Safety, Unconditional Love, Surviving & Thriving

In this episode we discuss (among other things):

1. What it might look or feel like to be stuck in survival mode.
2. How it may look or feel to live life in thrive mode.
3. Fight, flight, freeze responses.
4. Parts of self, and loving all of the parts of our self.

If you feel triggered by any information in this podcast, or if you feel led to start your own therapeutic healing journey, please visit psychologytoday.com to find a mental health therapist in your area.

If you are having suicidal thoughts, please call 911 or 988 for support. You can also visit 988lifeline.org for more resources, and information.

Remember.....YOU MATTER!

To schedule a discovery session with Sherri, please go to Elevatetoabundantlife.com. 

The information provided in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Divine and Most Unlikely. We're your hosts. My name is Nathan, and this is Sherry.

SPEAKER_04 0:06

Hey everybody, how's it going?

SPEAKER_00 0:08

All right. Last time we got into some of the definitions of trauma. We talked a little bit about what makes someone a trauma therapist versus being trauma-informed. And we talked a little bit about big T and little T trauma.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Right.

SPEAKER_00 0:23

So today, one of the things that we want to discuss, among others, is we want to talk about surviving versus thriving.

SPEAKER_03 0:32

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 0:32

And to me, this is a really important concept. It certainly is not something that I understood or was even aware of. I'd heard the two terms. I'd never applied it to myself and how I was living. So, Sherry, when it comes to trauma, tell me a little bit about what survival is and then what it looks like and what it feels like.

SPEAKER_04 0:57

Right. Yeah, absolutely. So survival, Nathan, and again, I'm just gonna use my own experiences, right? I I was not, okay, growing up as a little girl who was told um little girls are to be seen and not heard. What do you think happened with my emotions?

SPEAKER_00 1:13

I my guess would be you learn to suppress your emotions and not speak them out loud.

SPEAKER_04 1:18

Yep. I did learn to suppress my emotions because there was a lot of fear around that in my childhood home. Um, with domestic violence, a lot of mistaken beliefs, like um, as you know, a recent thing that I went through was um a recent mistaken belief that surfaced is if I if I don't do everything perfectly, then somebody might die. I don't know if you remember that one.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

Yeah, I do, definitely.

SPEAKER_04 1:41

Um that that's uh a belief that surfaced from the domestic violence that I experienced in my home. And so just thinking that things had to be done perfectly. And um that is surviving, right? Like thinking you have to, that's where perfectionism was born in my life. And so then fast forward into marriage number two, which lasted I think 28 years, but fast forward into marriage number two, I was still super dysregulated, very emotionally dysregulated. I would have like emotions like waves. We like the the wave of emotions. I would have emotions, didn't couldn't name the trigger, but I would get triggered by my then husband's alcohol use. Um, and then I would feel probably fear, I couldn't name it back then, but I would feel all the emotions, and the emotions would come up that wave and start to crescendo, and I would freak out. Yeah, I didn't know what to do with them. And I just learned how to survive through them, right? I I would probably get afraid, I would lash out, I would definitely get defensive, I would definitely do all the things back then, Nathan. I was a smoker. I smoked, I started smoking from the age of 13. Wow, I know, right? I started smoking. Talk about survival skills. Yeah, that's a survival skill. I started smoking at the age of 13, which my parents got divorced. I think I was around 11 or 12, and my mom was a smoker. So I started smoking, and in that second marriage, I smoked for the first year of that marriage. The Lord delivered me, miraculously delivered me from that. Um, literally, like the day after I got saved, boom, that habit was done.

SPEAKER_00 3:22

That is amazing.

SPEAKER_04 3:23

It was a miracle. It was it was a straight up miracle. So smoking is a survival skill, and so when I would get really emotional and be all over the board with um how I acted, I would smoke.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 3:36

I would smoke.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

One thing I want to add a little bit about survival is that that language, that terminology, I want you to start people to start thinking about your nervous system, and I want you to think about literal physical survival. Right. So your nervous system, you have an autonomic nervous system that can be split into parasympathetic and sympathetic. Parasympathetic is the rest and digest and the or sometimes called feed and breed, and then the sympathetic is fight, flight, freeze. And I'm sure that everybody has heard those three things fight, flight, freeze. Right. For a long time we taught fight or flight, and then freeze kind of is something that is that hypo response. Yeah, and it's being talked a little bit about a little bit more about now. But the the physiologic basis of that is something, like you said, triggers you. And sometimes, even before you know it at a conscious level, there's a chemical fear response that happens. So that's internal release of adrenaline, and I want to tell you a little bit about what that does to your body. So that internal release, and it's a scale, so don't think about a switch, think about a dial, but that internal release of adrenaline can look like increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, increased respiratory rate, and then in in as you dial that up, more from like a three to say a seven or an eight, now you're talking about things like auditory exclusion, meaning if I'm not looking at the thing that's making the sound, I won't hear it. It's not about how loud it is, it's my brain telling me only the stuff that's in front of me matters. Um, you have a narrowed, narrowed field of view. Once again, it's your brain going, okay, only the thing in front of me is what matters the most, and I'm excluding my peripheral vision.

SPEAKER_04 5:21

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 5:23

It negatively impacts your memory when you are utilizing that portion of your nervous system. You're functioning with an older part of your brain. So Sherry mentioned the amygdala last time. You're functioning with the limbic system, which is absolutely designed to help you survive a lethal threat, but it also cuts off your ability to use your neocortex. So your ability to think clearly, to understand language, to formulate language, and to formulate a plan, that is all either degraded or eliminated depending on where you're at in that fight or flight response. And so your brain, your body don't necessarily distinguish as cleanly as we would like to think. Right. They don't necessarily distinguish as cleanly between being chased by a tiger and not being able to pay a bill this month.

SPEAKER_02 6:14

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

They can both feel very similarly. And when that actually degrades your ability to essentially be a grown adult human by thinking, forming language, making a plan, all that stuff, that can be really difficult to deal with. And whether it's a big T trauma, a little T trauma, or a trigger that is connected to one of those wounds, it can put you in that survival fight or flight place.

SPEAKER_04 6:44

Absolutely, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

And that is not thriving.

SPEAKER_04 6:47

That is not thriving. It's definitely the opposite of thriving, right? I sadly did not learn how to start thriving until pretty close to my second divorce. Because for me, and I think for many clients that I've worked with in the past, when you're in a relationship that's very triggering, and that you constantly feel like you're not safe, right? And then your body's responding in all the ways that you just so beautifully described, by the way, when your body's responding in that way, it is really hard to have to have a healthy, safe response.

SPEAKER_02 7:23

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 7:23

Because your brain is telling you there's a tiger coming after you, you better get ready to run, right? Right? And and even though your husband is not a tiger or your wife is not a tiger, right? Your brain and your body is telling you, you need to defend yourself. You better do something.

SPEAKER_01 7:41

Right.

SPEAKER_04 7:41

Right? And so that's also what I would call you, you're then gonna be reactive versus responsive. I spent much of my life being reactive. Oh my goodness, much of my life being reactive until I didn't, until I learned different, then I learned how to respond.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

And so reacting, would you say reacting is a little bit more like kind of a knee-jerk thing where a thing happens, yes, and then you immediately do something, but really there's not a whole lot of thought involved. Whereas responding is there's a stimulus, I'm gonna absorb that stimulus, I'm gonna consider how I want to behave, yes, what I want to do, and then once I've selected that, then I do that.

SPEAKER_04 8:22

Yes. And did you remember the window of tolerance?

SPEAKER_00 8:24

I do remember the window of tolerance.

SPEAKER_04 8:25

Yeah, that's where the window of tolerance comes into play. So if you guys could imagine like two lines, like you're looking at a window, and the line of the when you go up to the top out of the window, that's a hyper-vigilant response. And when you go down past the line below the window at the bottom of it, that's a hypo vigilant response. That's where the freeze happens, where you just like freeze fawn, right? In that area where you just like feel like you can't move, you're dying, you can't breathe. And I have a great video that I used to play for clients about um, it was like an antelope being attacked by a cougar, and the antelope looked totally dead, and um, it really was faking being dead, it was in a frozen state, and then the cougar got distracted by another animal and eventually ran off, and it shows the antelope um coming back to life and it would shake and it would jitter as its nervous system kicked back in, as the nervous system came out of that freeze response place and went in back up into the window of tolerance. And once the the animal got its wits about it, it shook a little bit and then it jumped up and it's waited for a minute and then it ran off.

SPEAKER_00 9:33

Yeah. And we we see these we see these types of responses in in what in like actual emergency situations. Yes, yes. You see uh both the individuals experiencing that and then sometimes the people responding to it, especially if they don't have a lot of exposure, yes, you'll see you'll see versions of each of those three things. Yes. And the freeze one to me is that was one that always stood out to me because I I mostly saw freeze in people who are newer on the job. And it was one of those things where like it there's nothing wrong with them, you know, like they're not doing anything wrong, they're they just don't have enough exposure yet. They're not quite, I'm I'm gonna use a word that maybe isn't that kind, but they're not as desensitized to it as they need to get. And so, you know, you just kind of work around them and then you can come back to it, talk to them about it later, just help them help guide and coach them through that. But it's a normal thing, especially when you're when what you're seeing or what you're getting exposed to is not what peop most people's everyday experience is. When you work in a field where that actually is fairly normal, it takes a little bit of time to get accustomed to that.

SPEAKER_04 10:39

Right.

SPEAKER_00 10:40

Once you get there, it's it's okay.

SPEAKER_04 10:42

We talked about that, Nathan, because I was so curious as for you as the client who grew up in a traumatic environment, and then you chose a career. I'd say, of course he did. Of course he did. He chose a career that was also brought trauma into his life. Yeah, and he had to educate me. He taught himself, you guys. He taught himself to override. So when he's talking about getting desensitized in the in the first responder field, again, firefighter, paramedics, police officers, all the people in the first responding field, they have to override their system, as do even physicians. Absolutely. Physicians and nurses, absolutely, especially in the ER. I I uh yeah, you have to learn how to override those natural responses. And that's it, and that goes to show you the power of the body, what we can do, the power of the mind, Nathan. Absolutely that you could train yourself to override those responses and then show up and be able to help people in those emergency situations, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:45

Right.

SPEAKER_04 11:45

And so when he says that he when he worked with newer people in that field and they weren't quite as desensitized as they needed to be, and they would go into that freeze response, right? Um, I have a little funny story connected to that. When I first became a therapist, and I I had done therapy, you know, for I spent two years in an internship before I obviously before I graduated with my master's degree and and officially became not licensed yet, because it took me some time to get licensed, but officially became a therapist out of school. I don't remember the story that I was listening to, but I was listening, I was in a session listening to someone's trauma, and I did my own little freeze, my own little version of freeze. In my head, I was like, oh my gosh, these people need to talk to somebody. And then it was like, oh crap, I'm the somebody.

SPEAKER_00 12:36

That's funny because in in public safety, we have similar responses. You like a friend of mine, a really good friend of mine who has been in the field for a long time too, he was telling me about a call he went on, and I don't remember what what the call was, but he got there and he's like looking at it, and he he was telling me his internal dialogue, which was, oh man, this is bad. Someone should call 911. Dot dot dot. Oh, wait, I am 911. Crap. Yeah, that's funny.

SPEAKER_04 13:04

Right? So when you guys are watching shows about that, first responders are you know, whatever the situation may be, we're all just human. We're all just humans trying to help other humans in challenging situations. And so if you're a therapist, if you're a first responder, if you're a police officer, if you're in the military, whatever, whatever, know that that is so human. It's such a human response. And um, I figured it out, you know, as that new therapist, different situations, because you guys, you cannot get trained when we go to school, whether it's as a first responder or as a therapist, you can get trained in every situation. I have encountered many, many, many, many situations where I was like, well, didn't learn this in school. Okay, how am I gonna get through like this next 55 minutes? And then I would call a colleague, or I would um, you know, back when I was in supervision, I would talk to my supervisor about it. And as therapists, we have consultation groups. When I was a therapist, we have consultation groups. I still can consult. Now I have coaching friends that I can consult with. And Nathan, when he was in that field, he also did clinical consults. And so it's just, I just want to normalize that because it's just part of being human, it's part of the learning curve. And I think it was shortly after that I went for a doctor's visit, and I look I talked to my doctor, and I was like, now I know why they call it practice. You're just practicing. Doctors are practicing, first responders are practicing, therapists are practicing. Yeah, we may get the training and the education and all the things, but we still have to practice.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

I want to, yeah, absolutely. I want to add maybe one more thing about survival, and I also want to talk about thriving.

SPEAKER_03 14:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:47

So the survival component, what I want to share. Stop laughing at me. What I what I want to share about the survival part is if you are in survival and if you've been there for a while, you likely will not recognize it.

SPEAKER_02 15:08

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

And the reason is, and there's a there's a quote, I'm sure you guys have heard it, but the quote is you don't ask the fish about the water. Because from the fish's perspective, they're gonna go, what do you what are you talking about, water? Like I live in this all day.

SPEAKER_04 15:20

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 15:21

And so for us, I'm by the way, I'm very food-centric, very food motivated, so that's something you guys should know about.

SPEAKER_04 15:28

Well, the boy eats a lot.

SPEAKER_00 15:29

The boy eats a lot, yeah. I'm a growing boy. Um, but when I think about survival in in us, I kind of think about there's like a soup that we all make for ourselves. Um, but we're in the soup. And we we put different ingredients into the soup. But the thing is, we're only in our soup, we're not in anyone else's pot of soup. So you don't know that there's something different out there. You're only used to what you are used to. However, what I would say is there are people who love you and who are close to you who very likely are going to be able to tell you, hey man, that soup, it could be a little nicer for you. And I had many people, uh, I would say maybe a handful or so people over uh five, ten years lovingly, gently say, Hey man, you might want to think about therapy. And I was like, No, you know, I'm good, you know, I'm tough, made me strong, good, you know. And and that was that was that was his Tim the tool man. Yep, that was my man grunt. But I I absolutely did need therapy, I just didn't recognize it at the time. So the reason I'm sharing that is you may hear that and you may think, ah, that's not me, I'm good to go. And you might be, you truly might be. But there's also a possibility if you have survived some trauma, there's a possibility that you may not recognize how it's impacting you, but there may be some people around you that are close to you, and it might be worth asking them, you know, if they're seeing anything that concerns them, makes them worry about you, or makes them think that maybe, you know, trauma might be a good a good solution for you.

SPEAKER_04 17:14

That's really good, Nathan. Really good. I'm glad that you had a good friend, a dear friend. I did, yeah, right? At the very at the very end of like of your own, like saying nope, I don't need therapy or I don't want to go to therapy, and then you did uh the other treatments, the psychedelic treatments. Um you had a good friend that's I you know what tell me about that.

SPEAKER_00 17:37

Well, uh the they had been going to to see you for therapy for I think one or two years previously. Okay, and you know, we talked pretty frequently and they would share about their experience with therapy, and I thought that was really cool. I was really proud of them for going because it takes a lot of strength to go. For sure. And you know, at the same time, I was like, Yeah, I'm not doing that. But it it seemed to be good for them. And then sort of when I came to the end of my rope, I just was like, All right, who are you going to see? And uh, and they gave me your information, and then you know, that caused me to to contact you, and you know, here we are.

SPEAKER_04 18:20

The rest is history. So the rest is history, as they say, yeah. God had God had plans that we didn't know about. But um, the reason I'm asking that is because you said, like, sometimes family can help show you, right?

SPEAKER_01 18:31

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 18:31

And from my experience, sometimes family can't, because a lot of times I don't know about you guys listening, but for me, when if my especially when I was younger, if so if somebody in my family said I needed to do something, I went and did the opposite thing. Just be just because they told me to do the the different, you know, something different.

SPEAKER_00 18:51

Makes sense to me, right?

SPEAKER_04 18:53

So sometimes I tell people that we need that objective perspective, and that's something that's really really good about therapy andor coaching, is that you you're getting an objective perspective. I'm not I'm not, you know, a relative. Your therapist isn't related to you, your coach isn't related to you. And so they can help you see the four the four the trees in your forest because they don't live in your forest. Right. Nathan used the metaphor of soup, and I like to use the metaphor of a forest. Um, when clients come to see me, whether coaching or therapy, um, I would tell them, you know, sometimes your forest, I would put my hand right up to my face, your forest is that close to you. And a therapist and or a coach and other people help draw your hand back so that you can see more objectively. So I just wanted to add that piece in because sometimes it's not family, because I'm not gonna stay here long, but family, I've had a lot of conversations with you about, you know, it's really, really hard, you guys, when when you've done your own healing journey, and I think Nathan can testify to this too. When you've done your own healing journey and you've got people that you love and care about dearly, and they don't want to do theirs, they haven't done theirs, it's so hard to watch because when you do start to thrive, you want everybody around you to thrive.

SPEAKER_02 20:10

Yes, right?

SPEAKER_04 20:11

When you do find healing and you do find joy again, you want everybody around you to experience that, and so that can be hard.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

What does thriving look like then? I mean, we spent the first 20 minutes talking about survival, which is good, valuable, right? But there you don't have to stay there. No, you know, you can with the right kind of therapy for you, and that's gonna vary person to person. And same thing with a therapist, by the way, there's a chemistry there. So it's not about whether they're good or bad or right or wrong, but between two people, there's gotta be just the right chemistry. So when you find the right therapist, you and you're utilizing the right modality for you. Last time we talked about what some of those modalities might be. The other side of surviving is thriving. So, what I'd like to talk a little bit about now is what thriving actually looks like. Share a little bit about from your perspective, what thriving looks like.

SPEAKER_04 21:15

That's really that's a great question. Thriving looks like, especially I'm gonna go back to the wave of emotions. Thriving looks like when a trigger comes to you or happens, because they're gonna happen. I I'm at my healthiest place ever. I think you can say you're at your healthiest.

SPEAKER_00 21:31

Without question.

SPEAKER_04 21:32

Yep, you're at your healthiest place ever, and you're still gonna get triggered.

SPEAKER_00 21:35

Yeah, right?

SPEAKER_04 21:36

I still get triggered. So thriving to me means um when I get triggered, I can be, oh, there's a trigger. And then as I start to ride up, go up that wave of emotions to surf the wave, I call it, then I'm aware of survival skills, like praise God, I got delivered from smoking. I'm no longer smoking. Um, so but but I've also used food. As a survival skill, comfort food. So I'm aware of my survival skills. So I've learned now to A, notice the trigger, B, name the emotion, and C surf the wave without using survival skills. Okay. And you gotta know what your survival skills are. You gotta know, I think it's really helpful to know your parts of self because your your parts of self could come in and be a survival skill. I've also dissociated a lot. I became an expert at dissociating because I'm sure as a child, well, first of all, you guys, part of my brain has totally dissociated because I have very little memories from the ages of zero, like zero to twelve. Like not many people have memories at zero, obviously, but in my healing journey, I've actually had some womb being in the womb events come up, but I don't have it hardly any memories. I have most of the things I remember from zero to twelve are negative, the bad things. So I dissociation was a big survival skill for me. So now I can do all those things. I can see the trigger coming, I can name the emotion, I can feel the emotion come up and I can surf the wave and I can go back down. And I I engage in healthy resources. As a believer, I I will sometimes stop and pray and ask God to help me ride the wave. I will sometimes call my best friend, Karen, to help me ride the wave. I might journal to help me ride the wave of emotion. I might um go for a walk. I I there's a there's a myriad of healthy resources. What's a what's a healthy resource, Nathan, you've learned to engage in when you get triggered?

SPEAKER_00 23:33

Yeah, that's a really good question. For me, one of the the things that has been most valuable for me to learn is to recognize that there's a difference between the emotion or how I feel and reality. Now, it's not placing value on one or the other, just recognizing that the feeling, like if I'm at a checkout line at a store, this is a thing that I have in my hand, and I don't have to choose to buy it. I've got it in my hand, I don't have to buy it. And when it comes to the emotion, I have started to be able to recognize when I have the negative emotions, I have started to recognize, oh, hey, okay, almost treating it like an imposter. Like this thing is lying to me right now.

SPEAKER_02 24:16

That's good, that's good.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Yeah, this thing is lying to me right now. I know that it is going to pass. And when Sherry talks about the wave, I learned to swim on a tropical island, and there would be waves that would come sometimes. And what I thought was really fun to do as a kid when a big wave came, as the wave was approaching me and I had my feet, you know, on the sand under the water, I would jump up as the wave came. And a lot of times what would happen is with that upward momentum, the wave would carry me to its peak, and then on the other side, the wave would pass me, and then I'd kind of like you know, come back down and land more or less in the same spot that I was before the wave approached. So I have started to try to visualize those emotions that way, like, okay, hey, here this thing comes, I just gotta ride it up and ride it down. And you know, Sherry mentioned still uh sometimes being triggered, and yes, that is true. I for me, what I've found is those events are fewer and further between, and they it it is now taking larger events for for that to trigger me, which all of all of that is evidence to me of my own progress in healing. Not not done, not endpoint, but significant progress from where I was two years ago. Part of the reason that we wanted to talk about thriving is because if you haven't thrived, if all you've been doing is surviving, then you don't even know that there's something better out there. And we want to encourage you that if you're surviving right now, there is better out there. There is thriving. That is not a pie in the sky thing, it is not unattainable, it is absolutely within the realm of possibility with the right therapist and the right work and just you know commitment on an ongoing basis. But you can transition out of just survival and move into thrive. Your body will feel better, your you you will, your heart rate will slow down, your blood pressure's not as high, you don't feel just constant anxiety, you don't have this constant doubt about everything and your ability to do or cope with everything. It it looks very much different. It's a lot more peaceful, a lot more island time.

SPEAKER_04 26:39

Nathan loves to be on island time.

SPEAKER_00 26:42

Yes, I certainly do. Try to live as much of my life on island time as possible.

SPEAKER_04 26:46

Yes, yeah, super important. That's a chill place to live, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:50

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 26:51

Okay, so one of the ways that that you can go from survive to thrive is by not blaming your parents, by not blaming the person who caused the trauma by go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Well, I just want to say this is a really complex and complicated topic because one of the things I learned from you, and I had no idea. Yeah, one of the things that I learned from you, and I'd like you to share a little bit more about it, but that a child's first experience of safety and unconditional love is supposed to be from their parents. That's right. Okay, I didn't know that. I it I just I had no idea, I never even thought about it. But tell me a little bit about what happens if the parent is the danger.

SPEAKER_04 27:45

That's a good question, Nathan. Oh, and boy, did I grow up with a parent that was a danger. Um, my dad felt my dad felt dangerous to me, I'm sure, as a child, again, not a lot of memories, but just looking back at the at the memories of the really bad events that I do have, I'm sure he felt dangerous to me. Now, I I want to preface this by saying, my dad, oh my goodness, the trauma my dad experienced, Nathan. He experienced horrific trauma growing up, which caused him to repeat some of the trauma that he experienced as a child. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 28:22

That is a really important point. That when we experience trauma, yeah, if we don't do the work to heal from it, we end up just replicating what we were shown.

SPEAKER_04 28:34

Yes, and Nathan, for both of us, we grew up with family of origin trauma. You repeated some of your trauma, some things that happened to you, you repeated them, which brought a lot of shame and guilt, and I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say false guilt, because when you are a child, you do not know what you're doing.

SPEAKER_01 28:52

Right.

SPEAKER_04 28:52

So he repeated some things as a child. Now he he his testimony is something, you guys, at the age of 14, and we're not gonna go into that too much, but right at the age of 14, I think you loved history from a very young age. Yep, he loved history from a very young age, and so he would read about famous people in history, and then somewhere along the way he started to love the military. So he he read and studied about Navy SIELS, and you guys, he was like, I want to be like these men.

SPEAKER_00 29:21

And so his 14-year-old self said Yeah, my 14-year-old self was like, wait a minute, what do you mean you wish you could be like these men? If you want to be like these men, be like these men. And what what I what I meant by that and what I understood at that time is identify the behaviors or the characteristics or the traits about them you find most admirable, and then start doing that. And even though you don't necessarily have them, that's the way you build them, is by doing it, and eventually it will become a hard built-in part of your character.

SPEAKER_04 30:00

For sure, for sure. I think God had his hand in that before, right? Without a doubt, before Nathan knew that God might have a hand in that. Um, but that is not everybody's story, for sure, right? That is not for sure, it's not my story.

SPEAKER_00 30:15

Yeah, and you were talking about, I I apologize because I interrupted you, but you were talking about your dad not being a good one. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_04 30:23

That's right, that's right. Okay, so Nathan's question was what happens when kids aren't raised where the parents are safe. Um, okay, so my dad didn't feel safe. I think my mom also became somewhat unsafe because she was trying to survive herself and protect herself because he was mostly abusive to her. Um, we I think as kids growing up, we never knew if she was gonna live or die. My dad always carried a gun in his pocket. And um I can I can only imagine that we as kids never knew if we were gonna live or die, if she was gonna live or die. And then I do know that I did think about oh my god, if she died, yeah. Then I would kind of I'm stuck with my dad.

SPEAKER_03 31:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 31:09

Yep. And then I might die. So um what happens when parents aren't safe is children quickly learn at a very young age, even in infancy, you guys, children absorb everything around them. Um, from um being in a bassinet or a crib or even in the womb, I told you guys I've had some womb memories. I in one of my early on healing journeys, I felt like my mom got beat when she was pregnant with me, and and later I asked her and she said that she did. So I it I mean it's bizarre. I can't explain that. How does how does a baby in the womb have hold that memory? But they can hold memories because if you experience trauma as a woman and you're pregnant, the baby is connected to your nervous system, right? Yeah, because they get sustenance from you. That that's how they're living inside of you. They get sustenance from you, so they they feel what we feel. And you guys don't even want to know about me. I didn't I didn't even know how to have a healthy pregnancy with my two kids. I literally smoked through both of my pregnancies. That's like the the limits of what I knew even as a young adult. Um, so okay, so going back to the kids not feeling safe, your nervous system learns from a very young age to be on high alert, right? And so I think I I think when I was a little girl, we've talked about this a little bit, I stayed in like freeze mode because I was so scared, but boy, when I turned 18, that shifted. But um, so when you learn that your parents aren't safe, we all want a safe attachment, right? And so there's a diagnosis that can develop outside, or not outside, but attached to trauma, and it's called borderline personality disorder.

SPEAKER_01 32:54

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 32:55

And I I don't think I ever had that, but I definitely had some symptoms of it. So how why that's attached to trauma is when in your family of origin, if your parents don't feel safe, and as a child, you naturally want to be in relationship and feel safe. So you go towards a parent, mom or dad, to feel safe. And if mom or dad ends up not being safe, you quickly go away from the parent and then you don't feel safe, right? And so you kind of teach yourself, you you automatically teach yourself how to survive. If I want to be okay, and let like in my case, dad wasn't safe, so I think I stopped going towards dad. I think I learned how to stay away from dad, right? And then I I attached perfectionism to that because if we if everything's clean, if I'm not a bad little girl, if I do this, if I get good grades, if I do that, then mom won't die.

SPEAKER_01 33:49

Right.

SPEAKER_04 33:49

Then mom won't die. And man, guys, wow, wow, wow, wow. What a thing for a child to carry, right?

SPEAKER_01 33:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 33:56

Um, and that one recently surfaced for me because my dad passed away recently. He passed away in August of 2025, and my mom tragically died during COVID in a nursing home in August of 2020. So when we talk about triggers, I and healing comes in layers. It comes in layers. So I was doing like pretty good these past 10 years, and then my mom died, and then um five years later, my dad died, and stepdad died in between that. Sister died prior to that. My sister was my first biggest loss. But so back to children feeling safe. You just learn not to attach, you learn to withdraw, you and that's called an insecure, unsecure attachment.

SPEAKER_00 34:41

Well, one of the things that I I wonder about is if those formative years are supposed to teach the child what essentially, and I'm using air quotes here, but what normal is.

SPEAKER_04 34:53

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:55

But what that's essentially teaching them is that not safe is normal. That's right. That's what they're looking for in a home. That's what they're looking for in in that environment. And so as that carries through from childhood into adulthood, that has some implications on those on romantic relationships.

SPEAKER_04 35:16

Totally, totally. So, who was I drawn to? I was drawn to unsafe men and didn't have a clue. When I married my second husband, this is gonna really speak to my age. We we were pin pals, and I answered, you guys, back in the day. Don't you laugh, Nathan? Back in the day, um, there were no dating apps, but there were newspaper ads. And so my second husband placed an ad in the newspaper, and I thought as a joke, I'm gonna respond to it. And then we were living in the same city, then I moved back to Texas. I was living in Seattle, he was in Seattle, and then we became pin pals.

SPEAKER_00 35:52

Is this where the song came from? If you like pina colada.

SPEAKER_04 35:57

Maybe, maybe, but um, we became pen pals. We were talking about marriage before because it was all the relationship developed over the phone. I back then wasn't healthy enough to know that was not a wise idea. You don't want to, you don't want to develop an emotional bond to someone without knowing all the other boxes are checked, because I tell people these days you need to have your like top three to five must-haves in a relationship before you can pursue a relationship. Because if those top three to five aren't being met, then I don't think the relationship is gonna be successful. So the only box he matched at the time was the emotional connection because we we would have hour long, many long hours of conversation. And then when we met, long story, we're I'm not gonna go down that road, but yeah, later married and found out he was an alcoholic. So I didn't I couldn't see that. I didn't I didn't experience that with just that emotional connection over the phone, right?

SPEAKER_00 36:55

Yeah, and you also said something else that I want to come back to because I didn't know this, and it was like really I think it's really important. You mentioned borderline personality disorder, but I also just briefly, we don't need to go into it too deeply, but I also want to talk just a little bit about dissociative identity disorder and narcissistic personality disorder. And so, guys, I just want to say when we're talking about these three things, we're talking about them not as they may colloquially be thrown around, but we're talking about like DSM uh diagnoses, okay? And the reason I want to just address each of those three things is something you taught me that I didn't know is that those things can be a response to trauma. So what I 100%. What I want to say about that is when I heard, and again, this is just like colloquial discussions, but when I heard about a narcissist, I'm thinking, ugh, what an awful human being. Like, ugh, what's e why why? You know, that's terrible. And what I didn't realize, well, and what I didn't realize is I mean, maybe, but also maybe that is their survival response to trauma. And it's it's it is manifesting itself that way as unresolved trauma.

SPEAKER_04 38:10

Absolutely, absolutely, but it doesn't look like that, it just looks like, ooh, yuck, right? And I think you, right?

SPEAKER_00 38:18

Yeah. What Sherry's alluding to is that I have some close personal experience with um with someone who uh struggled with at least narcissistic tendencies.

SPEAKER_04 38:30

There you go. We're not gonna diagnose anyone from afar, but tendencies can be there without a diagnosis, right? Just like I feel like I had probably had tendencies of borderline personality disorder, and it totally as a result of trauma. And and and some of the main components of borderline um personality disorder is that push-pull. And and in relationships, in my marriages, I would be like, come here, love me, love me, love me. And then they would get close, and I'd be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, nope, not safe, not safe. Right? And the alcohol use, you guys, the alcohol, not use, but abuse, exacerbated all of that, right? Because I I I you know he would feel safe. It would feel safe for him to come close to me when he was maybe not drinking, but then when he was drinking, it didn't feel safe. And I mean, it just fed into all of those symptoms, right? And as as it is too, I've worked with a lot of people now in the past as a therapist. Let me just keep saying that. A lot of people marry to people with narcissistic um symptoms, symptoms of narcissism, and man, it's hard to be in relationship with either with borderline personality symptoms or symptoms of narcissism, or what was the other one? Oh, DIY. Yeah, dissociative identity disorder. Dissociative identity disorder, which used to be called multiple personality disorder. Um, as a professional, I did not, that's a whole other expertise category. And I didn't get into that field. I didn't feel drawn to that, but I I loved, honestly, and most therapists will not tell you this. And as a former therapist, I'll tell you this. I was drawn to people with borderline personality disorder to work with them because A, I could relate, and B, you can shift that. That's a diagnosis you can come out of, right? Because you can teach people. I'm a huge fan, even as a coach, of psychoeducation. Nathan got a lot of psychoeducation, and Nathan, I think you would say psychoeducation changed your life.

SPEAKER_00 40:29

It absolutely did.

SPEAKER_04 40:31

Like the trauma chart, he bought his own.

SPEAKER_00 40:34

I did. She goes, You don't need to buy this. And I was like, too late, I already bought.

SPEAKER_04 40:38

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 40:39

And then I bought my own workbook, and I worked through the bang workbook again from Janina. You said Janina?

SPEAKER_04 40:44

Janina Fisher. Yeah. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 40:46

Both I both I bought both the trauma flip chart and the workbook and worked through that. Very valuable for me.

SPEAKER_04 40:53

Yep. And he was a fun, what I would call a fun client for me because he was so serious about doing the work. And as a therapist, former therapist, we love working with people who are hungry for healing, hungry for healing. It's a little more challenging. Everybody's at a different place when they come in for therapy. It's a little bit more challenging when it feels like we have to pull the client along for the healing because no one else can do that work for you. I've always assigned homework. Even as a coach, I assign homework for people to do. Because one hour a week, Nathan attended for a long time, two hours a week, but you guys, even two hours a week is not enough, right? That's the workbook, that's the homework, that's all the things that I would do. And I still give homework too as a coach, right? Because homework is valuable. So that connecting, we started out talking about um a safe environment as a child and and teaching children how to safely attach. And again, children, if if there's no safety in the home, they learn. They they just learn to live in a hyper-vigilant state and they feel like the world is unsafe. Right. I, after I got divorced in 2016 for the second time, I think I told you guys that already. I determined not to be in a relationship again until I got healthy. And I've literally spent the past 11 years of my life doing my own work with therapy, with EMDR, with the Lord, with parts of self, all the things. Um, and that that is how you learn how to thrive. And yeah, we do look at your family map to see where things came from. We never ever look at a family map to blame and say, oh my gosh, your parent was so awful, or your parent did this, or your parent did that. And I do talk about my dad's stuff because it was real. My mom's stuff is real. I didn't hate them, I stayed in relationship with them. I did some confronting with my dad along the way. But let me tell you guys, the Bible talks about forgiveness 70 times seven. I exceeded that. 70 times seven staying in relationship with my parents. I exceeded that. But here's, and this is this is different for everybody, and Nathan's got a testimony too about that down the road to share if he chooses. But I chose to constantly forgive my family, and I set boundaries with them along the way for sure. My dad would we would talk and he would ask me, like, literally, Nathan, I think I've shared this with you. Because I've struggled with my weight, because guys, after I quit smoking, guess what I started doing? I started eating as a survival skill for comfort food. And my dad, his own trauma was connected to food and weight. And when he would very first call me up, the first thing he would say, he wouldn't say, Hey, how's it going? He would say, Hey, how much are you weighing now? And let me tell you, I had to set a very firm boundary. I told him, if you keep saying that, we won't be talking anymore. And he would stop that behavior for a little while until he started back up again. I'd set the boundary again. But like Long story short, I stayed in relationship with them because as a believer, as a follower of Jesus, I when my parents died, I didn't want to have any regrets.

SPEAKER_02 44:10

Right?

SPEAKER_04 44:11

I didn't want to have any regrets. And so I stayed in relationship with them with strong boundaries, and something that helped me a lot is at the age of 26, I moved away from my family, and I I didn't never go back because my second husband was in the military, so we kind of moved all over the country and out of the country for a little while. And I just never went back to my family. So that distance helps when when, like Nathan's, his family still is close by. That makes it a little bit more complex, right? It makes it more complex. Distance really helped me with my boundaries. Um, so it's different for different people, and some people do need to not be in relationships for a while. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 44:56

But I I just also wanted to say, first of all, forgiveness is that's definitely a topic of its own, maybe a podcast of its own. We and we will definitely talk a little bit more about that because I think it it's it's something that sounds nice, but it absolutely deserves us fleshing it out in in specific detail because it's not just it's not just a light switch. I also just want to point out that's a really interesting and difficult dichotomy, I think, for a lot of people to manage because we just talked about two things. One, a parent is supposed to be a child's first experience of safety and unconditional love. And then in the same breath, we said, and we don't blame parents. That is a really difficult dichotomy to walk. And I can I can just imagine people going, oh my gosh.

SPEAKER_04 45:47

What you know, that's yeah, it's just it it it is a different, it is a difficult dichotomy, but Nathan, did we ever talk about how awful your parents were? Or did we acknowledge? I think this is really elemental, not elemental, not elemental, but key for the therapist that you choose you guys. As a believer in Jesus, I don't believe in blaming and shaming because that doesn't help anybody. If I help a client hate their parent, that does not help anybody. It doesn't help my client, it doesn't help their family, it doesn't help anyone.

SPEAKER_00 46:20

And hate hate and anger, first of all, those things take a lot of energy. And energy is another finite thing, and I do think that we ought to consider where do we want to devote our energy? Do we want to devote our energy to hate and anger or do we want to devote it to love? And another thing that I think a lot about anger is it, and I this is a quote from the Buddha, I'm gonna butcher it, so I apologize, but it's something to the effect that being angry at someone else is like grabbing a hot coal to hurl it at them and hurt them. But the moment you you pick up the coal, you just burn yourself and you drop it. And that's kind of what anger is like. It definitely is there to protect you. Like we talked about, it's a secondary emotion. But when you choose to stay there, right, you're hurting yourself. And I don't I don't just mean in a nebulous way, but when you retain anger within your body, yeah, you cause damage to your physical body. Like, think about you know, hypertension, the damage that that causes to vessels, the damage that that causes to your your organs. It's a very real thing. And so if we can work our way out of that and build a different habit than anger or than hate, we will live much happier lives. The soup that we're in is gonna be a lot better.

SPEAKER_04 47:46

That's right, Nathan. That's really good. Yeah, so we don't I would encourage you to find a therapist that is not about like having you cut off your family members. Um, that's a whole other topic because my uh youngest daughter did end up leaving the family. Um, and I don't know, you know, how she came to that conclusion. But um from my generation anyway, I I I just don't think that's something that we did. And and I did have several people say, I can't believe you're still in a relationship with your family, but that's just something that I chose to do, but it's so different, it's so different for everyone. Um people make different choices, right? Nathan's story is a little different than mine in that regard. Um, and that's okay. Our stories are our stories, and we do not want to judge ourselves, we don't want to shame ourselves. We haven't touched on it yet, but it's so important. Healing cannot happen without self-compassion.

SPEAKER_00 48:42

Yeah, right? And guilt and shame are both enemies of self-compassion.

SPEAKER_02 48:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:48

Um shame is the I am a bad person. Yeah, that's right. Guilt is I did a bad thing. Yeah, but really neither of those are constructive. Like they don't when you when you when you look forward, yeah, yes, you want to be informed by your past, but when you look forward, if you carry I'm a bad person or I did a bad thing, and that's what you carry every day, you make it much more difficult for you to be the best, kindest, most loving version of yourself.

SPEAKER_02 49:18

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 49:18

As of and we're not saying to hide that or bury it or pretend it didn't happen, but we're saying, you know, there's a difference between that and acknowledging it, allowing it to inform your current and future behavior without convicting yourself over and over again in a cell essentially, you know, self-flagellation every day.

SPEAKER_04 49:38

Right, right. And what I don't know, I'm gonna test you now. I'm gonna give you a test.

SPEAKER_00 49:43

Oh, I love I love tests.

SPEAKER_04 49:44

Yeah, yes, you guys, he he he is really good under pressure. He just had to go through all this thing to figure out how to record our audio because some things just messed up with it, and he figured it all out. And I was just like, okay, I'm stepping away and letting him do his thing. But here's a little test for you. Do you remember the word that I constantly, if it would come up in therapy, I was like, mm-mm. Oh that's shaming. Do you remember the word?

SPEAKER_00 50:07

Yeah, should.

SPEAKER_04 50:08

Should.

SPEAKER_00 50:09

And you guys, this is the funniest damn one of the funniest things that I've heard Sherry say, don't shoot on yourself.

SPEAKER_04 50:17

And it sounds like that, right? Because that's what you're doing. If you should on yourself, you are crapping on yourself. Because it's like if I say, Nathan, you shouldn't, whatever, and I'm sitting here wagging my index finger at him, because that's how that comment comes across. And we can so often do that to ourselves all day long. I shouldn't have done this, I should have done that, I should have, should have, should have. And that is shaming yourself, and that is not helpful, it's not beneficial. Right.

SPEAKER_00 50:45

And it doesn't mean you can't do a self-assessment, it doesn't mean you can't perform some metacognition, it doesn't mean you can't ask yourself, how can I do better? You can do all of those things, but without demeaning or belittling yourself. And one of the things that you have asked me often is a really good like reflect reframing reflection question, which is, is that how you would interact with someone else who came to you and said the same thing? And of course, my answer was, well, no, I wouldn't, I've I wouldn't do that.

SPEAKER_02 51:17

Right.

SPEAKER_00 51:17

But what I learned is that because of the wounds that I've sustained through the trauma that I've lived through, my default dialogue internally is was really cruel. And it isn't that way now, but it was that way for the overwhelming majority of my life.

SPEAKER_04 51:36

Right. Even though he taught himself at the age of 14 to be like these great men that he read about and he studied, underneath all of that, right, was some self-hatred.

SPEAKER_00 51:50

Yeah, oh yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 51:52

Yep, yep. And underneath all of my anger was also self-hatred. I will never, ever, ever forget. I don't remember the date, probably 2006, 2005, somewhere around there, I hired a life coach from church, barely knew the woman, and went and had my first session with her. And she said to me, Has anyone ever told you you're intimidating? And I was like, What? Me intimidating? And she's like, Yeah, you're very intimidating. Well, if you're walking around, if you're walking around thinking you want, and I think I don't remember if I said this in the first, the the last episode or this episode, where I talked about being so angry. You don't remember?

SPEAKER_00 52:38

I don't think so.

SPEAKER_04 52:38

Okay, well, uh in one of the episodes, whether it was this one or the last one, I talked about how I had so much anger, I used to wish a man would rape me so I could kill him.

SPEAKER_02 52:47

Yep, that was the last one.

SPEAKER_04 52:48

And so if if I'm walking around thinking that, I'm probably coming across as intimidating, right? But my self-esteem was like half an inch high. And so she asked me that. She said, Do you know that you're really intimidating? And I was like, No. And then her next words were, she looked me in the eyes and she goes, You don't like yourself very much, do you? And then came the tears.

SPEAKER_00 53:08

Oh, yeah, I can I'll bet.

SPEAKER_04 53:10

Yeah, yeah. So uh yeah, there's a lot of things we hide underneath, right? Nathan taught himself how to be like the great man, but then underneath that was um him not loving himself, not liking himself. And I even man, I went through all I went through six years of college, you guys, to become a therapist. And came out, guess what? Not liking myself very much.

SPEAKER_00 53:37

I I think though that that's not an uncommon story for people who survived trauma. Totally. There's a difference between that external facade and the actual internal state of where you know where you're at. And I hope I what I hope is that when people hear that, both from both of us, I hope that when people hear that, if if you've survived some trauma, I hope that you're hearing first, you're not alone. Amen. Second, you're not broken, there's nothing wrong with you. This is a normal response to some pretty abnormal stuff, and that doesn't have to be the end state.

SPEAKER_04 54:16

That's right, that's right. You can go from surviving to thriving.

SPEAKER_01 54:21

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 54:22

Nathan has done it, I have done it, and you can do it too. And so, guys, there's just so much hopelessness right now in the world because the world's kind of turned upside down and backwards and all the things. And I just want you to know there's always hope. A, there's always hope in Jesus, and B, there's always hope if you're willing to not blame people, if you're willing to not step into that role of being a victim, because let me tell you, being a victim makes you feel it's makes you powerless.

SPEAKER_00 54:53

It does make you powerless, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 54:55

Because when you're a victim, and and granted, I my I, you know, I did I did confront my dad and I did carry that rage, and I I was a victim, I think, for quite a while, until I until I knew better. Once I knew better, like, hey, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 55:11

Well, I was gonna just say that one of the important distinctions that you've pointed out to me is victim versus survivor.

SPEAKER_04 55:16

Yep. You know, yep, yep. And so yeah, okay, so maybe not I was probably a little bit of both, though, right? Like still trying to survive because you don't know what you don't know, but once you know, back to that Maya Angelo quote, I think we talked about in the first podcast, is that once you don't once you know different, then you do different, right? And so, um, and it's baby steps. Man, is it a process, Nathan?

SPEAKER_00 55:41

Yeah, it is such a process, gentle pressure relentlessly applied.

SPEAKER_04 55:45

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 55:46

That's right.

SPEAKER_04 55:47

Even that applies to yourself, yeah, absolutely. Gentle pressure relentlessly applied to yourself. And you, I don't think you can find true healing and unless you have compassion towards yourself. So, over these past probably two to three years, I've been at this place where I've just been increasingly more compassionate to myself. And I think Nathan could say the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 56:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 56:10

Um, and we find ourselves encouraging each other, and then we'll call each other out, like Sherry, Sherry, what do you what did you just say to me, Sherry? Or Nathan, what did you just say to me? He's like, and then he's like, so it's just helpful to pay attention to that internal dialogue because we talk to ourselves more than we talk to anybody, right?

SPEAKER_00 56:35

Yeah, we're we're in constant conversation with ourselves.

SPEAKER_04 56:38

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 56:38

So the the way that you talk to yourself, the way that we talk to ourselves is so important. And just imagine if you had you know two separate realities. One, you have a a wise, intelligent, kind, compassionate, loving coach next to you all day, and they're constantly, they're giving you feedback and they're saying, hey, like you might be able to do this better, you might be able to do that better. But overall, what they're telling you are these kind, loving, encouraging things. And then in an alternate reality, you have got the meanest, angriest, most sociopathic, just demeaning, degrading, horrible person, and they're barking at you 24-7. You know, which version of yourself do you think is gonna be happier, more productive? The best husband, the best wife, the best friend, the best daughter, the best son. Which version of that do you think is gonna lead to that? And then recognize you, you're uh you're the coach, you're that person inside yourself. You gotta choose which that voice, yeah, which voice you want to hear from. The other thing I would say is just remember that I think we can kind of default toward that more cruel side of things when we have unresolved trauma.

SPEAKER_04 57:54

Absolutely true. Absolutely true, because in internal family systems, that voice is sometimes called the critic. Oh, right, like the internal critic.

SPEAKER_01 58:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 58:03

Um, sometimes that internal critic might be the voice of a parent, might be the voice of a school teacher. And oftentimes it's just an internal part of us not liking ourselves, not liking um, you know, past decisions that we've made. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_02 58:19

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 58:20

Yep. Yep. So, so just a just a little closing note on that part of it. It's important, you guys, to love, and this does this is not gonna make sense. We have to love all the parts of ourselves, right? I have learned to love that critical voice because when that critical voice shows up, that means it's trying to protect me in some way, even though it doesn't, you're like, what, Sherry? How is it trying to protect you? It's trying to protect, it could be trying to protect me from getting hurt by someone. Like if I if I am critical, if I listen to that critical voice and it's saying negative things to me, then maybe I think, oh, well, I'm not maybe I shouldn't be in this relationship, or I might get hurt in that relationship. And so it's trying to protect me, but in an unhealthy way.

SPEAKER_00 59:06

Yeah, and you kind of you kind of pointed this out, but maybe an approach, if people are going, oh yeah, yeah, I do that all the time, maybe an approach is to learn to be earnestly inquisitive with that voice. So, like, hey, what are you what are you trying to protect me from?

SPEAKER_02 59:24

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 59:25

You know, and you've even talked about expressing gratitude to that part of you, but then also kind of saying, hey, we're not we're not buying that, we're not going that direction. Thank you.

SPEAKER_04 59:36

Yep. And we're at the cash register and we're not picking up the product.

SPEAKER_00 59:40

That's right. Right? Yep.

SPEAKER_04 59:41

We're not picking up the product.

SPEAKER_00 59:42

Right.

SPEAKER_04 59:42

Um, because that part, yep, trying to protect you. But like at my in our lives today, Nathan, both of us individually, um, we don't need, we don't need what, how the that critical part is trying to protect us, right? Or if his little boy part or my adolescent part shows up and they tell us to do this or do that, they also are trying to protect us, right? And you triggered the heck out of my adolescent part. He's laughing, you guys. He triggered the heck when he was wanting to be friends when I was his therapist. I was like, I can't get in trouble. I have to do things perfectly. He triggered like the probably the little girl and the adolescent part um when that all happened. So, but again, those parts showed up to keep me safe, right? Like Sherry, remember, we can't get in trouble, we can't get in trouble. Don't do a decision, don't make a decision that's gonna get us in trouble, right? And so that's how those parts got triggered for me. And his little boy part shows up often, um, needing just, I think, love and attention from his adult man. Yeah, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:46

Yep, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:47

Um, and and then so those, yeah, when those parts show up, we don't let them react and take over. We don't let them drive the bus.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:54

We don't let them drive the bus.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:55

Right, right. When we're thinking about the little boy, I always like picture picture yourself, picture the little boy behind the steering wheel.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:03

Can't even see over the dashboard, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:01:04

He can't see over the dashboard, but he's got the steering wheel in his hands, right? And so, as believers in Christ, we want the Lord to drive the bus, right? We don't want those parts of self to drive the bus. And and when the Lord is driving the bus, we're always going to be safe and protected. But sometimes those other parts jump in the driver's seat. And uh a really popular phrase, a really popular phrase in internal family systems is that everybody's allowed on the bus, all the parts are welcome, but either A, only the adult part, or as believers, Jesus God gets to drive the bus. Yeah. They're all welcome, even the critic, everybody's welcome on the bus. My little girl, my adolescent part, my my perfectionistic part, which has caused a lot of challenges in my life. They're all welcome on the bus.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:52

All right. Yeah. Is do you think this is a good place to wrap up?

SPEAKER_04 1:01:55

I think it is.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:56

Okay, so I want to share just a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:00

Next time, one of the things that we want to talk about is anxiety and depression, and most importantly, how they may be a symptom of unresolved trauma. And the reason why we think this is so important is so good. If if the the approach, if the if our belief is, okay, for depression, okay, that's problem, there's a pill for that. Okay, I got anxiety, that's problem, I got a pill for that. You can we can do that. That's certainly a we can choose to go down that course. But what we end up doing with that is literally just treating the symptom, not treating the underlying cause. So going back to the dude with the broken leg, yeah. Do you want to take morphine for the rest of your life, or would you maybe like to have some surgery done, fix that leg, and then go through some PT and heal up and get strong again?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:50

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:50

And um, you know, we're not saying that there are no times when an antidepressant will be appropriate. We're not saying that there are no times when an anti-anxiety medication is appropriate. We are saying that often those are symptoms of an underlying wound. And if the underlying wound is effectively addressed, then the symptoms, the overlying symptoms, go away. And we'll we'll talk a little bit more in depth about that.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:14

Yeah, for sure. We live for sure in a society, Nathan, where we want to pill for everything. We can drive up to Starbucks and boom, boom, get what we want. We can go order on our app for Target or Cub or whatever grocery store, boom, boom, go drive and pick it up. But you guys, that is not the way it works with trauma and with healing in general. And in order to go from surviving to thriving, we have to put in the work.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:40

Yeah, if you use you know fast food tools and responses for things, you're gonna get fast food outcomes.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:45

Yep, yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:47

All right, guys, thank you so much for joining us again. Your time is incredibly valuable. We are thankful for the fact that you have chosen to spend some time with us. We said we wanted to close with gratitude. There's our gratitude to you, Sherry. What are you thankful for?

SPEAKER_04 1:04:05

I am really thankful for I'm thankful for so much you guys. I'm thankful for, I think right now in this moment, I'm thankful for that 70 times 70 or 70 times seven in forgiving people because I don't know, it just helped me to have more grace for other people in my life. It helped me to have more grace for my clients, for friends, for other family members, and and Jesus totally helped me along the way with that forgiveness. Um, yeah, that's what I'm thankful for is the ability to forgive, desire to forgive, and how that helped me find freedom and learned how to thrive along the way. How about you?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:45

I would say along those same lines, what I'm really grateful for are love and compassion. When I was a little boy, I always wanted to be Superman. I wanted to be able to fly and be bulletproof, and I just thought that'd be so cool. And unfortunately, at least as far as I know, none of that is doable, but I still have like a little bit of hope. But I think if there truly is a superpower in the world, love and compassion are our superpowers, and I'm really grateful for those because they make this world a much, much better place to be.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:19

Nathan, you are the epitome. You are the epitome of love. You I don't know that I have the words, but you walk, talk, and breathe love.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:30

Well, thank you. That means a lot.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:32

Yep, yep. And I think that came out of really hard places. It came out of really hard places.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:39

I think I think that's often true. I think when people are good at that, it does come from really hard places.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:45

Yep, yep. So, guys, don't try to escape the really hard places. Learn how to do the really hard things and land in the good place. Yeah. And that just reminds me, I'm gonna close with this verse. It reminds me of Genesis 50 20 and Romans 8 28. Where God takes what was meant for evil and he turns it around and uses for good. And I think you're listening to two living and breathing examples of that, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:06:10

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:11

God took your difficult circumstances and made you into this most incredible man who loves really well, who serves others really well, who um you just love to help people. You have a heart for people. And I think that's kind of that's that's that's why we're friends. That's why, that's why he's my son. Um, because I have the same heart. I I love people, I love to hold space for people, I love to let people know that they're seen, known, loved, and cared about. Um, so good things can come from the hard places. I see it time and time and time again, time and time and time again. And I think you would say the same.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:52

Absolutely. All right, guys. We're gonna wrap up. Thank you once again for joining us on Divine and Most Unlikely. We'll talk to you again soon.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:01

Yep. See ya.