so I don't say like, "Oh, Theresa, you did it again." I say, "Beloved, drink your water." And I'm still not like happy flowery, you know, it's still like Come on, do it, you know, but I am at least not pounding on more shame for myself.

Yeah.

And that is forward momentum. And by creating as a horse, what I found is like, there's certain relationships that you expect to kind of bring some trouble your way. You know, like if you have loved elderly loved ones, you know, sometimes they're, they'll test you, you know, but you still love them because it's grandma. And there's history there, you know, same if you've raised small children, you know, toddlers can just, they can just really try you, but you love this small child. So you will show up for this child. And for many of us, animals are the same way. Like the animal will never just go to the bathroom when and where you want it to go to the bathroom, but you still deal with this animal because you have compassion and you love. So I couldn't just make my body a person, because I would still have all of those, uh, you and all your needs, you're so needy. But I did not find myself saying those things to an elderly loved one, a small child, or an animal, because I expect those people to have needs. And, and if there's love there, I'm happy to help them meet those needs, even when they're making me crazy. So by thinking of my body as a horse, even when it is hurting me, even when it is not allowing me to do the things I want to be doing, even when it forces me to turn down something important to me, to go lay in bed for another day, I still treat it with dignity and respect. It still has needs. It is, it is a being that has inherent worth and dignity, and, and I just, I need to respect that. Perfect.

So, Theresa, if you don't have this breakthrough, if that never happens, you don't have the vision, the dream, who would you be? Where would you be if you had to take just the best guess?

I mean, this is dark, but honestly, I don't think I'd be alive. I don't think I'd be alive. I don't think I ever would have recovered from that surgery. I think I probably would have, um, yeah, I don't, I don't think I'd still be here. I, I really do feel like that moment was a life and death moment for me because I, I had been in such a terrible place with my health for so long. I've been through eating disorder recoveries. And, you know, I was a teenage dropout that lived on the street. Like I've been through some things. And by that point in my life, I was just like, why? What for? What for? And by finding a way to fall back in love with myself and then through extension of that, fall back in love with life, I found a way to not just survive, but actually actually to find my way to thriving in.

That's perfect. That's where we will leave it. Theresa, thank you so much. This, you know, again, everything happens for a reason, and we come into each other's lives because I think we have, you know, you had something to teach me today, you had something to teach my listeners today. Thank you so much for all that you shared with us. And because these are very personal moments that I'm asking you to share, I get it.

Wow. No, I'm happy to. I mean, this world is rough. This world is rough, and we are who we have for each other. So yeah, just love and solidarity to you and all your listeners. Love it.

Perfect. Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate you so much. And if you are finding value in these episodes, I would love it if you would go to Apple iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and leave a 5-star review. And just so it helps more people be able to find the podcast. So take care, guys, and be exceptional.