Riana Milne: Lessons in Life & Love | The Business Blast Podcast #676

Welcome to the Business Blast Podcast. I'm your host, Tyler Wagner. This episode is brought to you by Authors Unite. Authors Unite provides you with the support you need to finish your book. Best part is, after you finish your book, they take care of the entire publishing and marketing process 100% for you. So if you want to become a successful author, make sure to check out authorsunite.com. Now let's jump into the episode.

Alright everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast Podcast. I'm your host Tyler Wagner. Today I have a global and certified life, dating, and relationship coach. Her name is Rihanna Milne. She is also a certified clinical trauma professional and a number one bestselling author who has written 7 books and has the podcast Lessons in Life and Love. She's on a mission to help change the way the world loves by transforming the lives of adults who suffer today in life and love from the past impact of childhood and relationship trauma, which is 90% of adults. You can have the life you desire and the love you deserve. So welcome to the show.

Hi, Tyler. Thank you so much.

Of course. Grateful to have you on today. We'll dive into the first one. The first question I have for you is, what is the best story from your life that has an underlying valuable message?

Well, there's many great lessons that I've gone through, but I think the most important for this topic is when I had recurring relationships that were not working out and I was doing my best to be honorable and act in integrity and have a lot of fun, but I kept picking men that were toxic, and I couldn't figure out why they would do things to deliberately sabotage. And I have a triple master's in applied clinical and counseling psychology. So when my ex-husband was caught at school as a middle school principal with porn on his computer, you know, losing his job, his income, his reputation, everything leading to that kind of impulsivity and risk-taking, I had to figure out what was going on with him. And childhood trauma was not and is still not diagnosed in the DSM-IV.

So I did the research on it about 2 years, wrote my book, the number one bestseller, Love Beyond Your Dreams: Break Free of Toxic Relationships to Have the Love You Deserve, because I uncovered so much incredible information about it.

And he was actually very grateful because I've been sabotaging my entire life and didn't know why. And, you know, very often this This happens to people who are very successful in business but struggle in love, and they can't figure out why that happens. And it does all come down to past childhood or relationship trauma. And he had 9 of the 10 traumas that I talk about normally.

Wow.

Yeah.

And hopefully in this one, if you're willing, we could get— I know we can't dive into all of them very deeply, but maybe mentioning them. So the next one I have for you is, what is the most valuable piece of information we should know that's within your expertise or industry?

Okay. Basically, yes, that 90% of people— it's 89.8% of adult men and women are impacted by past childhood relationship trauma.

And the research shows most people have 1 to 3. However, many have a lot more. And most people will say, well, you know, I had some bumps in the roads as a child. I don't think I had trauma.

They equate that with maybe, you know, sexual molestation or something like that. But there are 10 traumas.

Actually, there's more. But these 10 that I talk about are the most popular.

If you'd like, I'll name them now. Yeah.

Okay. So keep in mind that when you're a child, you're young and innocent. This is not looking to place blame or have anger around the family situation. It's just factual. Did these things happen?

And this is what I work with with my coaching clients.

So Again, as you're a young person, did your parents have any addiction? So the typical ones we think is drugs, alcohol, but also sex, which is chronic cheating, porn, eating, hoarding, spending, gambling, gaming, TV watching, workaholism.

Right there is 11 of them right off the bat.

If you encountered verbal abuse, watching your parents fighting, or you were the recipient of verbal abuse, but like cursing, yelling at, or the opposite. They would shut down, or they would not say that they loved you or give you verbal accolades or compliments, instead saying, oh, you'll never amount to anything, or what's your opinion matter, that type of thing. There's all samples of verbal abuse. Then there's emotional abuse and neglect. There is physical abuse, rape or molestation, abandonment.

And there's two types: there's fault and no-fault abandonment.

So a no-fault abandonment would be if a parent died early, if they might have gone off to war, or if they traveled quite a lot for work. And a fault abandonment would be if parents divorced, and let's say the father leaves the family home. He promises to see you on weekends, he doesn't show up, or he shows up late, or he's zoning out and watching football all weekend and not paying attention to you, or spends more time with his new girlfriend than you. So that's a type of fault abandonment. Then we have number 6, if you were adopted, part of foster care, or had to live with other relatives because mom or dad couldn't take care of you.

Trauma 7, very popular, probably one of the biggest one, is personal trauma.

Either you were born with a medical condition or you were teased and bullied in some way. You just remember feeling different, not fitting in. You could have been a little heavy, you could have been skinny and gawky, not chosen for the sport teams. Whatever it was, you just didn't feel you fit in. Number 8 is sibling trauma. That could be a sibling, um, acting out and bullying you, or they might have been born with a physical or mental complication where they demanded more of the parents' time, or they were perceived by you as the golden child. And that's a child that had more of mom and dad's attention because they might have been more athletic, intelligent, more beautiful, but you could just tell that there was more fondness to your sibling than yourself. Next one, very common, family trauma. This could be a lot of moves when you were growing up, like our military families travel every 2 to 4 years to new homes. If a parent was incarcerated, if you grew up with financial lack or remember struggling, if you grew up in a dangerous neighborhood and there was high risk and anxiety around your neighborhood all the time. Now, one from the later list I bring into trauma number 9 is community trauma. That includes mass shootings, school shootings, our devastation by nature, floods, fires, mudslides, volcanoes. I mean, look at every— all this has been occurring so rapidly and repetitively. And of course, this is really devastating for adults, but can you imagine little people needing to live through one of these devastations? And then number 10, is a mental health illness in mom or dad.

And that could have been—

the top 3 are borderline personality. That's best trigger anger. You never know what you're going to get. Very moody, very hard to understand. They could get mad at the littlest thing that would be not a big deal to anyone else. Bipolar means manic or depressive.

A lot of people say, oh, manic is a good one.

Well, Well, not really, because if we're going on an eating, spending, or gambling spree, that's a nomadic phase, and that's not good. Depression can show as checking out emotionally, anger, or extreme fatigue. And then a third one that's common is narcissism, you know, where that parent is more involved with what they want to do and puts the wife or the spouse second and the children third. So those are the 10 top traumas that are very prevalent in our world today.

Thank you for sharing those. And for everybody listening, like you said, you have a whole book on this. So for anybody interested that wants to dive like deeper into detail on all these, is it your book on Amazon, I would assume?

Well, my books Live and Love Beyond Your Dreams are in Barnes Noble stores and also Amazon.

And yes, the love book touches on it a little bit, but even more of the research has been done since that was published. So to get the deep dive into changing your life is working with me as your life and love coach.

Perfect. So thank you for sharing that with us. The next one I have for you is, what is your best piece of overall business advice? So not necessarily industry specific.

Sure.

Well, my dad taught me a lesson when I was very young, and my book Live Beyond Your Dreams: From Fear and Doubt to Personal Power, Purpose, and Success has a lot of mindset advice when you're going through difficult transformations, hard times, trying to start a business from nothing.

Every business I started, I never had a bank loan, and I've had several over the years. So this lesson always rang true for me. My dad said, "Hon, if you have the 5 Ds, you can do anything." And that's desire, dedication, determination, devotion, and dare to dream.

Mm. And those 5 really ring true to me. And I added number 6, which is drive.

So when you're tired and you're exhausted, you still push yourself to that next level to reach the goals that you've set up for yourself.

So both Live and Love are sold in Barnes Noble stores, are both rated 5 stars on Amazon and the other platforms.

But Love Beyond Your Dreams also went to number 1 in couples therapy, women in spirituality, number 2 in psychology. Beautiful.

I love, I love those D's. That's awesome.

Yeah.

Um, so the next one I have for you is, if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?

Well, I really wish I had all this research that I know now, um, because my mistakes with relationships were very financially costly and emotionally, uh, devastating. So I just really wish I knew all the research I did on childhood trauma that I came into in later years.

However, it really didn't exist out there. It's still really new and cutting edge.

But also, you know, take the time for fun in between working your passion.

Make sure what work you do, you have purpose and passion behind it. That way you always love going to work. But make sure too that you schedule in fun vacations, you know, romantic dates with your partner. All very important.

So that ties in, you know, pretty perfectly. So in your opinion, what is the key to happiness?

Balance in life. I, I talk about the balance triangles in the Live book. Uh, one, for example, is you, me, and us.

You want to have enough personal time where you're not feeling short-tempered and frustrated, enough time for your partner, you know, this could be your workout time, reading time, work, and then enough time for us. And a lot of people where their relationships are falling apart, they do not invest enough time in the us part of that triangle.

And another one is have time for work, play, and purpose. So that is another triangle you want to monitor.

If you're way overworking and not playing enough, this is when you're going to feel either depressed or anxiety.

And both of those, uh, they call them a mental health condition, but to me it's your body and your brain telling you it's time to readjust.

Look at what's off.

Why are you anxious?

Why are you depressed? Well, probably you don't have enough play, or maybe you're going to a job that you hate and you don't feel there's any purpose to it.

So, you know, these triangles—

and there's several of them mentioned in the book, but those are just two to give you an example.

And, uh, what is the best book that you've read, and what was the number one thing you learned from that?

Well, I am an avid reader, and I've been reading books on spirituality and personal self-help since I was a teenager. But the one book that was my aha moment that started me down the track, trail, and the path to understanding the, the what childhood trauma does for people is a book called The ACOA Sourcebook, and it's by Janet Wojcicki. It's W-O-I-T-I-C-K-I.

And ACOA stands for Adult Child of an Alcoholic.

So that was one of the 10 traumas, and there's the first research of where these personality and faulty behavioral patterns were being cited. If you were a child with a parent that had addictions, and most common, alcohol, and then drugs came in, but they didn't even talk about the other traumas until recently. And that research came out in 2014 and '15.

And then what is your favorite quote and why?

I have two of them. Through the years, even as a teenager, and when I had my model and talent business, it was, "Help yourself by helping others." Every one of my graduating groups in my school did an event that would raise money for like the homeless or rape crisis victims, Humane Society.

They all picked a project and they loved doing it and they learned from it. So by helping others, you really help yourself.

And the second one, since this work I've been doing, I tell my people all the time, you can't change what you don't understand.

And most people do not understand the unconscious, how strong it is to impact you currently in life and love.

And when your unconscious kind of rules what you do and your impulses and the way you think, it could be negativity, it could be the victim stance. In business, it could be, I can't do that, you know, how am I going to do that?

So when you learn this work and you get beyond the faulty negative thought processes that you learned as a child, your whole life opens up and you just soar. And that is where I came, you know, you can't change what you don't understand. Once you understand it, everything in your life changes.

I love it. Thank you so much. This was a very insightful interview. The last one I have for you before we let you go is where's the best place for our audience to connect with you online?

Sure.

BriannaMilne.com.

And if you would like to Meet with me. I offer your listeners a free life and love transformation discovery session. It's a $500 value.

Just fill out the pop-up form. Again, that's rihanna.com. I have a second, uh, website that houses my podcast, and that's called lessonsinlifeandlove.com.

And you can get all the podcast shows there, plus on Spotify and all the other popular apps.

And then I'm most often on Facebook.

My fan page is Coach Rihanna Milne.

Perfect. Thanks again for jumping on.

All right.

Thanks for having me, Tyler Wagner.

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