#187: Difficult Childhood? "You're Not Broken, You're Adapted!"

What if your "trauma" is actually your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do?  Gloria is back on the Inner Child Podcast after a summer break to share how the healing industry is shifting from a "diagnostic" approach, to a heart-centred model of mental health! Plus, an exciting new announcement about a brand new podcast segment, where YOU can receive 1-1 healing from Gloria- for free!

Mentioned In Episode:

• 🎥 Interested In Joining Our Live Healing Segment?  Apply to be on the show, and experience a 1-1 inner child session with Gloria! Applicants must be 21+.
  
  
• 💜 Apply To Work 1-1 With Gloria:   Private and compassionate 1-1 sessions for Leaders, CEOs, High-Performers, and Professionals who are awakening and ready to heal their Inner Child, who are ready to move beyond surface-level healing... and initiate back to who they truly are. 1-1 confidential, intuitive guidance and deep inner work delivered over Zoom and a private direct line to Gloria. 
  
  
• 📕 Download Gloria's Free Core Wounds Guide: Explore all 4 childhood wounds in this beautiful workbook with tips, affirmations, prompts. Downloaded 1000+ times.

Gloria Zhang (@bygloriazhang) from Vancouver, is a renowned intuitive, trained therapist, and award-winning author and TEDx speaker known for her signature style of translating deep esoteric ideas into everyday wisdom. Gloria hosts the global sensation, 'The Inner Child Podcast,' a self-help series which has captivated audiences across the globe, accumulating 2.4 million downloads. Her clients include accomplished athletes, founders, and entertainment industry giants.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Introduction
01:19  Checking in After Summer Break
02:20 Masculine vs Feminine Approaches To Healing
04:59 CBT and DSM Origins
07:46 Trauma as Adaptation
10:12 Love and Connection Heal
14:00 Live Sessions Announcement
15:57 Why It Matters and Safety
19:27 Gloria's Mystical Experience
21:20 Calls to Action and Offers
24:00 Closing and Next Episodes

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You may have noticed that the mental health world is changing. It's shifting from treating your trauma like some kind of malfunctioning machine to understanding that love and connection is the true path to liberation. We can go all the way back to the 1950s. A couple of psychiatrists created an entire diagnostic system centered around the mind that we had to diagnose and medicate. I've come to realize that most people don't need another tool or another worksheet. They need a hug. They need to be held and they need to be listened to fully, presently, and to be understood. And today we're going to be discussing how this shift towards mind-hard coherence is going to affect you and it's going to shed some light on where you might have been stuck. Plus, at the end, I'm going to be announcing a brand new segment on this podcast featuring live inner child healing sessions with real people just like you. I'm so excited, right after this intro. Welcome to the Inner Child Podcast. Now with two million downloads, I help high achievers recover from painful relationships and childhood trauma. Let's heal together on season two of the Inner Child Podcast. Welcome back to the Inner Child Podcast. I'm your host, Gloria Zhang, award-winning author, former therapist, and healer. We're recording this in August, and yes, it has been a minute. A couple of months ago, we announced in our community that we're taking a bit of a summer break. And first of all, I want to check in with all of you to ask, how have you been? Really, how have you been? Have you had a great summer? Have you had a not so good summer? And if that's the case, I hope that you remember to slow down and take care of yourself, especially if you've been working really hard. Make sure that you're drinking enough water, that you're taking care of your body. And if you're the type of person who tends to take on a lot, don't be afraid to reach out and ask for help when you need it. Nothing wrong with doing that. And just know that I'm really proud of you for how far you have come already. What I thought would be interesting to talk about today is something that you may have noticed. The conversation around healing and mental health, trauma healing, inner child work has changed a lot even in the past five to six years that this podcast has come out. And you may have noticed that back in the day, there was a lot of emphasis on strategies, techniques, diagnosing, trying to categorize things in lists and categories. In the last few years, there's been an explosion of work around somatic, embodying, and bringing back some ancient wisdom that has to do with being centered in the heart. And you may have noticed a bit of this shift even in my own podcast. In traditional words, we may look at this as a shift from a predominantly masculine way of approaching mental health and problems to now this resurgence of feminine wisdom. And it's not that one is better than the other, but that both of these sides actually need to work together. It's also about the connection and the love and how do we stay centered in our heart while also using strategies when we need to. And then we're going to talk a little bit about how trauma doesn't mean that you are broken, that you have some kind of machine that isn't working anymore, but maybe your nervous system was actually working exactly the way it was designed to do, and that everything you've experienced up until now has been a normal response to an abnormal environment. But first, I want to read some fan mail. Our inbox has been piling up since we took a bit of a break, and I want to honor all of our listeners and clients and students who've been a big part of this journey. So this email was from Christine, and Christine says, I too have been walking through a dark time. I would not have survived if not for the healing work I've done, of which you have played a huge part. I use the taluscript so often. I pray that I come out stronger too, sending you all my best love, Christine. Christine, thank you so much for your email. We have written a lovely response to you. And the taluscript is a tool that I taught in one of the recent free workshops. It's a way to respond to the critical inner voice whenever negative thoughts start to take over your mind. So we'll do a fuller episode on that later on as well. Let's talk about the shift from a really masculine perspective of healing to now a more balanced perspective. We can go all the way back to 1950s, where a couple of psychiatrists, Ellis and Beck, created an entire diagnostic system centered around the mind. And we know that as CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy. And for the longest time, CBT was sort of hailed as the gold standard, right? Of the most popular model that therapists would work with, using logic as a way to work through uh negative beliefs and patterns and things like that. Then later in the 1980s, we had a lot of changes come to the DSM, which is the diagnostic manual that psychologists and psychiatrists work from as a way to diagnose mental conditions based on a list of symptoms that would fit in certain categories. But you have to keep in mind that back then the world was very different. This was an industry built and operated almost entirely by men and for men. But not only that, it was inside a medical model that treated our human minds and our human psyche almost like a malfunctioning machine. Something that had a defect, right, that we had to diagnose and correct and medicate. That sort of lineage is what a lot of people have experienced. You're handed a label, you're given a technique, maybe a prescription, and a description about what's wrong with you. Obviously, this is not a broad stroke. There have been a lot of people who have found diagnoses and labels to be helpful in helping them understand that they're not the only one who deal with this. There are people who have had benefits and really needed medication. So we're not saying that this entire model is 100% bad, but it's also built on this assumption that there's something wrong with you, that there's something broken. And if you want to go a little bit further, this entire architecture of fixing your thinking type of therapy was presented that way so that companies could get employees to go back to work, right? Get well enough to be able to be another cog in the machine to return to the workforce. And it's still the dominant model that's been taught even up to today. Now, fast forward to the future. When I started talking about inner child work, we wanted to introduce a new philosophy that yes, you may feel like you are broken, but in fact, it's not that you are broken. It's that your body, your system, and your nervous system was conditioned this way as a response to the environment and the connections that you had growing up. It was a response to the needs that were not met in you as a child, and an even more revolutionary perspective, that what you're experiencing isn't some kind of pathology. There is nothing wrong with you. But in fact, your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do, to keep you safe in an unsafe environment. When you grow up with abuse, it is a normal response for your nervous system to put walls up. When you grow up in a scary, frightening environment, it is a normal response for your body to produce anxiety and stress. When you're raised by narcissists or you had parents whose mood was unpredictable and would swing from one day to the next, it is a normal response to develop a fond response, otherwise known as a people-pleaser response, in order to survive that environment. Okay, it is a normal response to have learned that you shouldn't express your anger when you're around people who may abuse you if you showed anger. And that's what you needed to do at the time to survive. It is exactly what a child's nervous system was made to do, to protect you. And when we reframe that entire conversation from what is wrong with me, to thinking of it in terms of what happened to me and what did my body have to do to fight for my survival? What did my body have to do because my body and all my cells and all my systems love me so much that it will shape shift and come up with all kinds of defense mechanisms just to make sure I can survive and get through what's happening in my life right now. Okay, it's not a pathology, it is an adaptation. Okay, it's an adaptation. A tumultuous childhood affects not only our minds, it is it's more than just our thinking patterns and our beliefs and our thoughts. It's also the emotions that are felt in our body. It's also this invisible hole in our hearts that I've described many, many times. That feeling of something being missing, that something is not quite full or there, and that is the lack of love and connection that we needed. It's more than the mind, it has to do with your soul. And unless you have felt that way, something deep in your soul that has been missing or a yearning that you can't quite put words to, it's almost impossible to describe to someone logically who has never been in that kind of situation, who's felt so unheard, so unseen, so misunderstood, and who's felt lonely even when they've been around tons of people. It is a spiritual kind of wound that cannot be accessed through just techniques and logical solutions on their own. That's another reason why inner child work is so important. This excess of logical overdevelopment, I would say, has been enabled and promoted in our schools, which in itself is not a bad thing. It's important to be able to reason and to think. But it's about balance and bringing in the feeling and the intuitive and the soulful side of healing as well. And the last thing I'll say about this, which might ring a bell for you and help you understand where you need to go next in your healing, is this idea that techniques, absolutely yes, can help heal the mind, just like the taluscript to work through the inner critic. But it is love and connection that heals the soul. It is that mind, brain coherence that a lot of experts are starting to emphasize, like Dr. Joe Dispenza, that no matter how many three-step formulas you go through, no matter how many worksheets you write, you're only going to go so far until you have to address connection. Okay, now it can be a connection with yourself, learning to love yourself. It could be learning to ask for help, getting support through friends, through relationships, through partners, healing, guidance relationship, through a spiritual connection, through connecting with Mother Earth, with nature, with our universe, and really allowing yourself to feel and not just think about the feelings, but actually go through the bodily experience and the discomfort of sitting there and letting those uncomfortable feelings of vulnerability and anxiety and sadness actually go through you and be felt and experienced through you. That is what will ultimately heal the soul. It is through love, it is through presence, through human contact, through loving touch, through reconnecting with that inner child inside you. If that resonates with you, please drop a comment on this video, on this podcast, and let me know what sort of insights you're having from having this discussion. Bringing up the importance of balancing the techniques and the connection is a perfect segue into explaining why we're bringing this uh this new segment onto the podcast. So up until now, I've done a lot of talking and teaching and telling you things through the show, which is really helpful in its own, and it kind of falls in line with the fact that these are techniques. But what if you had a chance to actually watch on the show a real inner child healing session where we're not just telling you about these tools, but you get to see how it works in practice in real time with real people who have real stories and childhood struggles just like you. So, starting September, we are launching this brand new format on the show. And we're inviting real listeners just like you who want to join us on the podcast for a chance to experience a free healing session with me. I've been thinking about it for a long time, and when I told my friends about it, they actually volunteered to be some of the first, the three people actually to be the first three people to be on the show. So that's uh that's when I I realized, okay, people actually want to do this. So we are currently in production right now. There's a few in-person episodes being recorded with people I know in Vancouver. The rest are online over video call. But I want to officially put it out there. Anyone listening who feels called to be on the show, we have created a link in the show notes right below where you can submit an application to be a guest on this show to receive this session. You'll have the opportunity to meet with myself first. Um you can talk to the producer, and we'll review everything with you just to make sure that you feel totally comfortable with the entire process. You'll get to listen to everything before we publish it. So you'll all always get final say at what gets published. And the reason it took me so long to agree to even do this is, you know, I grew up seeing things like the Jerry Springer show or even like the Dr. Phil show. And you could argue we're exploiting people who were really suffering and needed help. And the way that they would edit things, you know, make fun of people. And um, I really felt a sense of aversion to anything like that. So I I had this belief in my head that, well, if I bring a live, like a real session onto the show, it might feel like I'm exploiting people who are having a vulnerable experience, you know, talking about um their past. But then when I talked about it with my friends and the fact that there's so many people who really wanted to be on the show, I realized that I was projecting a belief that I had onto everybody and that not everyone feels that way. So I probably would say probably 70, 80% of people would feel uh like this is too vulnerable. But then I realized there's a good 20 to 30 percent of the population who really loves being seen, who experience a lot of benefit from being seen and being able to share their experience with other people. And that's one of the reasons why I've had a lot of past clients who've really wanted to come on the show and I've had so many interviews, right, with past clients. It was all voluntary. And so over time, that helped me understand that, well, just because I think one way about this doesn't mean everyone feels this way. And so this is really an invitation to those 20 to 30 percent of folks who do feel like they truly value and would benefit from feeling supported and seen on a public show like this. Please click on the link in the show notes to send in an application. Because we tend to get a lot of responses, we don't have the capacity to respond to every single person. Uh we're only going to be able to reach out to candidates. And so if you don't hear back from us in a few weeks or a few months, feel free to apply again in the future. Every session is different. We use inner child healing techniques such as editing past memories, using visualizations, meditations, also intuitive and spiritual guidance tools as well. And I really feel it is part of my purpose, my greater purpose to help more people. As you well know, I offer private sessions as part of a premium service. I work with a lot of high achievers, professionals, founders, public figures, and there's a lot of incredible transformation work that we've done with our clients, but I understand that not everyone is able to afford something like that. And so being able to offer and demonstrate these sessions on the show, not only it gives a chance for these uh guests to experience this for free, but it allows other people watching the show to experience secondhand what it's like. And many of these guests have gone through very similar experiences as you, right? Different traumas and difficulties that they face growing up. One of the other things that I will share with you later on, as you know, I've been going through my own spiritual awakening for quite some time. But in the recent past months, it's really come to a head for me. And I've had some life-changing mystical experiences that have made it more clear than ever what my purpose is on earth. But the things that have happened to me, I've also had multiple witnesses from about five to six of my friends. To me, that is the most valued form of validation that I could ever ask for. And when the time is right, I'm gonna bring them on the show and just also have them share what they experienced together with me as well. Um actually, I did talk about it briefly on Nadine Sumat's Her Money podcast a few weeks ago. That's the only place I've even briefly mentioned this incredible experience that happened to me recently. And uh, when I'm ready, I'll I'll share with I'll talk about it more on this show. But all I will say is that part of my experience is to share this divine motherly unconditional love with every single person I cross paths with and every single person who finds my work or hears my voice. It is literally my life and my soul's purpose to share that unconditional love with you, and you can know that whenever I record a message, anytime I write an email, I'm putting all of my good intention into it so that whoever I reach, even if I've never met you before, that you will feel that love. And it may plant a seed or you may feel it right away. And my intention is that it's going to heal something inside you. So that's all I'm gonna say about it so far. And our call to action for today. It's number one, if you feel like there's something off, if you're feeling extremely anxious or something doesn't feel right, instead of shaming yourself for it and thinking that there's something broken about you, I want you to ask a question of curiosity instead. And ask yourself, how is my body and my nervous system reacting to something in the environment right now? Maybe it's my work environment, maybe it's some relationships that uh I need to have a a tough conversation with. Maybe it's something happening that is. Affecting your body to respond in a certain way. And that's going to help you a lot in finding out what you actually need to do. Okay. The second call to action is this whole idea of how techniques heal the mind, but it's love that heals the soul. Are you relying too much on tools and techniques when really what you actually need is a sense of connection? And perhaps it is through seeking out help. Perhaps it is reaching out to friends, perhaps it is going out into nature and finding that connection with Mother Earth. And maybe it's with yourself. How can you turn towards connection as a way not to fix something about you, but as a way to nourish your soul and that love-shaped hole in your heart? Third call to action: if you feel called to engage with me, participate with me in some shape or form, there are many ways that you can do that. That's available to every single person here. So again, if you do feel a calling that you do want to be on the show, click on the link in the show notes to apply to be a guest on the Inner Child podcast. If you are a high achiever who wants to work with me one-on-one and you do want that more confidential one-on-one approach and a direct line to me, you can also book a free consultation call with me to learn if one-on-one work is right for you. And to everyone else, if that is not for you, I have a free guide to healing the core wounds that you can also sign up on my website by gloriazhang.com. Again, we'll put the link in the show notes. It's a beautiful ebook that I designed. It gives you a lot of insight into the four core wounds, journal prompts, tips. And when you sign up, you also get a free membership to my email list where I do send words of wisdom a few times a week. So if you'd like to hear from me that way, that's open to you. Please sign up there. So, my loves, thank you so much for tuning into the Inner Child Podcast. I'm really glad to be back. I feel so refreshed. And my purpose and my mission here has never felt stronger. Ultimately, what's meaningful is not about the money. It's not about even reaching more people. We are all here to help heal the world, but not from a place of self-sacrifice, but from a place of taking care of our own needs first so that we have more in excess and overflow to give back to others. And that's the example that I want to set for anyone who listens. Sending you all my love. I'm proud of you. Please enjoy the rest of the summer. I will have some more solo episodes coming up for the rest of August before we start our new series in uh September. In the meantime, have a beautiful day and an abundant life, and I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks for tuning in, Bestie. I've got something for you. If you think this show deserves a five-star review, we'll send you my free inner child starter kit as a thank you for your support, which contains exclusive wallpapers and resources for you to download. To get your kit, just upload a screenshot of your review on Apple or Spotify to my webpage by gloriazang.com slash reviews. The link is also in the show notes. There, you can also check out my healing sessions and programs at bygloriazang.com. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast, and I will meet you in the next episode.