Why Trying to Fix Your Emotions Is Keeping You Stuck (Dr. Sarah Hensley)
In this extended interview, host Josh Trent and Dr. Sarah Hensley explore the paradox of trying to "fix" emotions versus allowing them to flow, emphasizing authenticity as a regulator of the nervous system. They discuss how unconscious emotional patterns, lineage beliefs, and victim mindsets hinder growth, and propose mind‑mastery practices rooted in cognitive‑behavioral techniques, biblical principles (2 Corinthians 10:5), and breath‑based somatic looping (the SOLAS framework). The conversation moves through identifying intrusive thoughts, distinguishing divine, enemy, and self‑generated mental content, and re‑conditioning conditioned responses via breath anchoring. They examine attachment theory, the role of marriage and parenting as crucibles for emotional maturity, and the four‑burner model for balancing work, health, family, and friends. Epigenetic transmission of stress (the cherry‑blossom study) is linked to generational trauma, while faith in God is presented as a source of meaning, resilience, and ultimate redemption. Throughout, they stress serving others from a place of love rather than self‑pity, the importance of being an "over‑comer" identity, and the interplay between coaching and therapy in guiding clients toward authentic joy.
Chapters
Emotions aren't going to kill us. They're there to give us information, and when we feel through them, the brain makes sense of that information, and then we can actually act from a place of conscious awareness and decision instead of a trauma response and a response of threat. But that's where a lot of people stop. They stop at the level of insight. We've got a lot more work to do after insight.
Dr. Sarah Hensley, the PhD attachment scientist in relationships, built over 1.5 million followers and has been featured in the New York Times.
Your body is where your emotions live. It's staying stuck in a filing cabinet that just continues to build and build and build. And when the brain knows that there's all of that unprocessed emotional energy, the nervous system stays constantly dysregulated. Shame is the only emotion that has no positive benefit. Every other emotion that we've documented has some research behind it that there is something positive that can come out of it. And most of the time, anger is the top-level emotion. Under that is fear. Under that is shame. It hits at the level of identity, and it says, "And I can't be fixed." How do we actually become mature to meet our own limitations?
Mm-hmm. Such that we live the life of our dreams. Well, why do most people treat emotions like it's a problem to be solved? Yeah. Instead of a message that their body wants them to hear.
Right. Well, let me give you an example. Okay. And this is gonna be a little bit of a long-winded example, but I think it's really important to sort of have this metaphor to understand what emotions really do for us. So let's pretend you're a young child, you're 5 years old, and you're going to kindergarten for the first time and you're pumped, right? You're so pumped and you have this Batman lunchbox and you're just like, I'm the coolest kid ever. And I got my Batman backpack and I'm just gonna rock it at kindergarten. And you go to kindergarten and you don't have that experience that you expect. Actually, people are making fun of your lunchbox and you know, you don't find it easy to connect with your classmates and nobody sits with you at lunch. And that day was just very heavy. It just did not meet your expectations at all. And you feel really sad and you feel ostracized and you're kind of scared to go back. You're like, I don't know if I wanna step into this tomorrow. Right? And you only, you're only 5 years old, so you don't have a lot of language around describing what you're feeling. So you go home to your mother and you tell mom about this experience and you're crying, you're shedding some tears cuz you're 5 years old and it felt, you know, rejecting and it felt, you know, like you were unworthy. And so you don't have the language around this, but your body is where your emotions live. The somatic sensations of emotion are a huge part of the signal. So emotion is made up of the somatic sensations plus sort of our story around what's happening. So there's a cognitive piece and then there's that somatic piece. If mom is really attuned and she's a secure caregiver, she's gonna lean into you to co-regulate. So she's gonna give you eye contact, she's gonna give you physical touch, she's gonna allow you to kind of cry it out. Like just let it go, you know, feel it. And of course she's gonna validate, of course you would feel sad if people treated you that way. That doesn't feel nice. And I'm so sorry that was your experience. And so she's going to co-regulate with you and she's going to validate your experience before she jumps into any kind of problem solving. Like, well, what do we say to these bullies? Or what do we do? And so what ends up happening in that experience is you would be having completed emotional processing cycles. So emotions are like waves. Okay? The energy builds and then there's like the peak of the wave and then it kind of drops off in the body and then it crashes into the ocean. And that moment that emotions crash into the ocean is the moment of psychological integration. Mm-hmm. It's the moment where the brain sort of like zooms out and can see the forest for the trees. It can say, okay, well this is just one difficult moment in my life. It is not my life, it is not my identity. And so therefore, I can move forward and I can reclaim some of my identity and I can move back into that situation and handle it the way that I need to handle it. Okay? So the signal value of emotion only gets processed when that emotion actually completes a cycle in the body. Hmm. And so when we have secure caregivers that allow us to experience our emotions, that psychological integration happens all the time. And so they get very used to automatically just feeling through things in their body and being present in their body. With their own emotional experiences. Now let's say we don't have an attuned caregiver. Let's say we have a more dismissive caregiver. That mother is going to say something to you like what my mother said to me when I was in these experiences as a child. Oh, don't get so upset about that. Bullies just want to see you cry. If you just ignore them and don't get so upset, they'll go away and they'll stop bothering you. So that message is, don't feel, suppress your emotions, calm down, Don't, you know, be upset by this. That's not valid. Mm-hmm. You know, it's not a valid way to be handling this situation. So that child is gonna learn, okay, well, I have all these big feelings in my body, but I guess that's wrong. So something must be wrong with me. So I gotta learn to shove that down and cut that off because it's gonna get me hurt in the future. So the message that we're being given in that situation is don't feel emotions are weak, emotions are bad. We don't let other people see them. So that is the blueprint they then carry with them, and that emotion is never truly getting processed. It's staying stuck in a filing cabinet that just continues to build and build and build. And when the brain knows that there's all of that unprocessed emotional energy, the nervous system stays constantly dysregulated. And then people intellectualize, right? They were taught to problem solve instead of to feel. And so the more avoidant folks that I see in my practice, have had this avoidant strategy of emotional suppression their entire lives, and then that leads them to not be vulnerable and intimate with their partners. They're always trying to just problem solve. And if you have a partner that really wants emotional connection and vulnerability, that's not gonna go over so well cuz they're gonna start to feel shame around your emotions by proxy cuz they had their emotions paired with shame when they were kids. It's the wrong thing to do to feel. Vulnerability is a weakness. And then we have more anxious people. They use more band-aiding strategies, so they go find things outside of themselves to try to help blunt pain. So that is maybe bringing in partner and using partner to just immediately soothe without them being able to actually feel through their own experience, which cuts off the emotional wave, which stops emotional processing and integration. And then they might, if partner's not available or can't meet their needs, They'll vent to their sister, they'll go eat, they'll go shop on Amazon. You know, they're gonna go look for that quick dopamine hit somewhere to try to stop the wave. And we can't stop the wave. We have to let the wave happen. And we have to actually learn how to anchor ourselves in safety while we're riding that emotional wave so that we can start teaching our brain emotions aren't gonna kill us.
It's brilliant.
They're, they're there to give us information.
Mm-hmm.
And when we feel through them, the brain makes sense of that information. And then we can actually act from a place of conscious awareness and decision instead of a trauma response and a response of threat.
Well, that was just one of the best answers I've ever heard about why people don't feel. Yeah, because like you said, this integration piece— I want to go deeper into that. That's fascinating. I think about the word integration. I don't know the etymology behind it, but I, but I assume it's something like its opposite. So if something is disintegrated, it's disparate. There's pieces everywhere that aren't connected.
That's right.
So It's funny, I was on a panel 2 days ago with Mark Groves, and you and him have a lot of beautiful similarities in the way that you're teaching people how to feel, essentially. And on the panel, we were describing Hawkins' work, Dr. David Hawkins. His book is on the table here.
Okay.
And he says, for many of us, I think especially for men, I'm curious how you feel. For many of us, the biggest space in life is the space between the head and the heart.
Yes.
And the lack of integration in these spaces is felt. But I wonder how you would explain what's happening in our society I love that you said integration, but I believe that modernity has created a really Molotov cocktail of ways in which either an anxious or an avoidant can go into coping strategy.
Yes.
I myself dealt with a pornography addiction for multiple decades. I had an anxious attachment, born to a situation where the father left early and my mother was manic bipolar. So it wasn't until I got in relationships, Sarah, that I was really shown a mirror of, well, this is what processing feels like and looks like. This is what honesty and the truth feels like and looks like. So I wonder, can you describe where we are and why society has really built an environment that allows people to not feel? Yes. Whether it's drinking, smoking, unconscious sex, you name it. I mean, there's so many things that pull people away from self and from other. What's your high-level understanding of what people get to look out for in society so that they can start to feel, so that they can start to do the work that's most important?
You're right. I think mindfulness is just at the core of that and just presence in your own body and, and mindfulness to the present moment because it is only in the present moment that we are actually firing from the smartest part of our brain, our prefrontal cortex, where we have conscious decision making, where we have inhibition, where we have, uh, you know, all of our executive functions. And I think it does start with those early attachment years where we were unfortunately maybe not given consistent attunement or given no attunement at all. Yeah. And so we learned these strategies. Early on. And then as we are adults and we have access to just anything immediately— I mean, we have immediate access to things now. We can DoorDash food, we can get on the internet and get, you know, pornography immediately. You can get on dating sites and start chatting with other people immediately. There's just this massive ability to have instant gratification. And when you're experiencing pain in your body that you don't know how to cope with because you've never learned how to cope with it, and the possibilities are endless to, you know, interrupt that cycle, people are gonna use those strategies. They're gonna seek the immediate comfort instead of learning how to sit in discomfort. And learning how to sit in discomfort teaches your brain that discomfort is a message and it has to be integrated and it has to be learned from. And we're not learning anything. We're just digging ourselves deeper in a hole when we're either pushing people away that really do matter to us— our spouse, you know, our children, our family of origin, whoever, you know, our friends— and go more into isolation and pour ourselves into, you know, doom-scrolling TikTok or smoking a bunch of weed or whatever it is. Or whether we're anxious and we're just like, oh, I need to get— I need to get just something immediately to make this feeling go away. So, you know, we DoorDash a milkshake at you know, midnight.
Yeah.
I just think it's, we weren't taught early on, and there's some generational pieces to that as well. There's some generational pieces where Gen X and the millennials were just not raised by parents that knew how to give us this type of attunement. 'Cause they were raised by the Greatest Generation who went through the Great Depression. So it was like, oh, you think life's hard? Well, I lived on potatoes for 30 years, right? So that they passed those kind of traits down to the boomers. And then the boomers sort of said, hey, you know, yeah, get tough, you'll be fine. The Gen X was the latchkey kids. So there's a lot of avoidant folks that came outta that generation. And then the pendulum swung a little bit more the other way where it's like everybody's special, everybody gets a trophy.
Mm-hmm.
And that creates a lot more attachment anxiety. So we just have struggled through the generations to find this balance of feeling and approaching the difficulty of life. With a sense that we can move through pain and also at the same time learning some grit. There's a balance there, right? There's a balance between vulnerability and grit. And unfortunately, a lot of us never found that balance early in childhood. And so we've then grown up in an age where everything's accessible. And so we're gonna use those things as coping tools.
I love that you brought up generational healing and its opposite. I think about the, the Native American term, the seventh generation principle. They say that, and they were switched on way before Jung, way before New Thought movement, way before collegiate and academia were looking at the self. This is like for thousands of years. They said that when you heal, it ripples back 7 generations and it ripples forward 7 generations. So literally, like in utero, we know from studies that babies can come out with hypervigilance if the mother goes through extreme trauma and stress. This is like a scientific fact.
Yes, it's epigenetic.
Epigenetic. So one thing I've been starting to grok that I'd love your opinion on is this phrase emotional epigenetics. The way in which the genome is fixed, but the epigenome turns off and on the different things like the FKBP5 for hypermethylation or hypomethylation. Talk about the emotional epigenetic component of what we've inherited and what we get to heal.
Yes, absolutely. So yes, there's a lot of research that stress in utero, for example, can turn on genes associated with having a more sympathetically dominant nervous system, right? So you're more hypervigilant. You sort of have the ability to turn on into fight or flight with a smaller trigger than maybe your average person. And that's tough. So then we see babies who are, you know, they don't sleep well. They, they may be kind of up all night. They may startle easily, those types of things. And then that can wear down the parent of the caregiver, right? Or the caregiver.
Yeah.
Of that child.
Yeah.
Who's not sleeping, who's not able to care for themselves very well. The marriages are getting disturbed. And so then we start to see environmental shifts that just reinforce that sort of predisposition, right? And we can, and we can just continue in these cycles where we have babies that are coming out stressed. They're a little bit more difficult in their temperament. Marriages start to break down. Self-care starts to break down. Mm-hmm. We lose attunement to those child, to those children or that child. We start to then see the family dynamic become more and more stressed. And then we just continue to pass it on to the next generation. And it is not an easy thing to heal in the midst of all of that stress. It is not an easy thing. And a lot of people are just floundering. The people that come up, that I come across in my practice, they're stressed out. They're stressed out because of finances, they're stressed out because their marriage is falling apart. They're stressed out because their kids have issues. You know, we've seen the rise of, um, developmental disorders in children, and a lot of parents are raising children with autism or with other types of neurodivergency that might be a little bit more difficult to care for. And so we are not, we're not doing a good job of serving these people either. Mm-hmm. We're just not doing a good job. I, I mentioned before we even started recording that I ran a program for clinical psychology for a number of years. And although I'm— I think that institution is, is a wonderful institution, programs in general are being shortened because of the mental health crisis in this country. We need more providers. So where it used to be like 3 years to get a master's degree, now you can get a master's degree in 9 months. Something has to be cut out of that training.
Sure.
To make it that short. And so I don't think the providers that are graduating are as well equipped and, and people are getting worse faster than we can treat them. So that's an issue.
Let's go back to what I mentioned with the Native American principle, but I would— I'd love it from your lens of academia as well. You have a, um, a bachelor's, you have a master's, and you have a PhD.
I do.
You went very deep.
What went very deep?
Before I ask you the question about generational imprinting, what made you go 3 levels deep all the way to PhD? What was that for you?
It was Very unhealed perfectionism.
That's so honest.
And some deep unworthiness that I felt like I had to prove myself with my intellect because I did not feel worthy in really any other way growing up.
I love your ability to just be real. I think that's why so many people are gravitating towards you. The age of the fearless, invulnerable leader is officially dead.
It's dead.
In my opinion.
Yeah. And he's being buried.
Maybe 30 years ago you could speak from a pulpit with perfectionism and people would buy it. Now, because of the rise of instant media, we get so many touchpoints with each other.
Right.
There's nowhere to hide is what I'm saying. And I think it's beautiful.
Sure.
I think it's amazing to be a leader that shares their own stuff.
Yeah. Oh, I'm very open about my stuff. How else are we leading? Yeah.
How else are we leading if we're not talking about our own interdimensionality?
Right. I mean, and I think that that's a reason that my audience does trust me to some degree, right? And is because they're like, oh, you were willing to admit that you were pretty messed up. Mm-hmm. And you took us through the process of how you got better, and now you teach other people that process. And so, if I could have a, a, a PhD in psychology where I studied the science of relationships and I was still a hot mess and my marriage fell apart, it just goes to show you that all the knowledge in the world isn't really what brings healing. It's moving through pain appropriately that brings you through healing. And I didn't know how to do that.
That wave you talked about, I remember when I was creating the blueprint, the self-liberation blueprint, I researched Dr. Jill Taylor. Have you heard of her work? I have. So she says that emotions, her brother unfortunately was schizophrenic, that's what drove her to the work. And so when they put the leads on the brain and they measured the wave as you speak, they found that it was 90 seconds for an emotion to actually move through. And for me, an immediate question popped up. Why do we keep it for longer than 90 seconds then? My theory, I'm curious what yours is, my theory is that we have an unconscious belief structure that almost holds it like lock and key, that just keeps cycling that wave so it never gets to hit the shoreline.
That's right.
What's your take on that?
Yeah, I think some of that is true. And then I think we also engage in those coping strategies, right? That just like break, like don't allow us to move through the waves.
The wave never gets to touch the shore.
Never gets to touch the shore. And this is really interesting 'cause I know you're very into breathwork. And sometimes people, you know, breathwork is amazing. There's a million benefits of it. So, you know, by no means am I saying don't do it, right? It's a wonderful thing.
Yeah.
But sometimes if you jump into that too soon, right? So like you start to feel a little dysregulated and you immediately jump into that breathwork, you're actually cutting the wave off, right? And so I teach breathwork in terms of we do it very slowly and intermittently as we're having an emotional experience. Experience. So it's just enough to ground us in safety and to, to put a message in the brain that, hey, we're safe as we move through this pain, but we're not just going to jump into it immediately when we're super dysregulated. We're actually going to move through that dysregulation, and we're going to use breathwork very strategically through that wave. Whereas a lot of people will go into this really intense breathwork like the moment they start to feel something difficult, and what we're teaching the brain is, hey, I can't move through this difficulty without having this like way to bring myself down. It's kind of preventing you from, and if you were just riding that wave for 90 seconds and using breathwork more strategically.
Yes.
As a momentary safety anchor, and maybe those breaths are 5 seconds, 6 seconds apart, you know, as we notice the sensations in our body, we actually cannot cut off the wave. So I think a lot of people, are using these strategies just too soon. They need to be able to sit through their pain. And people are like, well, what about if I just go for a run? Isn't that a healthy coping strategy? I'm like, running's great. I'm never gonna tell you not to run. Yeah. I think you should run. Running's amazing. But if you're running the moment you start to feel like something's wrong, again, you're cutting the wave off, right? We have to be able to be present with our pain in order for the brain to go, okay, I felt that. I took the message. I know what it meant. I've integrated into who, what that means for me and my identity and my whole life. Now we kind of reach this safer place in our nervous system, that ventral vagal state of safety. And that is when our executive functions come online.
Ooh.
So that's when we can be present and open and mindful and curious and compassionate and empathetic instead of, okay, we're cutting the wave off and then it never gets to complete. And then like you said, those inner programs are sort of locking it in place, making that cycle happen over and over and over again. So we just keep using the same coping over and over and over and over again. We're stuck.
Can you share how exactly breathwork— can breathwork be a crutch to actually have people not feel their emotions? It can. How so?
It can, because again, if you're starting to, let's say, move from ventral vagal to fight or flight, and you feel that in your chest, and immediately you've been trained of, okay, I need to do this really deep breath work. Essentially that wave, it's like going backwards and it's like cutting the wave off, right? Instead, if we use it more strategically in that process, where I teach a method that I created called SOLAS and it's somatic looping for attachment-centered embodiment. And really what it, what it does is we scan down the body, we notice the sensation, we say it out loud, and then we pair it with a breath. We don't try to move it, we don't try to change it, we don't try to make it go away. We just notice it, take the breath, and then we move on to the next sensation. We notice it, we take the breath, we move on. And so that breath is spaced out enough where it's providing enough of a safety signal or anchor, just like your mom would've done if she was an attuned caregiver in that example I gave earlier, right? Where she was hugging you and she was calm and she was saying, it's okay, I'm here. You can cry, let it out. That's the safety anchor that actually classically conditions or wires together in the brain. I feel something difficult in my body, but I'm still safe. The breathwork used strategically can do the same thing. We just don't wanna front load it, right? Where we cut the wave off. We wanna use it strategically throughout the process of feeling to allow enough integration to occur while still anchoring and sending that message to the brain, hey, I'm safe.
That's so good. I learned breathwork from Commander Mark Devine, a Navy SEAL commander in 2010. 16. And in 2020, during the whole craziness, I launched the Breathe Breath and Wellness Program. And I learned from Dan Burleigh and Anahata Ananda and Niraj Naik and all these people. I traveled to Thailand for 30 days, did this training, and I saw this time and time again of which you speak, where people were coming in thinking they had a program that said you're broken.
Yeah.
And that really struck me as just complete lies and falsities because none of us are broken. No, I believe we're just burdened. But if you go into an experience like ayahuasca, plant medicine, breathwork, of any kind and you go in there with the presupposition that you're broken, well, that's just what's going to be reflected back to you. And then when you go into the deep holotropic breathwork, all you're going to feel is some kind of ecstatic moment. But the wave— I love how you speak about the wave— the wave inside that I saw in others, it never actually came to completion. And then they show up the next day still thinking they were broken. It's like, yo, y'all, the breathwork ain't working.
Yeah, it gives them a momentary sense of peace. But then the dysregulation comes right back, right? So you have to be able to feel through your emotions. And then that, you know, other more intense type of breathwork, it's like weightlifting, right? For your nervous system. It's good for you. It is breathwork. I would never tell you that it doesn't have amazing benefits. It does. But I think when we start to notice that we're having an intense emotional experience, we don't want to rescue ourselves with intense breathwork. To bring our nervous system down before psychological integration occurs. We have to be more strategic about it. Mm-hmm. And so that is, uh, that is a tool that I teach very deeply in my program, in my coaching program for, you know, how to really move through emotions, especially, and, and to be able to stay within your window of tolerance. This is another thing that somatic processing, um, sort of doesn't explain very well, or people don't talk about it very much. Which is especially if you're more avoidant, you might be more frozen. So your nervous system has pulled this hard brake of like the dorsal vagal system where you are two levels above safety. So there's fight and flight, and then we move one level above that. That's dorsal vagal shutdown. That's freeze. Mm-hmm. My more avoidant folks are living in that freeze state, or even just what we call functional freeze, which is a blended state of both fight or flight being turned on. And dorsal vagal being turned on, kind of like the gas and the brake in a car being pressed at the same time.
It's really bad for gas mileage.
Very, very bad, right? Then it's not good for the engine. Not good at all. And they're living their whole lives this way. The flight or fight component is pushing adrenaline, which allows them to be productive so they can go to work, they can cook meals, they can take care of their kids. They're totally dissociated from their inner world, totally checked out. They're just moving through the motions. And they don't even realize it. There's no presence there, which means that there's no true attunement with the others around you. You have to be present to be attuned. And so the comfort and the healing we get from true attunement with others isn't happening as much as it should, especially for my more avoidant folks.
Let's go into this beautiful analogy. I think about every person, and whether you have— whether y'all have a great relationship with your mother or not, I believe that all children come into the world from an emanation of love. I believe that all children come from God, from our creator, and that we all essentially sign up for some kind of mysterious contract. If you want to look at the Vedics or the astrology or the Eastern philosophy, whether we sign up for that or not, I'm trying to explain the ineffable. We really don't know. God's a great mystery, right? But we come into this world and we choose our parents, if you take that vein, or just the fact that you accept that your parents are your parents, right? Either one you want to go on. We get into these situations where our parents learned from their parents, who learned from their parents. Alan Watts describes it as, it's all wretch and no vomit. Yeah, everybody's just teaching their children to raise everybody the same.
Yeah.
If somebody like is not in a situation where their parents were really providing attunement, presence, the mother let's say was gone, you could fill in the gaps of anything that I'm sure you've seen. What's the beginning place of someone to actually start feeling, being honest with themselves, and move through the wave that they feel inside of themselves when it wasn't given by parental example? Where's the start, the true starting place for that?
The true starting place for that is awareness of your own patterns. And so, but that's where a lot of people stop. They stop at the level of insight, and we've got a lot more work to do after insight. But if we can't be honest with ourselves about how we're behaving and how that behavior affects ourself, and others, there's no way we're going to change it. And a lot of people, you wouldn't believe, get stuck on that very first step. Their ego and that, you know, conscious desire to protect the sense of self is so inherently strong that when they start trying to look within, immediately their own internalized shame that they've never worked through starts coming up, and it's a huge block. And then they go, you know what, I kind of am who I am, and people can either love me or leave me. Or, you know what, I can't think about this right now. I've gotta do X, Y, and Z in my life, and I'll come back to it and I'll dig into myself later. And so we keep putting it off or making excuses for why it's really not our fault, or, you know, I am this way because of that. Yeah, you might be this way because of your attachment trauma, but it's still your responsibility to fix it. And this is where we have to have just radical self-accountability for the way that we are. And totally just admit, I need to do something different. This is not working for me in my life. My relationships are suffering. Maybe my health is suffering, my mental health is suffering. And so I've gotta start with knowing who I am. And I know that you've talked about this a lot, knowing who you are.
Yeah.
It has to start with who am I? And our behavior is just representative of who we are. It's not who we are. It's a function of, you know, it's not who we are at our core. It's not who we are in our spirit, right? But it's who we've been conditioned to be. And it's just conditioning. It's just learning. And if you've learned one way of being, you can learn to be something else.
Yeah. I feel like in our society there's this dichotomy of radical self-empowerment or learned helplessness.
Yes.
On the way from learned helplessness to true ownership and accountability of one's behavior, there's got to be a sweet Goldilocks zone of comfort. You talked about the window of tolerance earlier in breathwork. Is there a window of tolerance between learned helplessness and radical self-empowerment?
There is, because we can't— I see it from sort of a spiritual perspective too. Like, if you actually read the Bible from start to finish, like, God just doesn't come in at the very beginning and reveal everything. He could not— we would not be able to handle the weight of understanding all of our sin at once. So from a spiritual perspective, if God met us here and was present with us and said, "Here is all your sin. Here is all the ways that you're doing things wrong, right? That you deviate from my standard of perfection," we couldn't hold the weight of that. And so it, that is not the goal here. The goal here is to not have 100% an understanding of every way in which we are making a mistake. Our goal is to have an understanding of the major patterns that are holding us back. And let, let's work through those things first. It, it's a lifelong learning journey. It's a lifelong healing journey. So we just gotta be committed to some starting point where we can see, okay, these are the major patterns that are really affecting my life in a negative way. And let's start there. And then you gain the ability over time to get to that piece where we can start to move through pain. Mm-hmm. So it starts with awareness. And then I teach a lot of metacognitive work or a lot of mindset work that's really important. And then we move into the emotional processing. Then we can start acting different. We start seeing different outcomes in our lives. We feel more empowered, and then we can continue to heal throughout our whole lives. It's not like we start with the weight of it all. We wouldn't be able to handle it.
Yeah. It'd be like going to the gym and trying to squat 500 pounds emotionally.
It's not gonna happen. Yeah. You're gonna wreck your body immediately and it's gonna hold you back.
So then where does grace fall in into someone's window of tolerance?
Yeah. Grace is huge. Grace and forgiveness. My husband taught me, and I'm not sure where he heard this, he said he couldn't even remember, you almost have to have delusional self-forgiveness. But with accountability at the same time. So you have to have accountability. Yes, I did that and it's wrong and I'm committed to changing it. Or I tend to do these things and they tend to hurt people or they hurt myself and I'm committed to changing it. But I also radically forgive myself because Jesus radically forgave us. And shame is the only emotion that has no positive benefit. Every other emotion that we've documented has some research behind it that there is something positive that can come out of it. Shame has none.
Oh, wow. For people that need to hear that again, which is everyone, it's on the screen right now. The map of consciousness. Shame vibrates at 20, y'all. 20. That is the lowest frequency that a human being can experience. They measured it in hertz when they did it in the lab. 20 compared to love, which is above 400 hertz, 400 vibrations per second. I think about people's inability to feel shame, especially— let's go into the men.
Oh yeah, man.
A man's ability to feel shame and process it through the way in which you speak.
Yes.
I believe is his ability to live life as a true masculine man, a man that cannot feel shame, that keeps shame locked down. It's like holding a beach ball in the pool. Eventually it has to come up, otherwise your arms are gonna fall off.
And it comes up as defensiveness and it comes up as anger. Anger and fear are always gonna live on top of shame. And most of the time, anger is the top level emotion, under that is fear, under that is shame. And so yeah, men will get angry. They'll get angry when you say, hey, you did something and it hurt me. And not all men. I mean, I know a lot of securely attached men and men that are, you know, my co-host Raina, her husband's an amazing man. My second husband is an amazing man who, but they had to work through this, right? They had to work through this to get there. Especially my husband. He had a lot of trauma, but shame eventually comes up. As anger or fear. And it is— those things don't help us connect in our relationships. They don't help us co-regulate. They don't help us foster a sense of healthy intimacy. And yeah, it's just, it's internalized shame. Like, all insecure attachments have internalized shame. And working through shame is a huge part of my program. So when we talk about emotional processing, we have to start recognizing where shame lives in us. Where we hold it.
I like that you said insecure, because I feel like whether it's avoidant or anxious, it's a predication of insecurity. There's an insecurity about being securely attached. So one would go to the left or to the right. For people that have never heard attachment theory at all, can you describe that on a super high level?
Super high level? Yeah. So attachment theory really posits that our earliest relationship with our caregivers gave us information that lives in our subconscious mind around what does it mean to be us and what does it mean to be close to people. So what is intimacy? They're our first mirrors of intimacy. We learn it through what we call modeling, where we watch our mom and dad interact with each other and we sort of observe their romantic relationship. So that gives us imprints around what is intimacy, what is romantic intimacy. And then when they interact with us, they give us messages of, well, what is intimacy? And so say we are a child of parents who are very dismissive. We have this sort of attachment spectrum when on one end we have avoidance, on the other end we have anxiety, and then we have people that just stay on the anxious end, just stay on the avoidant end. And then we actually have an attachment called fearful avoidance where they can kind of navigate that whole spectrum so they can jump over to anxiety, they can jump over and into avoidance.
Mm-hmm.
Let's just talk about avoidance for a second. So we have caregivers just like that earlier example that say, oh, don't worry about that. You're fine. Don't be so upset. That's what they want. The bullies just wanna see you upset. Just, you know, calm down and never let 'em see you sweat. Then what has been imprinted into the subconscious? What is that message? Well, first, if, if we wanna go really light with that message, it's don't feel emotions are bad, they're weakness, and don't show 'em to anyone else. If we go deeper, the wound that really gets created is defectiveness, which is a huge shame wound. So it says, well, I have all these big feelings in my body, but I guess nobody else around me does. All the adults that know more than me. About how to function in the world are telling me that that's wrong. So something must be wrong with me. And so defectiveness is this wound where it says, I am bad. It hits at the level of identity. It's a shame wound, you know, and shame, as you know, is an identity emotion. And it says, and I can't be fixed. So of course they're gonna lean into avoidance. Of course when things get hard, they're gonna throw up their hands and be like, well, this is hopeless. Well, I can't give them what they need. Well, I can't deal with this right now. It's too overwhelming. And it just leans, it leans 'em out in the relationship. It, it keeps them, you know, from coming close because if your internal programming says, I'm defective there, I am who I am. I can't give people what they need. It's not in my nature to be weak or vulnerable. I, I don't like having to work through conflict and I just, I can't be somebody who can give them that kind of intimacy that is. The number one thing my dismissive avoidant folks say is, I just don't think I can give my partner what they need. I'm like, that's your defectiveness wound spoken out loud.
Can you say that again?
Yeah, their defectiveness says, I just can't give them what they need. I can't do it. And can't never could. So if you're telling yourself I can't, if that is your inner program, I can't give them what they need, why would you try? It is learned helplessness.
I can't. Wow. Can't, never could.
Can't, never could.
That's so good. So for anybody that ever has said that out loud in a relationship, this is a signal that your unconscious is providing to you for learning, for healing, not for defectiveness, not for brokenness.
No, but it's just so important for people to understand nobody's defective. Nobody's defective. You were made by a creator that knew exactly what they were doing, that made absolutely no mistakes in creating you. And life is made intentionally by that God source.
Sorry to interrupt you.
No, you're good.
When I hear you correctly, tell me if I'm hearing you correctly. If we were born with the ability to love unconditionally, self and others, then what is it that gets in there that blocks us to say things like, "I can't." Yeah. What is that really?
Well, I have a psychological perspective and then I have a spiritual perspective. So which one do you wanna start with?
Well, I want you to weave 'em both together on a tapestry.
Okay, let's weave 'em both together. Okay. So psychologically, we would say those are programs in the subconscious. Okay, so those are our messages that we got from our caregivers that occurred so many times that it created a deep subconscious belief that it's true. Okay, and then our intimate partners, they just trigger that. Okay, they just trigger a very familiar feeling from our childhood.
Yeah.
And we go through the trigger cycle, and, you know, it's a large part of what I teach in my program is how the trigger cycle works, how we break it at every level— thought, emotion, behavior. And then, I mean, we just play it out. We just play it out, you know, like it's a play already written deep in our soul and we play it out in adulthood as if it's unchangeable. From a spiritual perspective, I am sort of a deliverance person. I'm a spiritual warfare person. I believe it's the work of the enemy. I believe that the enemy, you know, works within us in our own thoughts, in our own beliefs. They shape our parents' thoughts to injure us. Our parents end up acting in ways that then don't foster that unconditional love. And then the devil's like, ooh, I already know your mom planted that shame wound in you and I'm gonna exploit it. And I'm gonna work on you and I'm gonna get in your mind and I'm gonna make you believe that that defectiveness is true, that you should be ashamed. And if you think about it, that's the exact opposite of what Jesus Christ came to do. He came, he died to save us from our shame. So the devil knows that shame is a way that he can really break most people, take them away from their faith, take them away from love, which is what God wants from us. Love God, love others, love self. Those were the commandments. Love others as ourself, which implies you have to love yourself.
What an incredible school or play that we're so blessed to be in here. Do you ever just marvel at the fact that we're in a body?
Yeah, I do.
That we have a neural system. I do. That our mind is operating with like, hundreds of billions of kinetics per second. And as I talk to you, I'm experiencing your neural tree. And even in the room, just the ability to be a human being is what I'm saying.
Yeah.
Is so profound that we, we take it for granted, just like we take the magic of fire or electricity or the way it feels to hold a child, the way in which massive healing can happen if we just surrender to love. What do you make of both the astonishment and wonder of being alive?
Yeah.
And also the fact that the enemy of which you speak is operating as well. It's like, I don't think one could know what it's like without the two paradigms either. That's right.
God created a world of opposites. If you think about everything alone, because you can't really understand one without the other. I think if all these people that have had these near-death experiences, right? And they talk about, they all have these things in common. I mean, this has been studied deeply. Like what do these NDEs have in common? And what everybody kind of says is, Immediately I felt loved. Immediately I felt held. Immediately there was no shame. There was no fear. There was nothing.
They also talk about light. They all experience light.
Mm-hmm. They do. And so if we never were exposed to suffering and to limitations, how could we know the great love? How could we really accept it? How could we really know what gift that is? So I think personally, it's just my own personal opinion, that we're here to learn limitations. We're here to learn limitations because there are no limitations in heaven. And we couldn't appreciate that and we couldn't understand the depth of that without the limitation. We couldn't understand no limitations without limitations.
Spoken like a woman who's worked through limitations.
Yeah. Worked through a lot.
Yes, okay, let's go into that because it informs so much of your work. You know, with respect, whatever you feel comfortable to share that you believe would be of service to someone else. In a short span, there was a death that you experienced. There was health issues. There was your mother, I believe, going through an issue. There was a lot for you in a short time. Was that in 2004?
Yeah, it was in 2020, actually.
2020.
The heart of COVID So yeah, well, you have to kind of go back a little bit further to my history. I grew up with a bipolar parent and so an emotionally unavailable mom who my mom would give me the shirt off of her back. Back. She was very acts of service oriented. She would always be everywhere. She was very physically present, but she was very disconnected from her own emotions. Mm-hmm. And so her and my dad had this really toxic marriage and they never got divorced. I mean, they were together for 50 years, but it was a really poor model of what intimacy should be. You know, my dad was very unpredictable. Um, you know, he would have episodes of sort of mania where he could then, you know, move into more anger. And then depression, right? And so you never knew what version of dad you were gonna get. It was so unpredictable. Mm-hmm. And that was in its own way traumatic. You don't know if, you know, dad's just gonna blow his top out of absolutely nowhere and just overreact 10 times more than was appropriate for the situation. So I became a very hypervigilant child. And then my mom's inability to be truly emotionally attuned, I learned from watching my dad to escalate distress. To try to get my mom's attention. So I learned these really negative patterns as a child, and really I was developing fearful avoidant attachment, you know, believing that love was pain, you know, different side of the same coin, that you could never really trust anybody. 'Cause with fearful avoidance, their primary wound is betrayal. They have dysfunctional parents, they have trauma. Primary wound is betrayal, which is like, not like, oh, I believe people are gonna lie or cheat. It's more of like, if my own parents couldn't love me in a way that made me feel safe, then nobody ever could, because their job is to love me unconditionally and to make me feel safe. So if they can't do it, then obviously there's nobody out there that ever will. And so then in relationships, you go in with sort of these muddy glasses where you just sort of are very hypervigilant to the negative aspects of the relationship. And you can use a lot of dysfunctional behavior. We— you can jump into anxiety and chase only to pull back really hard and avoid. 'cause fearful avoidants are always sort of trying to get the most intimacy without getting hurt. So that's where that push-pull comes from. And, um, I got, I was in a relationship in high school that was very, very, uh, dysfunctional. That person was very narcissistic. And I think it even sort of solidified, you know, that love is pain.
Hmm.
And, um, I didn't really date that many people in between my high school relationship and the first, my first husband and my first husband. I thought I was marrying somebody opposite of my dad. So I really looked at my dad as being very sort of weak-minded. Um, he really struggled to hold a job. He, my mom had a lot of masculine energy. She always had to be sort of the provider, the caregiver, the person that took over everything. My dad had a lot of medical problems. He was very fragile. And so I was attracted to my first husband because he was this big guy who lifted weights and he was,, a little bit of a bully. And I didn't see that as problematic. I saw that as like, wow, you know, he doesn't let people step on him and he's gonna go far and he's gonna be a leader. And I remember when we bought my first car, you know, he went in there and he was like, I'm not taking that deal. And he was kind of a bully, but I almost viewed it as like, that's a positive thing because we ended up getting a really good deal on this car. Nobody's gonna push him around. He's gonna protect me. Well, it ended up that that strategy got used against me. So, you know, there was a very abusive relationship with lots of infidelity on his part. And I mean, I can't even list the number of affairs that I caught. And finally, after I had my second child and he developed a pretty severe alcoholism throughout the marriage, I mean, nobody starts out, you know, as an alcoholic, you know, in your teens and everything. It just, you know, we married in our mid-20s. And it just, it was a slow progression, you know? And so then the alcoholism just got worse and worse and worse. The abuse got worse and worse and worse. There were moments of sobriety and clarity and love that were followed by relapses into alcoholism and abuse. And so that really forms a trauma bond through intermittent reinforcement, where intermittent reinforcement's like sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
So you're always sort of sticking around waiting for the good to come back. And so I stayed in that marriage for 10 years when I should, should have gotten out. I mean, after a year, but I stayed and I had 2 children. And then when my daughter was 16 months old, I discovered a long-term affair that was happening even when I was pregnant with my second child. And that was just kind of like my breaking point. Like, I can't do this anymore. I filed for divorce. Um, ended up getting back with him after we were divorced. That's how trauma bonded I was. I mean, I was just addicted to this relationship. And then that ended up in a domestic violence situation, which ended up in an EPO, uh, DVO situation where I had a restraining order. We couldn't even exchange our kids. They had to, I had to drop them off at my parents' house. He picked them up at my parents' house. We couldn't even see each other legally. And then shortly after that, you know, we ended up having a really nasty custody battle. 2 weeks before our custody trial, he died from an overdose. Where he was apparently, um, from, from friends I learned he was trying to get off alcohol by using OxyContin, which was not a good strategy. Um, and he died of a combination overdose of OxyContin and alcohol overdose.
Can I ask you a question?
Yeah.
Do you feel like his soul did the best that it could with the level of consciousness it had? And do you feel like he actually needed to leave the planet because he felt like he couldn't heal?
Absolutely.
Absolutely. Like what a gift that was.
I think that God knew that he was just going to be more and more destructive. Like at his funeral, there could have been two little coffins there of my little girls. Like he was drinking and driving them. He was not a safe caregiver.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
You know, and I think God knew that he wasn't gonna get it together and it was time to come home.
Yeah.
That's my personal conviction. It took me a while to get there. Yeah. To believe that. But I, I, I 100% do now. And my entire, everything that The Love Doc does, I mean, my whole, you know, platform, all of the people that I've seen in my practice, this practice wouldn't exist without that pain of losing him because I was trying to work through very complex grief of grieving somebody that I, I loved, but in a very dysfunctional way and someone that was doing a lot of harm, but also was the father of my children. And my children did love him. And It was just a very, very complex grief. And he married somebody 6 weeks before he died. He flew off to Vegas, married somebody he didn't really know that well, changed off all the life insurance over to her. So she got all the life insurance when he died. We didn't get anything. She kept it. You know, it was a, it was a hard time. And then 6 weeks before that, this is at the height of COVID Okay. So this was like September 2020. 6 weeks before that, my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My dad already was struggling with early dementia, was wheelchair-bound for the most part. And so then I became caregiver to two of my parents at the time when I was experiencing my own grief and loss. And, um, I was dating a guy who was very dismissive avoidant, who basically did what dismissive avoidants do, which is run away from any vulnerability. So he saw me sort of breaking down, and that is just— that is a a repellent to a dismissive avoidant, right? They experience shame by proxy if you have emotions. So my emotions were very overwhelming. He immediately sort of backed away and said, I can't do that. My dog of 16 years passed away during this time. I had to put her down. She had chronic kidney disease and she was on her last leg. So I had what I call an attachment crisis, which it was just like all of these big attachments that I had formed were all kind of ripped away from me at once. And my nervous system just imploded, and I ended up having a nervous breakdown. And a lot of people think a nervous breakdown is psychosis or, you know, just you're losing it, you know, losing your mind. It's not. It often comes in the form of a physical illness. So I developed chronic vestibular migraine, which was an extremely debilitating kind of 24/7 condition where I had blurry vision, I was dizzy 24/7, I had extreme pain, nausea, ringing in the ears. And I was just barely functional. And I mean, I was one ace away from suicide. The only thing that kept me alive was, I can't let these girls lose two parents. I have to be there for my girls. And then I, by a chance happening, met a person who saw the brokenness in me in terms of my spirit. My spirit was, believed it was broken. I believed that truly I was a broken person. My life is terrible. I had this huge victim identity, just massive amounts of self-pity. And self-pity is like the super glue to hell, you know? It's like temporarily an anesthesia, but then it just keeps you stuck. And she led me to Jesus. And when I say my spirit turned around, it, it's— it hit the ground running and turned around. I mean, God transformed me and gave me enough stability and hope that I then went to the science because I'm a huge nerd and just always wanna go to the science. What does science have to say about what happened to me? Right? Sure. And, and I really learned about the deep things about the nervous system and how it functioned and emotional processing and, um, my mind and my old programming. And I just started applying tools to, to take a hold of my mindset and to recognize my thoughts and to reframe my thoughts and to keep my mind in a healthy space. And then I learned how to move through the pain and actually process that grief and process my trauma that I'd experienced. And yeah, I took a whole year of healing and then, you know, totally became a different person. And even, you know, Raina, as my best friend for 8 years, she likes to tell people like it's night and day of who I was before this and then who I was after all of this. And then I just started making social media videos about it. People started following along, kind of got a following. And then my husband was like, I met my husband. I should put that part in there. Who, um, also had taken a year of healing at the exact same time as me after his second divorce where he was just like, I, I've had two failed marriages. He was in, uh, the Army. He had a lot of combat trauma. He had a lot of childhood attachment trauma. His dad wasn't in his life and died early of alcoholism. And, um, he had to do a lot of work on himself too. And we just happened to meet each other at this point where we were like, okay, we're gonna put ourselves on the market. We've taken a year off. We've poured into ourselves. We've tried to heal, try to understand ourselves, getting to know ourselves and really work on our patterns at a, at a deep level. And I mean, we were together ever since, you know, we were best friends from kind of the start and we have a really happy marriage. He just adopted my children last year, so he's officially their dad. They changed their last name. Um, we're all Hensleys now. And, um, yeah. And then God has just put me on this mission to teach people that you're not broken. You just experienced pain and you have to learn how to move through it. And when you learn how to move through it, then you can love.
It's so touching. What an inspiration that your life has become.
Yeah, it's, it's could be a Hallmark movie. I'm telling you.
I don't know if Hallmark.
Yeah, I don't know.
There's a, there's a, they're more cookie cutter.
Yeah, they are. It could be a, maybe a, I don't know, Lifetime. I don't know.
So what comes up for me when I hear you share is there's multiple choice points for You said you were one day away from suicide, but you know, it was your children that kept you alive. And I think a lot of people can relate to that, actually. I never shy away from going into the dark and feeling the— oh no, the sticky stuff, because I know that to the degree that I go into the darkness, that I can experience true authentic joy. I mean, we've rebranded. You're one of the first episodes that are going to be coming out after—
amazing. We're rebranding too.
After 11 years, I I, I, like you, am a nerd. And by the way, nerds run the world.
I don't know if you run the world.
I don't know if you knew this.
I do know that.
When you're a dork or a nerd about something, it just means that you're into it.
Yeah.
And like people, that energy is infectious.
You're a rabbit hole person.
That energy is infectious, right?
It is.
You become a master of a domain.
Yeah.
Right? So, so for you, it's the master of being a human being and what it is to feel.
Yeah.
And all the different ways that the brain experiences, et cetera. The reason I'm saying that is because we've gone through an evolution. I've gone through an evolution as a father of two children and being with my wife now for 7 years. We just got married last year, actually.
Oh, congratulations!
In Hawaii. Because it was this culmination of— I remember I was on a coaching call once with a buddy, Mike Zeller, a man who's been on this podcast, and he said, Josh, what do you really want? What is it that you actually want? And I said, my deepest desire is to be in authentic joy. Not 24/7, because that's not possible, but but to have a baseline of authentic joy. That's my desire. That's my goal, if you will. But I know that by me saying that, God is going to bring me unique experiences to test that and to fortify that within me. So I'm praying for ease, God. I'm not praying for challenges.
Yeah.
The reason I'm saying this is because in order for us to really be in the embodiment of authentic joy, for it to live in our bodies, I believe— I'm curious what you believe— I believe that when we have a goal or when we have a way of being that we desire to be embodied, there are going to be limitations, or let's call them unconscious emotional patterns that come up, unconscious beliefs from our lineage as well. The way in which we meet those with grace, maturity, and love is, I think, the exact fruit that our life will bear. How do we meet? We have a goal. It's very good. We, we plan on having this thing, or we put our sights on this thing and our heart is pure. Our heart is very pure in the way that we're going towards it. But God, in the play that we signed up for, we have these limitations. We have these unconscious beliefs that pop up. To the degree that I meet them with maturity, love, and presence will be the quality of my life. How do we actually become mature to meet our own limitations such that we live the life of our dreams?
Yeah.
How do we actually do that?
Yeah, well, I think you said a really important word, which is authenticity. And from a neuroscience perspective, the state of authenticity, when someone truly feels like they are being their most authentic self, that is the most regulating thing to the human nervous system. And so what I try to teach people to be is the best version of your most authentic self, right? So it's a part of you that can move through pain, that can face adversity, that can, you know, have optimism and hope, and that can continue to, even when you are having difficulty, love and serve other people. And so much of my healing in that space of despair, I turned it towards trying to love and serve other people. And I think there's nothing that will get you out of self-pity or victimization or pessimism faster. Than trying to serve someone that needs help.
That can become a crutch as well.
It can.
If it's not pure.
If it's not pure.
If it's running from to be in service of others, but you're running from yourself, it can be a guise.
It can, right? So it has to be from pure heart. It has to be from, you know what? I'm experiencing this hardship, but I still have a duty to give to others. It doesn't all become about me. 'Cause I think it prevents some of that, This is all about me and my pain, which is that spirit of victimization, that spirit of self-pity. We have to be able to still serve ourselves and love ourselves as well as to continue to serve and love other people at the same time. Yes, definitely not using it for a crutch or in a narcissistic way because I help somebody so it makes me feel better.
Yeah.
No, it's more of like, servant-heartedness is both serving myself and loving myself and taking care of my body, my mind, my heart, my spirit. But also continuing to serve others, because that does help bring you out of the "it's all about me" sort of space that pain can bring for you.
How would one know, just on a high level, if they took an honest breath, how would they know if they're in a victim vibration specifically? What's some of the symptomology of being in a victim state?
Constant complaining. Complaining. I did a podcast on complaining a couple weeks ago. In my opinion, it becomes a character flaw because it's just like, this is bad, this is bad, this is terrible. I can't do this. It's just a huge negative focus. And so the mindset work that I teach people is like, there's a psychological perspective in cognitive behavioral therapy about capturing your thoughts, reframing them towards your own competence, your own confidence, your own values. Well, 2 Corinthians 10:5 says, take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ. So God actually said that we should be vigilant of our minds. He teaches that. And he teaches that, you know, that every thought that lands in our brain isn't necessarily true. So if Christ is the truth, then we should be making it obedience to Christ's consciousness, right? Which is really centered around love. And so my threshold, when I did that work, that metacognitive work in myself, My threshold was, is this loving to God? Is this loving to others? Is this loving to myself? If it was out of alignment with those things, I immediately said, I'm not participating in those thoughts. I'm gonna take 'em and throw 'em away in the trash can, and I'm gonna repent for that. And I'm gonna go to God and say, God, reshape my mind in this moment. So whether that was fear, which is not loving to God, it's the opposite of faith. Whether that was bitterness, which is not loving to my neighbor, whether that was self-rejection and unlovingness towards myself, I was not going to participate in those things anymore. So mind mastery was sort of my first step into healing. And I think it did start to feel more authentic to me to be loving instead of to be in self-pity and victimization. But I grew up in a household that was heavy on the self-pity and victimization. If my— and it's hard. If somebody wasn't complaining, there was no talking. If someone wasn't mad or disappointed or upset about something, they probably weren't moving their mouth. And that was a huge program that I had to unwind. And I still find myself sometimes falling back into that space because that old wiring still exists in the brain. It's weak now because it hasn't been used, but under the stress of enough pressure, will my neurons start to Shift over there. Sure. And so I have to be very consciously aware of being a master of my mind. Oh no, I'm going into self-pity. I'm going into victimization. I'm not participating with that because now I identify as an overcomer.
Yes. The intrusive thoughts are an interesting thing. I have described them in the past like there's leaves in the driveway that blow by. That's kind of like what intrusive thoughts are. If I grab the leaves and hold them, Well, then they're intruders that are staying for a while. How do you understand first? How can you first, whether it's through the lens of the enemy or Christ consciousness or academia, I guess you can go in any one.
I see 'em as parallel.
Any three. Maybe they're all the same then. So we'll speak from that lens. What are intrusive thoughts and why do you believe they're there to actually help us or guide us?
Yeah, so I believe that my thoughts are really not my own. This is just my own personal faith perspective. I believe God speaks to me. Me through my own thoughts. I believe the enemy speaks to me through my own thoughts. I believe I have some of my own natural thoughts about how to, you know, that are sort of coming from my spirit. And my goal was to differentiate the three. Okay? Is this God? Is this the enemy? Is this some benign thought of my own? And I just took 2 Corinthians 10:5 very seriously. Like, take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ. Because there's this idea and a lot of people are speaking about it now. And even quantum physics is jumping in on the conversation. So psychology, theology, quantum physics, sort of all triangulating to this one sort of theoretical framework that as a man thinks, so is he. And Tony Robbins says, your perspective is your reality. There's a million different ways to say it.
Sure.
But bottom line is when we hold those negative thoughts, like you said, the leaves that are blowing and we grab onto them, then essentially we're being victimized by our own mind. And we might not be able to control the first thought that comes through, but we sure as heck can monitor it, decide if we want to keep it, decide if it's in alignment with us and who we want to be, the best version of our most authentic self, and then decide to reframe it, decide to bring God into the picture and help us reframe it. Whether you want to use God or not, you have to have certain lines in the sand about your mind. And where it's gonna go and where it's not gonna go. And that helped me more than, I mean, that and emotional processing were the two keys to the kingdom of my healing.
Yeah, and I get that there's also this eminence of God in your life in a very major way. It's like a life support for you.
For sure.
So for people that have wounding around the word God, you know, I've been just unapologetically saying the word God because I think it's been something that we tiptoe around. Yeah. Much like the children and trans and all this craziness from TikTok and just really the distortion, the demonic distortion that's in the world.
For sure.
That people are not wanting to talk about 'cause they don't wanna hurt anybody's feelings. It's all ridiculousness.
Right.
It's all distortion. But I wonder, you know, the word God holds a significant presence in your life and I wonder how much if you speak to the truth of God and you really share from the purest heart to be in communion with God, it doesn't have to be the word God. It could be universe, it could be creator. I am unapologetic in the way that I say God. Have you found that in your circles, especially in academia, that there's a tiptoeing around the word God?
100%.
Why do you think that is?
Because we don't wanna hurt anybody's feelings. Just what you said, we don't wanna be, we all wanna be super inclusive.
But don't you think there's a big price that's paid for that?
100%. And I think that I am not willing to pay that price. I am not going to tiptoe around my faith. I am not going to force my faith on anybody, but I'm also not gonna not speak about it to not hurt someone's feelings, right? Because then I'm not being authentic. Yeah, I'm not being my most authentic self. God saved me. Jesus Christ saved me, and I will shout that from the rooftops until the day that I die, because I'm here to serve God. I'm not here— I mean, I am here to serve fellow man, but not above God. Right? God comes first. And I know what God did for me to transform me from someone who wanted to kill themselves to someone who now has, you know, a pretty successful business and, and a big voice and a big platform and, and gets to do what I love every single day and has the love of my life and gets to work with my best friend. The fruit of God's work is apparent in my life, so why would I choose someone else's comfort over acknowledging the God that changed me and transformed me and brought me these blessings. And he brought me these blessings because I followed his will. Because when you follow his instructions, there's blessings at the end. It's not because he's just random and he's like, well, I'm going to bless this person and not that person. No, he gives us an instruction manual, and when we live by that instruction manual, it's like the road to where the blessings live, right? It doesn't mean we won't suffer, True. Because life is full of suffering and God is very, very explicit about that in the Bible. Right? Like other people will participate in the enemy. You are gonna falter and participate with the enemy and that brings suffering.
Yeah.
Whether you do it or somebody else does it and it ripples back to you, life is gonna have suffering. But if you stay close to me, I'm gonna bring you out of that suffering and I'm gonna bring you to redemption until the next thing hits. So staying close to me is the best path. Because it's the path of least pain. It is the path of the most support. It's the path of the most love. And so I'm just, I am not willing to dampen that voice because I would be stepping out of authenticity.
Amen. Aho. I feel that. I think about the Blue Zone experiment was a massive meta-analysis. I know you know about the 5 Blue Zones in the world. You've heard of this.
I've heard of this.
This meta-analysis. Incredible because it wasn't just the food they ate, it wasn't just the relationships they had. Guess what the through line was as to why the 5 spots in the world have the most centenarians? It was they all had a faith in a higher power. So if that doesn't bring up the hair on your arms, I don't know what will. We're looking for this absolute undeniable proof in the world that our ego doesn't have to be in control, I think.
Yeah. And, and one of the second things is that they all felt supported and loved by other people.
Sure. That was a huge part of it, which is a fulcrum of your work. So, so for me, it brings up this big question. If really our goal here is to learn unconditional love to the, to the greatest degree that we can for ourself and for other people, I don't believe that it can happen outside of marriage and children. That's my paradigm. I'm not saying that that needs to be everyone's life, but I just believe there's no way Josh could ever know Josh or could be sitting here with you if I didn't have a wife that I love, that teaches me so much about myself, and my children that teach me even more at times. I don't think it's possible to heal relational stuck energy in motion, a.k.a. trauma, if you're outside of a devoted relationship with children.
It's really—
that's my viewpoint. What's yours?
Yeah, I mean, to some degree, you know, I do agree. I think that if you look evolutionarily, our mating strategy is is different than most beings, right? We mate for life and we form intimate—
There's some penguins and birds that mate for life.
There's a handful of other species. Yeah, there's a handful of other species, but humans form deep intimate relationships, bear children through those relationships, and then if we look at the data and it just makes common sense that if those parents stay together and are happy, those children are most protected.
And are happy.
And are happy. And then they go on to be successful successful members of community and have families and have successful marriages. That's the opposite of the generational trauma, right?
Yes.
And then if you're not doing that, I always say there's nobody gonna trigger you more than your spouse and your kids. Those people are gonna trigger you. And a trigger is just a mirror of what you need to still work on, right? Of what is inside of you that is hurting. When you're triggered, you're just being shown a mirror. Here's what's going on inside of you, right? Because when someone triggers us, we shouldn't be going, why are you triggering me? You're so bad. We should be going, why am I triggered by this? What's going on with me that I am feeling this way in response to this behavior? Yeah. And when you don't have that construct of the people that are gonna trigger you the most, which is your married partner, cuz that's the highest level of intimacy.
Mm-hmm.
And your children. You're not going to get that mirror. So you can just continue to gallop along in life thinking that you're the best thing since sliced bread and not do the work.
It's a beautiful place to hide for many people.
It is. And—
Sorry, go ahead.
No, and I'm not saying that everybody should absolutely get married or have children.
I want to be respectful.
But I do believe that it is the most informative place for your own growth.
Well, where do the wounds happen, Sarah? They happen in relationship.
Yeah, it gets messy. They happen in—
So whether it's whether it's generational or this lifetime, they happen in relationship to a caregiver or a parent of some sort, which were— which those wounds were imparted upon them generationally, 7 generations back, if you look at that 7th generation principle. Have you heard of the cherry blossom study?
Oh gosh, that sounds so familiar. I know I've heard about it.
We've got to talk about this.
Okay, refresh my memory. This feels like Psych 101.
This is so cool. So I think it was 2014, uh, researchers, they would shock a male rodent and they would have it smell cherry blossoms, and they measured the neural system response in 2 generations down. Just when that offspring smelled cherry blossoms, it would exhibit the same excitatory response. So that shows us that, that literally imprinting, epigenetic, emotional epigenetic imprinting happens. We know for sure at least 2 generations. Then when I, when I spoke at Dave Asprey's conference, I went even deeper and I found some that were 7 generations, which totally mirrored the 7 Generation Principle. So if we know that just the smell of a cherry blossom can exhibit a stress response 2 generations down in a rodent, what's your understanding from what you know?
Yeah, so it's just a part—
How it applies to humans.
Yeah, so what you're describing is a term in psychology called classical conditioning, and that was actually discovered, have you ever heard of Pavlov's dog? Yeah, of course, the bell. Yeah, the bell, and it got paired with the food that made the dog salivate, and then the bell became what made the dog salivate even outside. Outside of the presence of the food. So it's just wiring together in the brain of two responses. That's all it is. Okay. So John B. Watson took that and ran with it, and he did a lot of studies showing that two automatic responses in the brain can be very conditioned or wired together. But the beautiful thing about conditioning is that it's just learning. And so whatever we learn, we can unlearn. And so we can actually decondition a stimulus that's been conditioned together. I mean, that's been proven. So again, that's sort of the whole basis around my SOLIS framework that I was talking about before in emotional processing, where before what was wired together is, oh my gosh, I feel this in my body and that's really bad. I gotta make it go away. Dissociate from it or I gotta Band-Aid it, right? Well, I'm teaching them to do something different, which is condition that you can stay present with it, but anchor in your breath to tell your brain you're safe. So now we're wiring together. I feel this big response in my body, whether it's the tight chest or the butterflies in my stomach or the lump in my throat, but I'm still safe. We've wired those two things together. So it's not permanent. Conditioning is not permanent. We can recondition things. We can recondition, we can repair things together in the brain.
I love that you have this. Why do you call it SOLAS framework?
Yeah, so it's just an acronym, somatic looping for attachment-centered embodiment.
But the word solace is interesting, because I think about solace as like a blanket. Yeah. Like a warm blanket.
It's just like feeling of safety.
Yeah. I find that frameworks are really powerful because they become this starting place, but then ain't no framework going to save you when you're feeling a wave.
Yeah.
You got to feel the wave.
You've got to feel the wave.
You can have a framework, but the framework goes out the window when it's 3 in the morning and your son or daughter kicks you and wakes you up. And then you realize you haven't gone to bed till 5 or 6 in the morning, which was me last night.
Oh, I am very, very sleep deprived right now. I feel you so hard on that. My daughter had a cheer competition, as I mentioned before, and she had woke us up at 5:00 AM the morning before, and then we woke up at 4:00 in the morning to travel here. So I get it.
This is why I'm saying, and with respect to people that choose consciously, not from their wounds that block them from consciousness, but if people choose consciously to not have marriage and children and it makes you truly authentically happy, then I support that. This isn't a disrespect to those people. Yet again, though, I am presented with a situation as a husband and a father with sleep deprivation, still having a beautiful, loving responsibility that we get to do here today. There's still a maturity that's involved that I don't believe, Sarah, can be experienced without being the caregiver and the provider and the safety holder of people outside yourself. I just don't think it's possible. I'm with you. That's my life experience.
That's my life experience too. I mean, I have to agree with view on that because, you know, how I am going to respond, you know, this was interesting. So the night before, my daughter woke us up at 5 AM when she didn't really have to be up till 6:45 because she's just excited, you know. She's 9. Competitions are all— if you've ever been to a cheer competition, they're crazy, okay? It's loud music, everybody's cheering, everybody's screaming. It's very, it's a very intense sport.
Yeah.
And, um, the night before, you know, we had said— I put her to bed she wakes us up at like 11 and she said, "I can't sleep. My stomach hurts." And my husband, you know, father's role is a little bit more aired towards grit. I mean, they're supposed to be vulnerable and have attunement, but also a little bit more grit. It's like I always say, the role of the father is to allow kids to sit in a little more difficulty where moms are a little more nurturing and a little more soothing. And it's like pulling a string at both ends to keep it taut in the middle, right? Like that's, it's a really great balance. That's so good.
That's so good.
Like fathers are so needed, right? And so, So he goes, yes. Well, baby, he said, the best place to be if you don't feel good is your bed. So I'm gonna need you to go lay down, you know, and if you get sick or something, you know, come get us. But I think the best thing to do is go lay down. And then I'm sitting there and I'm wide awake after this, right? And I'm like, if I don't go check on her and see her with my own two eyes, because I was kind of dozing in and out and he woke up and dealt with that. And then I woke up and he kind of told me that she came in and, and said this. And I'm like, if I don't go check on her with my own two eyes, I'm not gonna be able to fall asleep. Right? So I just had to check and make sure she's really just excited. She's not really sick to her stomach. You know, she just needs to lay in bed and she will fall asleep. Right? Yeah. So I had to go in there and, okay, baby, let's get back to bed. You know, you're just excited and you just need to go back to sleep. And then I fell right asleep. And so it's, there's, there's definitely a diff— different dynamic with mothers and fathers.
Oh yeah.
But bottom line is nobody, you're never gonna learn to to really deal with something super hard with all of the constraints that family and children bring on you and learn how to overcome it because those constraints don't happen anywhere else, right? Like you're never gonna be as stressed at work as your family will stress you out.
Of course.
It's not possible. It is not possible.
Total truth.
Like when you're a parent and you're like, you know, your kid gets the stomach bug and you're like catching their puke in their hands as they're running to the toilet. Like that's no other experience. You can't get that. Yeah. Anywhere else. You can't get— and in the nervous system, there's two sort of analogies in the literature. There's the muscle analogy, which is a wonderful analogy, and then there's the gas tank analogy, and they're very parallel. But the gas tank analogy is like when our gas tank is full, we have more self-regulation, our nervous system feels safer, we have more inhibition, we have more ability to be present, to be conscious, to be attuned. But all sorts of things can take from the gas tank, right? And sometimes you end up on E. So what you're talking about is like that moment at 3 in the morning where you're like, oh, I have a framework, but it went out the door. It can happen when your gas tank is empty.
Yep.
Right? It can. Even I who teaches this for a living can have moments of dysregulation cuz I'm on E. And that's where grace and mercy comes in. And the science, it shows you don't have to be a perfect parent to raise a secure kid. You have to be like a B. You have to be a solid B. To raise a secure kid.
Oh, that relieves the pressure.
It does. Oh yeah. It does. You have to be a solid B, and that's basically you get it right more than you get it wrong. You know, it's when we start getting in the low C, D, F territory, then we start to see insecurely attached kids.
Yeah. What are other ways that myself, all of us as parents can be at that B? Like, what are, are there a handful of tenets that you know must be in place for us to get that B?
Yeah, I think, um, Kody Sanchez. I don't know if you follow her online.
I've interviewed her.
Oh, you have? Oh my gosh. Well, we've tried to get her on our podcast. She turned us down, but that's okay, Kody.
Okay.
We're still, we still love you. We still love you. She made a video the other day about the four burners theory, which is like, there's work, there's health, there's family. And what was the other one? And friends. Okay.
The friends one I just turned down.
Yeah. And you can only have two out of the four on at the same time. And so if you have, if you're on full capacity to, you know, you can only have 2 at full capacity.
Sure.
And so a lot of us are trying to like low simmer on all of these burners, right? And so we're, if work is turning down your family burner, then we're gonna start to see problems, right? You're not gonna be that B+ parent.
Yeah.
And so I think for my, for me, I have chosen at this point in my life for my family to be my top burner. Unfortunately, you know this, being an entrepreneur is really hard and all-consuming. Work is on there. But I noticed that my health, that burner's getting turned down too much. And friends is kind of nonexistent. I mean, I work with my best friend and my husband's my best friend. And honestly, that's all I have the capacity for. And I am happy in my life with just those two intimate relationships. And so I'm like not worried about that burner, but I am starting to get a little worried about the health burner. Like a little too much, um, too many protein bars and not enough real meals, a little too much Diet Coke and not enough water. And so it's like, okay, I need to re— I, I need to turn the work burner down just a little bit. We've hired more people and at first that's a little more stressful, but hopefully that's gonna relieve some pressure. Um, so I'm doing, putting things in place on the, to, to turn down the work burner so that I can turn up the health burner. So I think the family burner always has to be on full blast. That's just my opinion. That's just my opinion.
Well, it's just so deserving of the gas.
It's so deserving. Yeah.
It's so deserving.
It's where you need to be putting the bulk of your time. Because if you think about your children's experiences going 7 more generations and the generations that you can affect, why wouldn't you want that burner to be turned up full blast at all times? So for me, it's about balancing turning those other 3, burners up and down according to where I'm at.
I love this. I actually just talked about the four-burner theory yesterday. We had some people over and I was like, have you heard of this four-burner thing? So I don't know if it was hers or if it was somebody else's.
I don't know. I think she got it from someone else. She mentioned she got it from someone else, but she did a great job of explaining it.
All great wisdom is borrowed and recapitulated.
Absolutely.
I really believe that. If you look at the most powerful sentences, they're not complicated. They're really light. They're really short. But they're the hardest to integrate.
Yeah.
Why do you believe that our creator brought us here to integrate these simplistically understood things, but so paradoxically so complex in order to integrate them?
Yeah, it— going back to those people who talk about near-death experiences, one of the things they also found when they looked at the data that they had in common was that it was like they understood everything all at once. Like all the great mysteries of life, they understood it all at once in this experience, but they couldn't really like bring it back with them, right? So it's like they lost that knowledge when they came back, but there was a sense of, oh my gosh, everything about the world makes sense now. And they couldn't even put words to it, but there was just this all-knowing, right? And I think that that's part of the limitations, right? Where it's like there's limitations in our knowledge, there's limitations in our abilities, there's limitations in, you know, how perfectly we can show up in any given moment, depending upon the other constraints. So I do think it really just comes back to learning limitations so that when we do get to heaven, we have this grand appreciation for what this complete relief of unconditional love from God will feel like. And all of those burdens, you know, there's no more burners. There's just one burner, which is love, and that's gonna be turned up full blast. But we wouldn't be able to truly appreciate it and to truly know that all of our burdens were relieved if we we didn't have burdens to experience in the first place.
Do you feel— this is a question I've been marinating on lately— do you feel like there's a potential possibility that when we leave this earthly plane, that we go to a space that's all-knowing, all-loving, where time doesn't exist, and we get to still love and be with our family members that we dearly miss so much?
I believe that 100%.
What in your fabric of being allows you to believe that with truth?
Because I lost somebody so close to me that, you know, he was 36 years old, died paying bills in his truck. Like, he didn't want to die. He had no intentions of leaving this earth. And when you lose somebody and you, you know, the most profound sort of grief memory, and I'd say the biggest part of like my complex trauma, which was almost more of just like a shock trauma, was I was telling my oldest daughter that her dad was dead. So I'll never forget the look on her face when I had to tell her that. It was a look of shock. It was a look of, and I can't even explain why, but it was this look of, you're telling me my life is forever changed. It was like, that was the look on her face. Right? And so when something like that happens to you, it's so profoundly difficult. If you believe in an all-knowing and all-loving God, The only way that that is redeemed is if I get to see him again in all of his glory, where he is glorified by the Lord, and he is in perfect image. He is a perfect image bearer of God. And I believe that that's who God is. I believe that is the character and the nature of God, that he wouldn't allow us to form these deep bonds and attachments if those just disappeared. Yeah, right. And they didn't have any meaning. I don't think that's the God we serve.
Because the counterbalance of that from an atheistic perspective or a nihilist perspective would be there's no meaning. But that's the beauty, actually. That's the paradox. If there is no meaning, then we create meaning to the degree we can love and create meaning. If there's no meaning, then we can be a nihilist and fall into that trap. It's this choice point of whether we go towards love or away from love. And so I, with compassion, understand why people go the atheistic route, because it's really like quenches the thirst of their ego to have undeniable proof. But I've experienced so many times in my life, like watching my son go through what he went through when he was born, and watching my daughter come out of my wife in a pool in Colorado, like the ability for me to love a being in a way that I had honestly, like never loved myself.
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Like, that was— I'm like feeling it right now because it's just such a— it's something you can't— you don't know until you've been there.
Yeah.
You can't understand what loving another being, like a father or mother loving a child, is until they show you how you haven't loved yourself.
Oh, yeah.
And the power, the potency of that, that for me is an immediate choice point where I go towards God, I go towards love.
Yeah.
Because how else could I experience the amount of vastness and the heart being blasted wide open that my children have done for me?
Yeah.
If there wasn't undeniable proof, it's like, I don't even need the proof. I have the faith.
That's right.
I don't need the proof.
Yeah, that's what faith is, right?
That's what faith is. I literally have the faith. I don't need you to prove to me that God is real. I've already, I have a relationship with God through my children.
Yeah, absolutely.
There's no proof needed.
Absolutely. And when you think about, how much you love your own kids, imagine how much God loves us.
You make me cry on my own podcast right now.
Yeah. You know, I mean, we can't even conceptualize it, right? We can't even conceptualize how much we are loved because we are here with limitations. We are here with thoughts of the enemy pouring into our brain. We're here with a lack of sleep. We're here with all of these physical, emotional constraints, and we still love our children so much. I was in so much emotional pain. I could not walk a straight line. I could not read a computer screen, so I could barely do, couldn't really do my job. I was surprised they didn't fire me. They were a great organization, had a lot of compassion for me. I had to hire help to take care of my kids. I drained my 401 to have a babysitter. I, you know, I, I, I was in deep in credit card debt and I still stayed on this earth when nothing, I wanted nothing more than to die, nothing more than to die. And my love for my children kept me alive. And so if I think about that's how much I loved my children, I can't even imagine how much God loves me. I don't think there's a context for that. I don't think we can wrap our earthly minds around that. I think we have to go to heaven to experience it. Mm-hmm. And people, the thing that changed my life, because I saw all these people with that type of relationship with God throughout my life and I was like, I don't understand it. Like, I don't know how they feel this. Like, I just, I don't know how they can believe so easily. Mm-hmm. You know, because I was inundated with fear and victimization and all of those principalities. And then once I did experience it, it was like, oh, this is what they had. I finally have it. But I only got it, my friend Ashley, who really brought me to Jesus, she gave me one homework assignment, one. And she said, your only homework assignment is to seek the character of God. Who is God? And I was like, why don't you just tell me who he is? She's like, I can't tell you who he's going to be for you. I've never suffered the loss of a father of my kids. My mom isn't dying of cancer right now. I can't tell you. I can only tell you what God's done for me and who he's, he's showed up to be for me. But the real relationship happens when you get to see how he shows up for you. But you have to seek that because he gave you free will to turn away from him. If you're using it to not to be close to him, then these are the results you're going to get. But if you use your free will to seek him, he will be there for you. He will show up. That is a God we serve. And boy, did he show up. And so I wasn't doing what it took to seek God because he gave us free will that we don't have to. He said he didn't want us to love him like robots. He said, I want it to be your choice whether you love me. And I wasn't choosing to love him. I wasn't choosing to seek him. I was using it as a lever. Oh, now I'm in trouble. God, come through for me. I believe you're there, but I don't really know who you are, and I'm just going to come to you when I need something. That wasn't a fair relationship.
I feel so much about what you're saying that we could have a whole nother podcast on that subject. Because I do want to— I'm not tiptoeing right now. I do want to respect people that do have a wounding. Around the word God.
Yeah.
Because I— It's very real. My mother would take me to church and it would be people that would act one way and then they would be another way when they left the house of God.
Yeah.
And so I developed this like really aversion to people that would go to church. And it took me, I can remember many moments in my life where my mom would be deep in her illness, my dad would be gone, I'd be like bullied in high school or bullied in middle school, overweight, like just going through hell. I felt like I was in hell.
Yeah.
And I can remember being out on that football field at Grossmont High School in La Mesa, California, and I literally said, "Fuck you, God!" Screaming and so angry at God. Like, why would you put me here? What is this all about? And it was from that anger that I actually got to know God.
Yeah.
Because it was the first conversation I'd had.
Same, same.
So I literally was like, you want to have a conversation? Come have a conversation with me then. What is this all about?
And God met you there.
And then from that place, there was another moment on my knees that started this podcast 11 years ago, which is why we prayed. It's why we pray. When we pray, we are casting a spell onto ourselves and those around us. And I would much rather cast a spell of surrender and grace that I don't have to have it all figured out, that my ego can rest for a moment and I can just be in the curiosity of someone else to learn something new about what we call this thing life.
Yeah.
What a beautiful place it can be. It can be heaven, it can be hell, but I think it's determinant upon how much we're willing to really surrender. How much can I surrender in my life? And how much can I keep an open mind to things that I don't know? Which is a lot. It's a lot that I don't know. What is one thing that keeps you going in this curiosity of your work? 'Cause it's never ending.
Yeah, no, it's never ending.
And the ability to know yourself and to know attachment theory and your soulless framework, like all of this requires a fuel source, right? What continues to be the fuel source for you to help people heal themselves?
Yeah.
And to also make an impact in the world? What's the fuel source for you?
I mean, it's definitely God. It definitely is. And when I was having my own kind of attachment crisis and I went through what you did too, I cursed God too. I said, how can you keep handing me these traumas one after another? And I have begged for mercy and you're showing me no mercy. And I, you know, that is when God promised me he would reveal to me, you know, why bad things happen to good people. Mm-hmm. And I often talk about this on social media, and this is just what God has put into my heart. Okay. Maybe, you know, maybe I'm wrong. I don't think so because I know the voice of God and, and God was very clear. He said, you know, Sarah, he said, nothing bad that happens on this earth is my will. Nothing outside of love on this earth is my will. My will for this, for human beings, has always been a place of perfect love. If you go all the way back to Genesis, right, the enemy came in and communicated with us. He communicated with Eve and said, oh, go ahead and eat that apple, which tells us the enemy can communicate with us. And so when bad things happen, it's because the enemy has meddled somewhere. Somehow, and we used our own free will to participate with it, whether it was us or someone else or society in general, we've used our free will to participate with the works of the enemy, which are always going to bring pain and suffering. Think about something like, well, how do you explain if a baby gets cancer? And how can that be? How can that ever happen if we have this loving God? Well, what I would go back to is, okay, what happened in utero maybe, Right? Was there stress, which is a spirit of fear, which is the opposite of faith, which isn't loving to God, that created maybe some immune dysregulation? We created a world that's nothing but a toxic soup, nothing but a toxic soup. So there was the work of the enemy and the fear and the dysregulation that maybe changed how the immune system works a little bit, right? In epigenetics. And then we created a world of toxic soup with our own free will. Combine those things together, we might have a child that develops cancer. None of that was in God's plan. God didn't say, you know what my will for you is? For you to get cancer and die. No, God said, my will for you is to be in health and prosper. And so when I realized that nothing on this earth that is bad or painful or outside of love was God's will, then it gave me a little bit more control and also the ability to surrender and release my hands to say, I don't have all the control. Like it gave me both perspectives. I can choose. Choose my own participation with the enemy. I can't choose whether other people participate or not. So their participation might have suffering that ripples back to me somehow, but God is there to see me through it. God is there to give me hope. God is there to lead me to my redemption. And that is— that I have to just accept that, that life is going to come with suffering because evil exists in the world.
It's like what you mentioned with the NDEs and the corollaries. They all knew they had a complete equation of the universe. They knew exactly what it was, but when they came back, they couldn't describe it.
Yeah.
What you and I are doing right now is trying to describe the ineffable, and we just can't.
Yeah, I know.
We literally just can't. And we get to just be okay with not describing the ineffable, which is the mystery and the beauty and the absolute power that nothing could ever touch, that is our creator.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're not—
there's nothing greater than the creator.
If we had all the answers, it wouldn't be faith, right?
Then we wouldn't play the game either, right? And even my question when I ask you, oh, do you think that we'll get to, you know, have reunion with those we love? That's coming from my love for them now. Yeah, it's coming from— and it is, it is coming from my heart. It's not pure ego, but it's also my ego wanting an answer, you know, in the way that I'm even asking it to you. If you could wave a magic wand, if you could have people behave in a way that's most loving, most connected to their authentic self, what would that magic wand do with your work and, and your service in the world?
I, that's a tough question. You know, I just, I don't wanna say, oh, I wish everybody could be exposed to my work. I mean, there's a part of me that's like, yes, I want everybody to be exposed to tools that can help them love better and tools that can help them heal and love themselves. But I'm not the only person out here doing this work. You know, I think people can find that in a lot of different places. You know, I'm, I'm proud of what I built and I, I believe in what I have to offer. But I just want somebody to be ex— I just want people to be exposed to it somewhere. I want people to realize that they're not a victim. They can be an overcomer. Life inevitably comes with suffering, but we can learn how to move through that with grace and compassion towards ourselves, and we can come out of it with a deeper understanding of, of life and of ourselves and, and how to be better from it. I mean, I think The best place for growth is from a launching point of pain. It is, you know, people don't grow if they're just happy and everything's great all the time. It's not how people decide to grow. They're like, why would I change anything? Everything's great.
Yeah. Yeah.
Like from suffering, from that painful divorce, from that death, from that job loss, from that, you know, whatever, name your, pick your, you know, suffering event. We can either go towards launch into growth. I mean, we know what launches people into post-traumatic growth versus PTSD. And a lot of that is how you determine this pain point as a source of your identity.
Mm-hmm.
So if you are like, I'm a victim, this is awful, nobody understands me. Nobody cares. I can't do this. I can't deal with this. Is that gonna lead you to post-traumatic growth and thriving, or is that gonna lead you to PTSD? It's towards PTSD, right? Mm-hmm. So we know that the stories that we tell ourselves about what we're dealing with and what it means in terms of our identity is huge. And moving from a victimization to identifying as an overcomer even before I was healed. Even I would still wake up every day with blurry vision and I would say, I'm an overcomer. God has built me to be an overcomer. Through God I have strength. And he didn't disappoint. And so it has to start with identifying as someone who can overcome. If you believe you can't, you never will. 'Cause can't never could. I mean, I'll go back to that, right? It's a phrase we use in my family all the time. You have to believe it first and foremost, or you're never going to act on it.
Well, I'll grab the wand with you and shake some pixie dust on. There's a great magic wand. I love that. The reason I say that is because it's just a fun question. It's just a fun podcast. It's a fun question in any conversation. Like, hey, whatever you're into, if you could wave a wand, what would you— it tells you much about someone's heart. It tells you much about someone's intentionality. So it's funny, in my house, my children say, "I can't," and I say, "We don't say I can't in this family. We say I'm learning." Yes. I'm learning.
Yes.
And my daughter caught me the other day. She got me. I said I couldn't do something. She goes, "Daddy, don't we say I'm learning?" And I was like, "Oh, she got me." Yes. It was so revealing.
Our kids are such great teachers.
They're such great teachers. Thank you so much for for choosing the path you chose. You could have chosen another path. When I look into your eyes, I see playfulness, but I also see maturity.
Thank you.
And holding both of those worlds can be a challenge because we've been taught maybe a curriculum.
Yeah.
By societal bodies that you have to pick one.
Yeah.
You can't be playful, you have to be serious.
Right.
You can only be playful and nobody's gonna take you seriously.
Right.
How do you maintain both of the worlds?
You know, it's interesting. I think the coaching world has really taught me a lot because coaching and therapy could not be more different. And that's a lot of, uh, confusion that people come into my therapy.
Coaching and therapy cannot be more different.
They cannot be more different. Um, and I think that coaching is this really fine line between being excited and com— and, um, motivating and compassionate and empathetic, but also really direct in, in having to tell some hard truths.
Mm-hmm.
You know, because people can't change if you don't tell 'em hard truths.
Yeah.
If you tiptoe around, you know, just try not to hurt their feelings, there's no growth there. Sure. There's no growth.
Sure.
And so I think coaching has really taught me how to just kind of walk this tightrope of like, hey, you know, let's get the most out of life. I wanna be, I, I told Raina that my New Year's resolution for 2026 is I wanna be the happiest person in the room. That life is, life is short. I've seen, I've lost somebody at 30, you know, 36 years old. I don't know when my last breath will be. I don't wanna die in a bad mood. I wanna, you know, I just wanna be the happiest person in the room. Yeah. And I've not always succeeded at that. And even, even in the short few months, it's been stressful in the business. I haven't completely succeeded, but it doesn't mean it's gonna go away in terms of my goal. I'm gonna continue to do that. But I also have to make room for the seriousness of people's pain and the depth of their pain and be able to hold space for them when they're in that pain. And it doesn't mean I have to feel their pain completely because I can't, but it just means I have to understand it to the depth that I'm capable and be a gentle guide towards resources that can help them heal and the strategies and tools that can help them heal. So I think coaching has taught me a lot about how to balance those things.
I can feel that from you. I share a similar energy with you where I show up with my pain. With my wounds. I show up with my stuff.
Yeah.
Then you can trust me.
Yeah.
How could you trust me if I pretended like I had everything altogether and that I'd never been through anything?
Yeah. I agree. And that's why I try to be so open about my past. And people have had different reactions to that. Some people have been like, well, how can we trust you if you used to be such a mess? And it's like, well, because that's why they can trust me. That's why they can trust me because I know what it feels like to be the mess and I've actually come out of the mess. Right. But yeah, my own mess taught me more than my doctor ever did. It did. My doctor, it was just a bunch of information. Didn't come with much feeling. Pain and loss and grief and hopelessness. Those are deep feelings that again, can launch you towards destruction or growth. And we really have a big choice in that. And I want people to know that.
Yeah. You're a wonderful soul. I'm glad we have this podcast.
Oh, so much. Thank you for the opportunity.
You're so welcome. This is worthy of sharing, y'all. So if you know somebody that's in suffering, that's in deep victimhood, share this podcast. It's worthy of sharing. I always ask myself whenever I share something on social media, am I sharing it because I want validation, or am I sharing it because I, I genuinely believe it's going to help somebody, it's going to be supportive of somebody? And that's not the case with most people. A lot of times people will share current events and politics because they're like, they're charged, and it's not really of service to other people. So share this podcast. It's of service. Tell people where they can go learn to play with you and be in your dance.
Well, I think if they want more of this type of content, seeing me on my own podcast, The Love Doc Podcast, we're on all platforms.
With your co-host who's here.
With my co-host, Rayna Butcher, who's here, my best friend and co-host. We have a lot of fun on that podcast. We talk about relationships, life, upleveling. We kind of touch on all things life and relationships. And so we get to be really fun and and silly and also really deep and sometimes emotional on that podcast. And then you can find me on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook @DrSarahHensley.
Okay, Dr. Sarah, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having me, Josh.
What a great conversation. Y'all, I'm wishing you so much love today, so much wellness, but most importantly, peace and power. You cannot have power unless it actually comes from peace.
Right.
And really, the goal of this podcast that is transforming in real time your one of the first episodes I, I shared this with you.
It's awesome.
Y'all already know, you feel it from me, that this has always been my therapy. This has always been a way for me to learn publicly with you. And I just so value the fact that you spend your lives with us, that you take an hour or 90 minutes today to enjoy a conversation that can give you different introspection so that you can live your authentic joy. That's what we're doing here. What's the point of life if you are not living your authentic joy? And can you be in the grace of knowing when you're not and and do whatever work is necessary. So until we see you again on another episode, I'm wishing you all those things and so much more. We'll talk with you next week.
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