Trauma changes identity. Healing rebuilds it. Danielle Bernock on PTSD, self-love & recovery.

FROM SURVIVAL TO SELF-LOVE: HEALING THE TRAUMA YOU CAN’T SEE | Danielle Bernock | W.A.R. Network

What happens when trauma doesn’t leave visible scars… but rewires the way you see yourself?

In this powerful W.A.R. Network conversation, Stryker sits down with Danielle Bernock to break down the hidden effects of childhood trauma, PTSD, identity loss, emotional survival, healing, and rebuilding self-worth after pain.

This episode dives deep into:

• Childhood trauma and emotional wounds

• PTSD and identity shifts

• Self-love after abuse and neglect

• Healing trauma that people can’t see

• Military trauma and near-death recovery

• Toxic inner dialogue and self-worth

• Emotional survival and rebuilding identity

• Faith, resilience, and emotional recovery

• How trauma becomes identity

• Rebuilding mentally after life-changing experiences

Stryker also opens up about his military PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and motorcycle accident recovery journey in one of the most personal W.A.R. Network conversations yet.

This is not surface-level motivation.

This is real healing.

Real truth.

Real recovery.

Welcome home.

This is W.A.R.

We’re All Recovering.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

And it's when I say the words of what happened, it sounds almost silly to me. Like how could that have affected you so deeply? Which is why people struggle with validating their trauma. It doesn't sound like a big enough deal. That what what I went through wasn't a big enough deal. It shouldn't have done that to me. Well, should or shouldn't have, it did.

SPEAKER_02 0:21

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 0:22

I like to illustrate that with you have two little girls skipping down the street, and they both fall down. One of them skins their knee pretty badly and it's bleeding, and she's hurt, and she's on the ground, the other just gets up, she's fine. She says, What's wrong with you? Well, I didn't skin my knee. Well, she did. You can't tell her it's not skinned. But that's what people tend to do with emotional trauma. That's what we tend to do to ourselves. I should be stronger. That should not have happened to me. I shouldn't have thought of it that way. Stop shooting yourself. I had to learn how to stop shutting myself.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

At least 50,000 Iraqi civilians have died.

SPEAKER_02 1:41

We're all recovering. This is the place where we talk about the battles people don't post, the pain people hide, and the healing most people never get to. Today's conversation, this one is gonna hit different. You know, because we're not just talking about trauma. We're talking about the kind that doesn't leave bruises, the kind that rewires you, you know, who believe to believe in who you are. Today I'm sitting down with Danielle Bernard. Did I pronounce that right? Okay, excellent. She's an international award-winning author, a trauma-informed faith, uh-based self-love coach. Wow, that's a that's great. And someone who doesn't just teach healing, she lived it. This is about childhood trauma. This is about identity, this is about learning how to love yourself when life taught you not to. Let's get into it. Danielle, welcome to war. It's an honor to have you.

SPEAKER_03 2:38

It's a pleasure to be here. I really love the name of your podcast, War, because we are fighting a battle people can't see, and we're all recovering it. I I love it.

SPEAKER_02 2:46

Thank you, man. Thank you, thank you. I appreciate that so much. Danielle, I want to start here. A lot of people hear the word trauma and they immediately think of extreme situations. But what most people don't understand is trauma doesn't always come from what happened, it comes from what stayed. So can you can you explain trauma to us? Just break it down for us.

SPEAKER_03 3:07

Well, I would love to because the misunderstanding of trauma is hurting a lot of people. You dismiss it because you look at trauma as if it's an incident that occurred. But an incident that occurred is not trauma. It's a trauma exposure, is one way they label that. It's an opportunity for you to become traumatized. Two people can go through the exact same thing and come through vastly different. So that's the incident. So it's not what happened to you, even though asking that instead of what's wrong with you, like we learned from Oprah, is a better question. Still, it's what did it leave behind? Because trauma is the wound on the inside of you. Yes. In your brain, in your body, in your emotions, in your spirit, in your relationships. It leaves a mark. Just like when you fall on the concrete, if you skin your knee, then you have a mark on your knee. Well, trauma leaves a mark on the inside where your eyes can't see. They can do brain scans and see if we don't go around scanning each other's brains.

SPEAKER_02 4:05

Right, right. Only if we could, right? That'll be awesome.

SPEAKER_03 4:08

I don't know. I wouldn't want people seeing inside there.

SPEAKER_02 4:11

Right, right, right. They'll there'll come a time when, you know, probably not in our lifetime, but it'll happen eventually, I I guarantee it.

SPEAKER_03 4:19

Yeah. Oh no, we've come a long way.

SPEAKER_02 4:21

Right, right, right. So then, yeah. So when someone grows up in an environment where they, you know, weren't seen, weren't heard, or weren't, you know, were constantly hurt in ways people dismiss, how does that shape the identity they carry into adulthood?

SPEAKER_03 4:36

It dismisses your value. You see yourself as invisible, unworthy of love, and questioning your right to exist depending on how pervasive, how vast, how deep the emotional neglect went. I always bring up Dr. Janice Webb, who wrote a book called Running on Empty. That's how I learned the term childhood emotional neglect. It's how I learned most about it and how it unveils itself in our lives, how it happens and how what it looks like. She does a story of a fictitious kid and then rolls it out with 12 different parenting styles to illustrate what emotional neglect looks like and how it happens beside a healthy the way it should have been, or supposed to be, I should say. Not should I not gonna should that it's design. Our world does not operate by design, the design is broken. God made the world by design, and the design is broken, and we're living in that. But we can do things better, we can adopt better ways if we will be aware of the truth and choose the ways that are better. But a lot of times a child would be emotionally neglected by parents who are doing their best, but they were emotionally neglected themselves, so they don't have to give you what you need because they never received it. That's the one category Dr. Janice Webb calls well-meaning parents who were emotionally neglected themselves. But she has 12 different categories, and I fell into three of those. I was one of the well-meaning parents who were emotionally neglected. Both of my parents were childhood trauma survivors that didn't even know they were childhood trauma survivors. Right. I've looked at that since I've learned trauma and look back and go, wow, yeah, they had a pile of trauma. My mother lost her dad when she was seven years old and was raised mostly by her grandmother, who was born in the 1800s. So I mean, if that tells you anything about how her back her upbringing and German background, very staunch, very stoic, you know, shut up and do what you're told kind of thing. It's like there was no room for emotion there. And I'm a highly sensitive person, and I needed more than a child who would be normally a little bit stoic in their personality. Didn't get what I needed enough. That's the word that Dr. Denise Webb uses, because there's no perfect parent. You can't parent your kids perfectly, you're gonna fall down because the design is broken.

SPEAKER_02 7:01

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 7:02

You can do your best, and can you do enough for that child? Because every person's different. They have a different threshold of how much love and nurture and how much they need to be seen, how much alone time they need. Every kid is every person is different. And so Dr. Janice Swebb uses the term enough. Did that child's emotional needs get met enough? Yes, a parent will fail their child. It's it's just it's inevitable. But did they get it enough? And due to the childhood emotional neglect at home, plus I had multiple deaths that took place, multiple bullyings and public shamings and humiliations, it was a whole big pile. They all wove together like a horrible spider web. And so it wasn't just my parents, but that was part of the story.

SPEAKER_02 7:48

Wow. And what you was describing earlier, you know, how we, you know, it should be that a perfect world, you know, only if we could get there. And um, you know, because what I've seen is and what I've lived is that people don't walk around saying, I'm traumatized, you know. We walk around saying I'm not enough and I don't trust people, I sabotage everything good in my life, you know. Um so help me connect that. How does trauma become identity?

SPEAKER_03 8:17

We identify with the symptoms rather than the cause. So you said I sabotage everything I do. That's a symptom, that's a side effect of trauma. It's like if you have a broken arm and you focus on the pain rather than setting the bone and putting a cast on. It's focusing on the pain instead of focusing on the brokenness and the cause. A process I use with my clients is called self, S-E-L-F. I have an IP protected, and it stands for C, which is about awareness, because if you don't see something, you can't do anything about it. And then E is about exposing what's underneath it, what caused that, what what's behind that thing that you see? And then L is love, because you need to lavish love on yourself to give yourself the courage to do something about what you just saw and expose. Otherwise, I'm jumping in a bed, pull the covers over my head, good night. But we need that love, that courage to take the action to move into F, which is free, to get free of those side effects by dealing with the cause of them. You're probably familiar with dandelions. If you have a dandelion out in your lawn and you just pull the top off, you didn't do anything to get rid of that dandelion. You just can't see it anymore. And that's what people do with trauma. They they'll like rip the top off. I'm good, I'm fine, I'm good, I'm fine. They might, you know, pull it and they get half of the root. Well, you know, I went to counseling for you know a couple times, but they won't get to the bottom of the root and get the whole tap root out. You have to get the whole tap root out to get the healing and the wholeness that we were born to live. We were made to live loved, and that's something we have to fight for.

SPEAKER_02 9:49

So Danielle, with that said, let's get to the bottom, the root. You know, I want to make this real for for a second. You know, for me, this isn't theory. Oh, I've dealt with PTSD, still dealing with PTSD for military service, and then everything changed again after I had a motorcycle accident in 2022, had death experience. It was just crazy. You know, traumatic brain injury. And what hit me wasn't just the physical recovery, right? It was what happened in my mind after. You know, I was paranoid. Uh the fear. I had, you know, the identity shift, you know, the question of who am I now? You know, like that that constantly replayed in my mind. So what I want to ask you is when someone goes through something that shakes them to their core, like I did, you know, how do they rebuild identity without carrying the trauma into everything they become?

SPEAKER_03 10:48

Well, everybody's different, and a traumatic brain injury is different than emotional trauma because something physical is also going on chemically in that. So that that's that's a variation on a theme. And I am not educated in traumatic brain injury. I am familiar with it, but it's not something I have expertise in the area of mine's more in the area of emotional trauma. And it's to get to where is that trigger taking you is one of the things that I have learned to do. If you get triggered by something, that trigger drops you off somewhere. You know, something happens and you find yourself in a place you didn't mean to go. So when you got there, to slow down what happened between the trigger and where I arrived. And with one of mine, I went through this with myself. God showed me how to do this because I got so upset the last time I was triggered like that. I sat in a chair and I said, God, I'm not getting you out of this chair until you fix this.

SPEAKER_02 11:45

Right.

SPEAKER_03 11:46

Because I, you know, it happens over and over again. It it's exhausting.

SPEAKER_02 11:49

Yeah, and it's frustrating.

SPEAKER_03 11:51

And it was a trauma that happened when I was six years old. And it's when I say the words of what happened, it sounds almost silly to me. Like, how could that have affected you so deeply? Which is why people struggle with validating their trauma. It doesn't sound like a big enough deal. That what what I went through wasn't a big enough deal. It shouldn't have done that to me. Well, should or shouldn't have, it did.

SPEAKER_02 12:16

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 12:17

I like to illustrate that with you have two little girls skipping down the street, and they both fall down. One of them skins their knee pretty badly and it's bleeding, and she's hurting, she's on the ground, the other just gets up, she's fine. She says, What's wrong with you? Well, I didn't skin my knee. Well, she did. You can't tell her it's not skinned. But that's what people tend to do with emotional trauma. That's what we tend to do to ourselves. I should be stronger. That should not have happened to me. I shouldn't have thought of it that way. Stop shooting yourself. I had to learn how to stop shooting myself. When I was six years old in first grade, I had a teacher who was probably hormonal because she was pregnant. So I bring that up because now looking back, I can understand things a six-year-old could not understand.

SPEAKER_02 12:58

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 12:59

So I'm six years old. I guess the the class had been unruly. So the teacher told everyone no one can talk. Sounds completely like a normal thing to do. But I dropped my pencil, and my pencil rolled underneath one of my classmates' chairs. So I asked them to get my pencil. Oh, I spoke. I wasn't supposed to speak. She told us all to be quiet. So she I got in trouble, got put out in the hallway, which was terrifying enough for a six-year-old when everything's ginormous and you're this little thing. But then she brought me in for reading group, put tape over my mouth, and forced me to read with tape over my mouth in front of my reading group.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

What?

SPEAKER_03 13:34

Yes. And I never told a soul till I was grown up. And that's one of the multitude of traumas, and actually one of the smaller ones. And I was 50. I was in my face when it was still triggering me, and it happened the last time I was on a worship team at church. And I don't stand still when I worship. I I don't like to sit still too long watching television. I don't sit still a lot.

SPEAKER_02 13:57

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 13:58

I'm a mover active. And he was videotaping, and I kept getting out of the screen. And so to teasingly play and to help me do what I needed to do, he came up and he taped my feet to the stage. Everyone else is cracking up. It triggered me. I was gone and they're looking at me, seeing it was visible. The trigger was visible to them. I mean, they're watching me going, what the heck just happened to you? Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_02 14:24

Right, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:26

Thankfully I reacted differently that time than I had before, because I'd been working on healing my trauma before that, not even knowing the half of what I was dealing with. But I I reacted to it differently. The worship leader was so kind. You don't have to be up here. You you can sit out if you want, but I wanted to anyways. But I went home and sat in a chair and said, I don't want this to ever happen again. And what God showed me was there was a space between that trigger and where I went when the trigger happened, where there was a whole thought progression in the subconscious mind. A whole thought progression that I went through like instantaneously, because it's in the fast track of the brain, the unconscious part, and that's what sent me there. So I'm like, well, what's happening there? So he slowed it down, and I learned the I wrote it down, I was writing down notes of this thought, then this thought, then this thought, then this thought, then this thought, led to that one, and it dumped me on, I was worthless.

SPEAKER_02 15:20

So Danielle, how did you react during that time the second time when he taped your feet together? Or in place?

SPEAKER_03 15:29

I don't completely remember because I think part of me left.

SPEAKER_02 15:33

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 15:34

And I think I started crying. I I don't really remember. It just it it just it arrested me. It kind of arrested me so that I wasn't functioning.

SPEAKER_02 15:46

Were you able to continue on or did you have to leave and reset?

SPEAKER_03 15:51

I did go into the bathroom and had a good cry. And instead of going home like I would have done many times before, I went back up there. He said I didn't have to continue. I chose to continue because I wanted to get through. Right. Wanted to get through. So I was grabbing a hold of courage to go through. But I did have that time in the bathroom to reset, collect myself to some extent. My friend came in there and prayed for me, but she clearly didn't really understand what was going on. But that was okay. Someone cared about me, and her caring about me is what gave me that's the element of love. She gave me the love to give me the courage to take a step toward that freedom to keep going instead of running home and crawling into bed, which is what the emotions wanted me to do because it deemed me worthless and I needed to just stop existing. So I started, I created a thing called a silver bullet, which is a short sentence or phrase that you rehearse and practice when you're not in the trigger, when you're in your conscious mind that is contrary to where that trigger wants to send you. It sent me to worthlessness, so my silver bullet became matter. And I started saying that all the time. I matter, I matter, I put it up around my house, I matter, I matter. So the next time that trigger would come up, because I had planted that in there, that would come up and it would interrupt that thought process and not it like stopped the waterfall of thought progression. It still happened, but eventually I it does not affect me at all anymore.

SPEAKER_02 17:26

What about him, this guy? Did you he did he ever ask you what happened or he apologized profusely and I apologized to him because I knew he was just playing.

SPEAKER_03 17:35

He did not, he had no malicious intent. I'm like, no, it is not your fault. It is not your fault. Yeah, he felt terrible.

SPEAKER_02 17:43

Right, right. I'm just thinking, you know, rebuilding physically is one thing, you know, but rebuilding eternally, emotionally, that's where, you know, people get stuck. That's why I got stuck, you know.

SPEAKER_03 17:56

Well, our brains are are really complex, and they've learned about neuroplasticity that we can heal our brains by doing that. But it's work. We have to program them. They're like a computer. It's like our brain is a supercomputer. You know, if we want to get rid of a laptop or a computer, you know, you can erase it, but if you really want to get rid of what's on there, you have to rewrite over it so that what was on it is no longer able to be retrieved.

SPEAKER_02 18:23

So what does that process look like?

SPEAKER_03 18:25

What does that process look like with people? Like like reprogramming your brain and yeah, by your thought processes and how are you thinking and to notice, to see, to recognize negative thinking patterns. And you can learn how you're thinking by listening to how you talk. You start paying attention. Well, what am I saying? Do you always say I'm stupid? Well, that's being unkind to you. That's not productive, that's not healthy, that's not self-love. But listening, and you just start because you're not going to do it in a day. It's going to be a process. So you need to employ patience with yourself too, which can be really difficult. But that's why having a coach, someone who is will hold you accountable, that you can contact to walk alongside you with it. And you do it layer by layer by layer, one thing at a time, just one thing at a time. Because we can't do 27 things at a time, but we can do one thing.

SPEAKER_02 19:20

Right. I asked you that because you know what it what does that process look like? Because I went through a a six-month intense PTSD program. And they talked about reprogramming your brain. And some of the things they did, the methods that we did, did it wasn't forced on you or anything, but you know, they recommended it, and I chose to do uh written exposure therapy. It's go through, you know, traumatic, write down traumatic events that happen to you, and you know, just write it down and it makes sense to you when you write it down for some reason. And then we went through prolonged exposure therapy, which was more intense, where you talk about it and you record the um therapist records, and part of the uh your homework is you go back to your room, whatever, and you listen to it for a while. You know, over time they call it subs levels, supposed to, you know, go from high to low, supposed to decrease. And then you went to moral injury where you talked about the most, you know, because people had different traumatic events, but you talk about the most and you share it you talk you talk about the hardest one, and you share it with the whole group of people, and which was terrifying for me. But these are uh some of the methods they talked about that we did that they said would reprogram your memory. So that that's why I would um reprogram your mind. During that I say during that time my son's levels went down, but after the program, they started going back up. I think like you probably have to do these certain things continuously. You know, part of uh part of it was in vivo's, that's where you go out. Part of my in vivo's was going out in traffic, because in Iraq we were scared. I'm still terrified to be in traffic because in Iraq that's where things go boom. That's where you know fuel trucks blow up, and that's where they target you as when you're sitting in traffic. So in traffic, I'm always looking for fuel trucks. I'm always looking for so they will want you to go put yourself in these situations, you know, during the vivo's and sit there in traffic purposely for 30 minutes or whatever, and do that repeatedly over time. And it's supposed to decrease your SUS levels. You're supposed to be able to deal with it now. It worked while I was in the program, but after I got out of the program, I'm not going to sit in traffic on purpose. I'm trying to uh avoid traffic, you know. So that it started coming back. So I think this is stuff that you have to do repeatedly. You know?

SPEAKER_03 22:05

I don't think one modality or process works for everyone. Just like trauma is personal, healing is personal. I mean, you're telling me about these things they put you through, and I'm going, that sounds awful.

SPEAKER_02 22:17

Right, right, right, right.

SPEAKER_03 22:19

Absolutely awful.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

Right.

SPEAKER_03 22:21

What my counselor did when I was in counseling writing my first book about my story, she would ask me questions of why. Why? And those were the E in self. Why? Like I told her, she'd asked me a question, I don't remember the question now because it got interrupted. She asked me a question, and on the way to answer that, I was saying, Well, I felt like I didn't belong in my family, I didn't feel like I was loved. I was going on the she went, wait a minute, stop. I'm like, what? She goes, Why did you feel that way? I'm like, I have no idea. And that was where the answer was. I needed to know why I felt like that. And it was emotional neglect. We we had to unpacked it then, but I didn't know the term back then, which I love to tell people, you don't need to know the fancy lingo to heal.

SPEAKER_02 23:03

Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 23:04

You just need you just need to go toward healing, move toward healing. And I've heard of, you know, going and sitting in a place, and if you associate your certain trauma with a certain place, it that can be helpful, but it can also not be helpful. And it's important for a person to do what works for them. I'm a coach, not a counselor, but I've heard great things about EMDR, which is a different approach to rewire your brain on the inside of those memories instead of the deep exposure. Instead, you I think talk about it while that's happening and they change your brain.

SPEAKER_02 23:40

And what is EMDR exactly? What? EMDR. What does EMDR stand for?

SPEAKER_03 23:45

Electromagnetic, I don't remember what the R stands for, but they uh they put electricity in your brain while you're talking counselors are licensed to do that.

SPEAKER_02 23:56

They put like like wires, actual wires.

SPEAKER_03 24:00

I've never had it on but I believe they put the um like nodes on your head. They don't enter your head.

SPEAKER_02 24:08

Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_03 24:09

But it's through talking about it and then they change how how you think about that. It's like you it reprograms your brain with how that your your brain processes that story.

SPEAKER_02 24:21

Okay. I gotta look into it. Not that I'm gonna do it.

SPEAKER_03 24:24

I don't want nothing on my my brain, but look into it and find out because I don't do it, so I don't know enough about it to really explain it well. I just know that for some people it works really well.

SPEAKER_02 24:37

Yeah, I'm gonna check it out.

SPEAKER_03 24:39

Your trauma is linked to war, and that's a whole different kind of thing. I mean, that's not the same as what I went through. Childhood trauma's not the same as war trauma.

SPEAKER_02 24:50

Right, the war trauma and then coupled with the motorcycle accident.

SPEAKER_03 24:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:54

Yeah, it was yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:56

No wonder we have a problem with traffic.

SPEAKER_02 25:00

And actually, that's why we're my my shades, people like, why don't you show your eyes? You know, I show my eyes, but let me let me show you my eyes right now. You see this puffiness? Okay, that's from the motorcycle accident. That's from facial and orbital fractures that held in place. And now my eyesight is terrible, like with the lights and everything, and I have this light in the studio, so that that's why I wear shades because it'll give me headaches and all kinds of craziness. Not that I feel nauseous, it's just a long time.

SPEAKER_03 25:38

And I had the uh daily reminder of how everything's connected. They're doing something to my hand and it's making my stomach queasy, you know.

SPEAKER_02 25:45

Right, right, right. Exactly. It's terrible. So when someone, you know, is at rock bottom mentally, right? What's the first thing they need to understand about themselves?

SPEAKER_03 25:56

They matter. They have value and they have a right and they are worthy of getting healed. That that it matters for them to heal, that they matter, and people need to know their value. They won't do anything about getting healed because they feel it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. There's no hope, they're hopeless, they need hope. They need hope and they need encouragement that things can be different.

SPEAKER_02 26:19

So is that where most people go wrong when they're trying to heal? Is when they think like that, that you know they don't matter? Where does do people most people go wrong when they try to I don't know that there is a most people go wrong.

SPEAKER_03 26:32

It's everyone's different. Right and how it the trauma always affects a person's sense of value. That's why I'm a self-love coach. It always affects your sense of value, your sense of identity, which affects all your relationships. Why I call myself a relationship repair specialist. I help people relate repair the relationship not just with themselves, but it starts there. But the relationship with other people, because that's affected as well. Because it flows out of who you are, what comes out of your heart. You need to know that you're loved. Knowing you're loved changes everything. Not knowing as in I understand English and I've heard it, but knowing, believing, I have value and I am worthy of love.

SPEAKER_02 27:11

And I want you to be clear on something, you know, for for the audience. What's the difference between coping and actually healing?

SPEAKER_03 27:19

Coping is like limping down the road. Healing is like going to the doctor for the limp.

SPEAKER_02 27:24

Okay, I like that. Okay. So just limping down the road, you know, just in the room. Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_03 27:39

You're not hiding it, you're not denying it, you're not shoving it down, you're not blaming it on someone else, you're not pretending it's not there, you're dealing with it. One little part at a time.

SPEAKER_02 27:48

I like that. I like that. And I want to go here because uh it's it's a little uncomfortable. And I read something, you said something powerful, that trauma doesn't disappear if it's ignored. It stays, it gets louder internally.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

Right.

SPEAKER_02 28:06

So why do people avoid facing their trauma even when it's clearly affecting them?

SPEAKER_03 28:11

Because they dismiss it, they think they're weak, they measure it by something else, so it's not a big enough deal, like I mentioned my six-year-old trauma, tape over your mouth reading in a reading group. How do you compare that with, you know, the Holocaust? You can't. But that's what we do. That's what I did. I compared things to the Holocaust, the plane crashes, tsunamis, um, war, to the Sandy Hook murders. I mean, I I looked at all these big huge things, and you know, what you've been through is nothing.

SPEAKER_02 28:44

Right, right. I can see that.

SPEAKER_03 28:46

And when we say what we've been through is nothing, then we do nothing about it.

SPEAKER_02 28:49

Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_03 28:50

But still, I have a quote that's gone viral, and in that quote it says, silent screams continue. Only heard by the one held captive.

SPEAKER_02 29:00

The silent screams continue, only held by the one most captive?

SPEAKER_03 29:04

Heard by the one held captive. Okay. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated, the silent screams continue, internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain and hears the screams, healing can begin.

SPEAKER_02 29:26

I like that. I like that. That's deep.

SPEAKER_03 29:28

That was my epiphany when I was writing that book. It was the beginning of me being able to really truly validate all the trauma in my life. And that quote has gone viral. That was what I do now because it resonated with other people. I'm like, well, maybe I maybe I tripped on something here.

SPEAKER_02 29:48

Yeah, that that's deep. That's really deep. You know, I could see people why that would hit a lot of people. It hit me just now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 29:56

Because with the internal screams, you're in such agony and misery inside, but nobody sees it.

SPEAKER_02 30:02

Right. Right. And I was just thinking yesterday, I don't know what triggered me, and I can't remember what triggered me, but I was just thinking to myself, I just want to scream. I felt like I was screaming inside. And I was like, I just want to scream. And I bet if I scream, I'll feel so much better.

SPEAKER_03 30:21

You can do that. Scream into a pillow. I've done that before.

SPEAKER_02 30:24

Right. I've never done it.

SPEAKER_03 30:31

Even with grief, there's a thing called grief work because we have to get that emotion from in the body out of the body. Right. People, you know, they like to go running or riding bikes or, you know, physical, some it's all different ways of how you can process that out of the body, but you have to get it out because the body keeps the score. Trauma kills people, it makes people sick if they don't deal with that.

SPEAKER_02 30:52

Right. Yes. Yes, that's terrible.

SPEAKER_03 30:54

Yeah, and people don't know that and they won't recognize it, but it does. Yes. The first time I said that, I felt like I was making a big deal out of it. Oh, you're being dramatic. No, trauma kills people.

SPEAKER_02 31:04

Yes, it does. Definitely.

SPEAKER_03 31:05

I'm not ashamed of saying it anymore.

SPEAKER_02 31:07

Nope, you shouldn't be. A lot of people need to hear that. It does. Okay, moving on. To love. Let's let's get into love. You're known as the lady on the internet who loves you.

SPEAKER_03 31:22

Yes. That lady on the internet who loves you. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 31:24

I want to sit in that for a second. Just for a second, because for a lot of people, self-love feels fake, forced, and uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_03 31:34

Well, people are told and taught that it's self-centered, and in religious circles, it's taught that it's sin. I grew up with loving myself. That was wrong. That was something that was wrong to do. And it's not wrong. I'm not trying to get people to be egotists or narcissists. That's that's a different thing.

SPEAKER_02 31:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 31:54

Healthy self-love is good because when you and it starts with recognizing your value, because when you value something, you will take care of it. If you value your car, you'll take care of it. If you value your house, you'll take care of it. If you value yourself, you'll take care of yourself.

SPEAKER_02 32:08

So how does it look for someone who never experienced it growing up?

SPEAKER_03 32:12

They hurt themselves in a whole host of ways.

SPEAKER_02 32:26

But how do you teach someone to love themselves?

SPEAKER_03 32:29

They have to start recognizing their value. They have to see. They have to see where they are, they have to see that they don't love themselves. I have a self-love, a free self-love assessment available on my website if anyone wants to take that of how much do you love yourself? How how big of a deal is this? Is it like, well, I I'm not too bad at loving myself, or I really suck at loving myself. Or I hate myself. I hated myself. I tried to kill myself slowly because I hated myself so much. I didn't think I had the right to draw breath. I had existential issues. And you people have to, it's like, you have to go to where when did it start? Because babies are born loving themselves. Babies don't hate themselves. They're like they cry, feed me, change me, you know. That's the only way they know to ask for what they need, but they are born loving themselves, reaching out for help to get what they need. Well, something happened since then that brought you to where you're at. And that's what you have to find. And find out when did it start? What happened? Maybe it was a slow progression, maybe it was one incident that occurred. It could be many different things of why, and then you're getting to the root of that and have to see their value, that they have value. Every person who's drawing breath has intrinsic value. I believe that. I'm faith-based. I believe God created us with value. Everyone has value just because they have breath. And people who like to sort people between good people and bad people, they'll say, Well, they have right, and they don't know. Everyone has value. People are evil, something happened to them.

SPEAKER_02 33:58

Life. Life is just people will answer that question with just life happen. You know? People saying now, you ever heard life is life in? You ever heard somebody say that? All the time.

SPEAKER_03 34:10

People say, I mean, like, well, life be life, and if I don't want to tell them anything, I don't want to say I'm fine anymore unless I really feel like I am. But like an example, because I'm in the middle of uh writing my next book, and I came across a story of a young man named Brian that I'm including in my book, and it's an excellent example of how life happened. He is in prison for multiple murders. He was a murder for hire. He got paid to murder people. And this person who wrote the article about it went and interviewed him. And what happened to Brian is he grew up fatherless, his mother was always gone, and he grew up invisible. He grew up invisible. He didn't even he had no one there to nurture him in any way. He grew up invisible, and his whole trek into the evil went into he got paid to deliver packages. He delivered packages, no big deal. Until one of them was a gun. Well, it's not, it's just to look at. And then he paid to this and it escalated into they paid him to kill people. And this one of the saddest things they said in that article about Brian was I didn't know I was a person until someone paid me to be one.

SPEAKER_02 35:21

Wow. That's deep.

SPEAKER_03 35:23

That's sad.

SPEAKER_02 35:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 35:25

That's sad. I mean, he murdered people, that's bad. He hurt people, that's that's bad. I'm not validating that you or excusing, but there's a reason why. And it's a hurt, a hurt person who was vacated on the inside from a child.

SPEAKER_02 35:40

Yeah, that's yeah. Yeah. Um, so you've worked with people who have gone from surviving to actually thriving. You know, what's that moment where everything starts to shift?

SPEAKER_03 35:51

When they have aha moments. When they have aha moments, I love those. I love those. Many of my clients have already gone through counseling and either it's helped them to a point or it didn't help them at all. But if someone comes to me and they need a counselor, I will send them to a counselor because I am not a counselor. I am a coach. It's forward-focused only. You know, we when you're driving in a car, you'll use your rear view mirror and your side view mirror to look behind you, but if you focus on those, you're gonna crash into something. So with coaching, we focus ahead, but we use the mirrors to look back to bring them into moving forward. So my whole thing with uh that lady on the internet that loves you started during the pandemic when fear was tangible in the air. And love drives fear out. People need to know their love. There was so much panic and fear in the air. I need to do something to help. I mean, I can't fix the world, but what can I do? I I can put love out there, and I just stumbled my way into it. I would show up on lives on Facebook and other mediums and say, I'm this lady here, and I love you, and I want to tell you I love you because you matter, and this and then one day I just grabbed that hashtag. I have an IP protected, and that myself is that identity of that lady on the internet who loves you. And I am that, so I can tell people I love you. Then I put the hashtag because sometimes I don't want them thinking I'm coming on to them or something, you know. Not trying to pick up anybody.

SPEAKER_02 37:19

I mean That's funny. Some people out there might think that's the case, too. That's the funny thing. That's crazy. So, yeah, that needs to be said. So, Danielle, for someone listening right now, and they feel broken, what do you want them to hear?

SPEAKER_03 37:36

Matter, and I love you. You are lovable. I don't care what you've done, I don't care what you feel guilty of, shame doesn't belong there. You matter, and there's hope.

SPEAKER_02 37:46

There's hope. But tell the people where they could find you, and I'm gonna put it all in the description, but you know, from your mouth.

SPEAKER_03 37:53

My website is Danielleburnock.com D-A-N-I-E-L-L-E-B-E-R-N-O-C-K dot com. It goes to my blog, my coaching, my speaking, my workshops. I had a podcast for three years that you can still access those interviews from my website, all my socials, everything I have at my hub of my website.

SPEAKER_02 38:15

And do you do virtual coaching?

SPEAKER_03 38:17

Yes, I only do coaching on Zoom. I do that very intentionally for the safety of my clients. I want them to feel safe. They can turn it off if they ever get uncomfortable. They've never I've never had one had to do that. But I don't want to be in their space because they're in a place where they they need to feel like they have a sense of control there. They could turn it off at any second if they wanted to. They could stop. I want them to feel safe, and their privacy is of the utmost importance to me.

SPEAKER_02 38:44

And we could uh book you through the website, consultations or and stuff like that?

SPEAKER_03 38:49

I do a I do a free discovery call to see if we're a good fit and answer a couple of questions and talk about how it works and stuff like that. So yes. And my books are available at my website as well.

SPEAKER_02 39:00

Excellent, excellent. And you're on Facebook, Instagram, all that good stuff.

SPEAKER_03 39:07

I have a YouTube channel.

SPEAKER_02 39:08

Okay, excellent. So I need to get you on on my app. I actually have an app too, Danielle. Uh I just launched the app. It's called the Ward Network app. It's recovery driven, but it has all the good stuff. It has think of it like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, all that stuff. My member MySpace, all that stuff put into one.

SPEAKER_03 39:30

Oh, you're dating yourself. There's one after that called Zanga.

SPEAKER_02 39:34

Zanga. Yeah, all of that put into one. But it just came out um uh like uh two weeks ago. It's it's it's nice. It's a good uh app.

SPEAKER_03 39:43

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn too.

SPEAKER_02 39:45

Okay, okay. So, man, Daniel, this was powerful. And I think what stands out the most is, you know, people aren't broken. They're carrying things, you know, they were never taught how to release, basically. So if you take anything from this episode, people, it's this. Hiller isn't about becoming someone new. It's about finally meeting who you were supposed to be, okay? Without the weight of everything that tried to bury you. Danielle, thank you again. It was an honor.

SPEAKER_03 40:15

It was an honor to be here. I really enjoyed this.

SPEAKER_02 40:18

Yes, ma'am. Until next time, people, each one reach one, we're all recovering.

SPEAKER_00 40:37

One of twenty four thousand wounded, at least fifty thousand Iraqi civilians have died.