Good Neighbor Podcast: Cobb County
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Cobb County. Good Neighbor Podcast hosted by Milli M. helps residents discover and connect with your local business owners in and around Cobb County, Georgia.
Is your business serving the residents of Cobb County? Then, we need to talk! Visit gnpCobbCounty.com to schedule your free interview.
Good Neighbor Podcast: Cobb County
E38: The Okie-Doke Life: Transforming Trauma into Growth
What if the trauma you're carrying isn't what you think it is? In this powerful conversation with Sharon Burtzlaff of Renewed You Counseling, we uncover the surprising truth about trauma and healing that might completely change how you view your emotional reactions.
Sharon shares her remarkable journey from an eight-year-old watching Bob Newhart to becoming a trauma specialist with what she calls a "magic wand" for healing. Her Marietta-based practice offers both in-person and teletherapy services throughout Georgia and Florida, specializing in trauma, anxiety, depression, and relationship issues. But what sets her approach apart is her goal: helping clients achieve what she playfully calls an "okie-doke life" – that place of inner peace where external chaos no longer triggers emotional turmoil.
The most eye-opening segment comes when Sharon dismantles the common misconception that trauma only results from major events like war or abuse. She explains how "small t traumas" – those moments when we weren't comforted, protected, or guided through difficult situations – get stored in our brains and manifest as those puzzling overreactions we all experience. Through EMDR therapy, which works with both hemispheres of the brain rather than just the logical left side engaged in talk therapy, Sharon helps clients rewire these neural pathways in weeks rather than years. Her personal experience with loss at a young age infused her practice with deep empathy and spiritual connection, qualities evident throughout our conversation.
Ready to explore whether unprocessed trauma might be affecting your life? Listen now and discover why Sharon believes everyone deserves healing – and why the newer therapeutic approaches she uses might succeed where traditional methods haven't. Your path to that "okie-doke life" might be closer than you think.
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Millie.
Speaker 2:M. Hello there, Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. I'm your host. Millie M. Are you in need of healing from trauma, anxiety, depression or other mental issues? Well, that help you need might be closer than you think. I have the pleasure of introducing your good neighbor, Sharon Burtzla of Renewed you Counseling. Hi, Sharon, how are you?
Speaker 3:Hi, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:Millie Doing quite well. We are so excited to learn all about you and your business.
Speaker 3:Tell us more about Renewed you Counseling Great, I'd love to. Well, renewed you Counseling. We are located in Marietta, georgia, and we also do teletherapy throughout the entire state of Georgia and Florida as well. So you can have a kid go on to Athens and they could still have counseling with us, or go down to Florida and we can still do it there as well. And we specialize we love what we do is we specialize in helping people who have experienced trauma, ptsd symptoms, anxiety, depression, ptsd symptoms, anxiety, depression, self-esteem issues, relationship issues not just go through their challenges, but actually grow through them and be healed from them and renewed through the process. And we like to say that we get people to be get to this place called what we like to call. It's kind of silly but thekey-doke life, because you get to this place where you feel okey-doke regardless and it's all my clients get there.
Speaker 3:They're like I'm there detachment that comes come for that or the other around them. There could be chaos, and they're like I I am not triggered, I feel healthy, I feel. I know my worth and value, I feel, I feel okay, and so that's our whole thing. We want to get people to not just go through their challenges, but grow through them.
Speaker 2:And I love that concept. I know you called it silly, but I think that's the definition of having peace and protecting it. So how did you get into this business? What made you want to? Well, that is a little funny story too.
Speaker 3:So back when I was way back young I was seven or eight years old I remember watching a show called the Bob Newhart Show. I don't know if you've ever seen it or any listeners have ever seen the show. What's?
Speaker 3:the name of the show again Bob Newhart Show. It's back way back. Bob Newhart of the show. Again Bob Newhart show. It's back way back, yeah, so he was a psychologist in Chicago in the show. Right, my whole family would watch the show together. We had great family memories and moments watching the show and I remember asking my dad like is that a real job what Bob does here? Is that like a real job? And my dad was like, yeah, that is real job. I would love to do that and I'm like I know what I want to do with my life. I want to be Bob Newhart when I grow up. I want to be a therapist. So at eight years old I knew that's what I wanted to do and that's what I always wanted to do. So I have my dream job.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. What a cute story. A lot of times we kind of degrade what actors do, but you know, television and film can definitely impact people's lives and lead you to your career. I love that. So what are some myths or misconceptions about your industry or what you do?
Speaker 3:Definitely one of the biggest myths or misconceptions that I hear from people is like oh, because I'm a trauma therapist, they say I don't have any trauma, I wasn't in a war or I don't have major abuse. That has happened to me. I had a pretty good childhood and what I tell everybody is that Every single person on the face of the earth has trauma and it is affecting them in their lives. If they haven't healed it, it is affecting them. So we can have what's called little T trauma or big T trauma.
Speaker 3:Big T trauma is like the war and the actual abuse and car accidents, things like that. But we also can have small T trauma, which is just we weren't feeling comforted or nurtured during something that happened to us, or we didn't feel protected or we didn't know what to do in a certain situation. We didn't have any guidance. All those situations can create trauma in our brain and that can get stuck and cause trauma for us for the rest of our lives and what that looks like is triggers. So if you've ever had a big emotional emotion to something kind of small which I think we all have and you're like, oh, my gosh, why did I just act like that?
Speaker 3:It's because you have stored trauma that hasn't been processed. And what's really cool is we do a type of therapy here at Renewed you Counseling. That's called EMDR therapy and it stands for eye movement, reprocessing, desensitization, and what it does is it actually gets that trauma that's stored and it gets it processed over and it no longer then can trigger you and totally change the way that you feel about yourself, from I'm not safe to I am safe, I survived, or I'm not good enough to I am good enough, I have worth and value.
Speaker 2:Is that a one time thing? Is it a takes months to process? How does that?
Speaker 3:work. It depends on the trauma that people are needing to process. So if they just had one big couple of things, then it can take any like four to six weeks. If it's more than just one which most people have, more than just one it can take a little bit longer, but it's much quicker than regular talk therapy, because regular talk therapy which I do also I incorporate both. But regular talk therapy can't get to the stored trauma because regular talk therapy just works with our left side of our brain and with both left and right side of our brains, so it actually goes into the brain and it actually rewires it and heals it.
Speaker 2:A rewired brain and you can.
Speaker 3:you can check the talk therapy by not talking about something, by hiding certain details right, yeah, so you don't even have to do that much talking, and even dear with it, to actually be very helpful in healing.
Speaker 2:I'm intrigued. So who are your target customers and how do you attract them? We?
Speaker 3:work with adults, we work with children, we work with couples kids, so really anybody, basically everybody, because everybody has trauma that deserves to be healed.
Speaker 2:Understood, Understood. Outside of work. What do you do for fun?
Speaker 3:That's a great question. So I love hanging out with my family and my friends and I love music. So any chance I can get I'm going to see some live music, play, go dancing, that kind of stuff, and love food. So I'm always going to new restaurants, trying new places, and I'm a geek with what I do. So I love what I do so much that in my free time, when I'm not doing counseling, I'm actually reading books, going to trainings and I'm just all about anything that I can get my hands on, about the latest and greatest stuff in trauma, research and anxiety and podcasts anything I'm reading all the time they say when you love what you do.
Speaker 2:You never work a day in your life, so you're blessed in that regard, and with the food and the live music, we are soul sisters. So let's just switch gears really, really quickly. Can you describe a hardship or a life challenge that you overcame? Of course, yeah, sure.
Speaker 3:Well, I have had several challenges in my life, as most people have, but if I'm just describing one, I'm going to go to the one that happened earlier in my earliest in my life, and that was when I was 11. My dad the one who I would watch Bob Newhart with, and all these things he actually passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack when I was 11 years old and that was really difficult.
Speaker 3:Right, I experienced at 11, my dad was young too when he passed away, so it was a very big challenge for my family. But looking back at it, I gained two really amazing important things through that experience. It was difficult, but I gained spiritually like I really grew spiritually. Weirdly, when somebody passes, you never know how you're going to react to that, but I felt more connected to God than prior to that and I feel like I had a very much more. I don't know just, I just felt much more connected. And second, because I was so young, I feel like I developed such a broad and big sense of empathy and compassion for not only myself but for others at a very young age. So I've been honing that for a long time and that, I think, definitely makes me great at what I do, because I have that ability.
Speaker 2:It's a beautiful outcome to something that happened to you. So, yeah, some older people can definitely learn something from you. Well, ms Sharon, please tell our listeners one thing you would like for them to remember about Renewed View Counseling. Okay, sure.
Speaker 3:I would love them to remember about renewed you counseling okay, sure, um. I would love them to remember that they deserve to be healed from their pain. Everybody deserves to be healed from their pain and if they haven't been to counseling before or if it's been a long time since they've been to counseling, we have so many other therapies now that work amazingly, so they might have been to talk therapy before and said, oh, it didn't work really that well. Emdr therapy, other somatic therapies that I've been trained in they work so amazingly. I feel like I have a magic wand and I feel like I get to see miracles happen here every single day and I absolutely love what I do because I actually see people feel and get healed.
Speaker 2:You're changing lives and we appreciate the work that you do. Thank you so much for being with us, wishing you all the best to your business moving forward.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much really.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the good neighbor podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to GNP Cobb Countycom, to gnpcobcountycom. That's gnpcobcountycom, or call 470-470-4506.