Tag: returning home

  • 8 Healing Resources to Return Home to Yourself

    8 Healing Resources to Return Home to Yourself

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    It’s very easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of life. Relationships, work, personal problems — life can throw us off balance and knock us out of alignment with ourselves. However, with the right healing resources, you can return home to yourself.

    In the third episode of Returning Home, Elise addresses the different ways you can heal yourself through body, mind, community, and spirit. She shares eight healing resources that she has used to better herself. Some of them are personal actions you can do on your own, while other methods need you to be with others. Specific tools work better for some people than others, so it’s best to find the correct method for you.

    If you want to learn more about healing resources that you can use to improve and transform yourself physically, emotionally, and spiritually, this episode is for you!

    Here are three reasons why you should listen to this episode:

    1. Find out the many ways you can improve yourself through body, mind, community and spirit.
    2. Discover eight healing resources that can assist you in your journey of self-discovery and improvement.
    3. Learn more about Elise’s drop-in group sessions.

    Resources

    Episode Highlights

    Resource #1: Yourself

    • You are the first and best of your healing resources. Getting to know yourself is the first step toward returning home to yourself.
    • When you know yourself, you know what works best for you. 
    • Sometimes you’d feel that you might want to work with your weakness. However, you could feel at ease with your current progress.
    • What works for you doesn’t necessarily work for others.

    Elise: “It’s about really like getting honest with, ‘Am I at my best right now or not? Could I feel better? What are the things I’ve been through? What is it that I need to address at this moment?’”

    Resource #2: Mentorship, Coaching, and Therapy

    • No one goes through life alone. New perspectives can help you detect weaknesses that you’re unaware of.
    • One benefit of therapy sessions is freedom. You can express your authentic feelings and worries without fear of judgment.
    • Talking to a coach or therapist propels you towards a higher goal from what you’ve set for yourself.
    • It helps to be open about talking about your problems. Having someone help you process your concerns and how you feel can make it easier to resolve them.
    • If you need help, take advantage of any healing resources you can access. Get help where you can.

    Resource #3: Intuitive Spirituality Practice

    • Initially, Elise was averse to spiritual practices because she used to equate them with traditional religion. However, connecting with her spirituality opened up her life.
    • Listen to the podcast to learn how Elise taps into her spirituality by observing the falling leaves during the fall season.
    • Spirituality meditations maximize her different senses and emotions in understanding herself and the others.
    • Meditation can be secular; it doesn’t require any spiritual component. We are all spirits living the human experience.  

    Elise: “It’s something that I recommend to all of my clients is to have this kind of moment with yourself throughout the day, whenever that is.”

    Resource #4: Body Work

    • The basis of our security is by treating our bodies well. The key to this is by being kind to your body, whether by pampering yourself or taking care of your basic needs.
    • Emotional healing begins after you address your basic needs.
    • Sitting at a dry sauna is Elise’s remedy in opening up her body to spirituality.
    • Our bodies consist of beautiful, powerful, and complex organs.

    Elise: “Your body is the vessel that carries you through life.”

    • Elise recommends that cold showers are beneficial for the body’s nervous system.

    Resource #5: Journaling

    • Elise is constantly caught up in her head, especially when she reads a book.
    • Journaling supports all other practices and aspects of her life. She does this by recording every detail of the instance she involves herself in.
    • As a social worker, Elise values the record-keeping element of journaling.
    • Recording your actions allows you to observe the patterns, thoughts, and inner workings of your being.
    • In the future, you may revisit your writings to track your previous progress, celebrations, and challenges. Altogether, it compiles a set of evidence of why you need to support yourself.

    Resource #6: The Mindful Self Compassion Workbook

    • Elise recommends the Mindful Self Compassion Workbook to her clients because it introduces relatable and practical concepts of intuition and spirituality.
    • She emphasizes how we are too quick to be kind to others while criticizing ourselves internally for minor inconveniences.
    • Elise believes that the workbook could resolve worldly violence if everyone had a copy. Kinder interaction is a stepping stone towards peace.
    • People’s treatment of others is a reflection of what goes on in their heads.
    • The workbook offers many opportunities for you to practice and contemplate your intuitive learnings. 

    Resource #7: Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study

    • The study sums up a person’s exposure to neglect and abuse during childhood and how it shapes their future actions.
    • A person’s trauma response develops in relation to the environment and treatment they received while growing up.
    • To get the gist of how the research is conducted, tune in to the episode.
    • If you experienced ACEs, participating in the study will help you understand why you react the way you do in certain situations.

    Resource #8: Drop-in Group Sessions

    • The session attempts to combine all the mentioned seven healing resources.
    • In 2022, Elise plans to organize a beginner-friendly group session.
    • The activities are held live, ranging from experiential teachings, conversations, personal sharings and visualizations.
    • From the program, participants could learn compassion and mindfulness in building their spiritual being.

    Enjoyed this Episode on Healing Resources?

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    Leave an episode review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in to this episode, don’t forget to leave us a review. You can also share what you’ve learned today with your friends to help them embody their true, authentic selves. Everyone benefits differently from the healing resources out there, so it helps to have choices — find the best one for you! Anything is possible when you return home to yourself. 

    Have any questions or lightbulb moments? I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to hit me up on Instagram or send an email at elise@elisekindya.com. 

    Thank you so much for listening! For more episode updates, visit my website. 

    Transcript

    Elise Kindya: Getting to know yourself is your path to freedom. So the suggestions I make here, like I said, are what have worked best for me, but they might not work for you. And that’s okay. When you get to know yourself, you know what works and what doesn’t work. And it’s about really like getting honest with, “Am I at my best right now or not? What is it that I need to address at this moment?”

    Welcome to Returning Home, the Podcast. My name is Elise Kindya, and I am a trauma-informed and intuitive therapist. This podcast is a space that I have created for you to discover a deeper understanding and love for yourself, which leads to expanding what you think is possible in your own life. My goal is for you to feel excited to live your life as your full, authentic self. 

    By listening to these episodes, you will learn things like how your brain works, my favorite resources for healing, stories from my own life, practices that you can press play on to add to your healing toolkit, and so much more. I invite you to return home to yourself in big and small ways to live the life you desire on your terms. You can live connected, empowered, and aligned. When you return home to yourself, anything is possible. I can’t wait to share all of my insights with you. Now let’s begin.

    Hello, and welcome to episode three of Returning Home, the podcast. I am really excited about the topic today. I want to come on here and share the top resources that I find myself recommending either to my clients, or even things that I’ve done in my own life. I approach my work from the biopsychosocial spiritual approach. And this is again, body, mind, community and spirit. And this is how I like to think about the work that I do. 

    It’s very multi dimensional, it’s very holistic. I like to think about it from all these different angles. And as I talked about in the first episode of this podcast, based on the kind of experiences that you’ve had, you might need a different level or mode of healing based on you know, what maybe like the gaps are or what, what’s the thing that you’re trying to address, you’re going to need a different solution for that, right? 

    This list was going to be like three items, but it kept expanding. Because I talk about this stuff all the time. This is my jam, this is the kind of thing that I love to do. And so we’ve got more like seven, eight things. And there are like levels to these things. So take what resonates, leave what doesn’t, you know, all of these things might not be for you at this point in your journey. But these are just some of my favorite things that I like to recommend. 

    With that being said, let’s get started. Number one, the first resource that I would recommend to anybody is you, yourself, you are your best resource. Getting to know yourself is your path to freedom. So the suggestions I make here, like I said, are what have worked best for me, but they might not work for you. And that’s okay. When you get to know yourself, you know what works and what doesn’t work. 

    It’s about really like getting honest with, “Am I at my best right now? Or not? Could I feel better? What are the things I’ve been through? What is it that I need to address at this moment?” And there’s been something kind of circulating in the aether lately around like, you don’t always have to be doing something in service of your healing, right? Like, you could just decide that how you are today in this moment is good enough, and there’s not going to be any striving or any you know, wanting to improve.

    You could just say, “I’m okay today. And that’s fine.” And you could say “Hey, I do know I have some blind spots. I do want to work on some things. These are the things I want to work on.” But again, you are your best resource when you get to know yourself and understand who you are and how you operate in the world. It becomes much more clear like what is for you and what is not for you.

    Not everything is for everyone and not everything is for you. And you aren’t for everyone and that’s okay. So, getting really comfortable with getting clear about who you are and the kind of person you are, in the end the person you want to be, the kind of goals that you have for yourself, the vision you have for your life. Yeah, it makes it just more clear what kind of life you want to be living and what action you can take from there. 

    The second resource of course is going to be therapy, coaching, and getting support mentorship. No one is doing life alone. So if you think you need a fresh perspective and objective view of someone to help you see your blind spots, then I encourage you to receive the help that you need. You know while we are kind of in life, like alone, we are our own sovereign beings and we do get to make decisions for ourselves and decide who we are and what works for us and what doesn’t, it is always so helpful.

    And I know in my own life, you know, therapy and coaching has been something that I’ve accessed pretty often. I think I probably went to my first therapist, when I was like, seven. My parents got divorced. So you know, that’s the thing when parents get divorced, they put the whole family in therapy. 

    That didn’t work at that time. But I’ve been in therapy pretty consistently, probably, since I was like, 14. I’m in therapy right now. I love it. I think it’s the greatest thing, you don’t have to show up any type of way other than exactly how you feel in the moment. And I really value the therapy that I’ve received. And I love being a therapist, because it is exactly how you show up in that moment is what we’re going to be working with. And that is perfectly fine and beautiful. 

    As I mentioned, again, in that first episode, there are sometimes ways that I challenge my clients, especially when they’re saying, “Hey, I have this problem, and I’d like some help with it.” Of course, I’m going to help them see some blind spots and help them with some suggestions for how to address the problems that they’re having. But I have this post on social media that I like to post every now and then that says, it’s okay to talk about problems. 

    That’s how you find solutions. So sometimes we just need somebody to process things through with. I, myself, am a verbal processor. And so therapy has been invaluable for me to be able to just run my mouth, and talk through some things that have been rolling around in my head, but I hadn’t, you know, said them out loud. It’s so helpful for me to just even hear my own voice talking, even with this podcast.

    Honestly, therapy, coaching, support, mentorship, I think, is something that can point us to where we need to go. And we know what your vision for your life is. If you’ve tapped into yourself and use yourself as your best resource, as your own best asset, the vision for your life. So then you can access these people outside of you, coaches and mentors to help you pull you along towards that goal and help you set some higher goals or your sights on something else.

    Help give you some processes too. Because, like I said, no one’s doing life alone. Nobody is born knowing everything, like there’s no possible way. You need to access help. So there are people out there that can help. 

    With that being said, my third resource that I recommend, all the time is having some type of an intuitive spirituality practice. And there is, I think, a lot of resistance here. I want to do a whole podcast episode just on religious trauma. Because when I hear the word spiritual or spirituality, it used to make me think about religion. And I was very averse to that. Until, you know, several years ago when I started practicing spirituality, in my own way. 

    I talked about this in the previous episode about my spiritual awakening and my spiritual journey. It’s why it’s such an important resource that I recommend to people I work with, and really to anyone that will listen to me. Because when I started connecting with my spirituality, is when my life started opening up. And there are so many ways that you can do this. I mean, from reiki, to meditation to tarot and oracle cards, breathwork, yoga, journaling, astrology. 

    There’s so many ways that you could tap into intuitive spirituality. It could even be a traditional religious practice, right? But for me, like I said, when I started opening up to myself, and really resonating with some spiritual messages, so much has opened in my own life and in my own, just in my daily experiences. So for instance, today is Monday, November 15 2021, which is when I’m recording this podcast episode. 

    I’ve also been seeing this all over my Instagram as well. A lot of people who live here in Richmond. Fall is like showing all the way off right now. The leaves are so amazing. It’s so funny because normally, in the fall, it seems like overnight, the leaves change and then they fall off the trees. Then, they’re like, “We missed the moment,” and this moment of these leaves changing has been going on now for probably a couple of weeks. 

    It just keeps getting better and better every single day. So how I experience spirituality in these moments is feeling that I’m a part of nature, like I’m made up of the four elements. Thank God I have eyesight, I can see the beauty of the trees. So I kind of tap into my intuition sometimes. Sometimes with my work, I have a slower morning, so then I can wake up and decide what I’m going to do that morning. 

    Today, for instance, I thought, “Oh, I have my whole morning open, I’m gonna ride my scooter to the gym.” And so I started up my scooter and I was riding up the street to my gym and just looking at the leaves and noticing the archways that they made over the street, and just like, it’s so beautiful to just feast your eyes on, fall in Richmond right now. And just reminding myself that I am here, I am a channel. 

    So during this scooter ride, I was participating in my intuitive spirituality practice by having like a mindfulness, kind of walking myself through a mindfulness exercise of noticing the leaves, so my sight and the temperature, the feeling, and the five senses. Also walking myself through a reiki visualization that was really helpful and healing to me. So that’s like one example of a time when you’re doing something ordinary, like taking yourself to the gym. 

    You can make it a spiritual practice. My morning meditation. So meditation can be really secular, like it doesn’t have to have any kind of spiritual components to it. Although I would argue that we are all spiritual beings, we’re all spirits having a human experience. And so when you sit with yourself and you return home to yourself, you might notice that you’re having a spiritual experience, because you’re being with yourself. 

    In my meditations, I’m always inviting in reiki energy. I’m always drawing tarot and oracle cards, I’m always working with the breath, I’m always visualizing, I’m usually doing a journal entry. It’s a really well rounded, full body experience, so to say, and a full spirit experience. It’s something that I recommend to all of my clients, to have this kind of moment with yourself throughout the day, whenever that is. 

    I just described to, for me, one of them riding my scooter to the gym, the other doing my morning meditation. But any moment can be a moment for you to tap into your intuition. And to connect with your spiritual side. 

    By intuition, I just mean this deep knowing that you have that, in your bones, like who you are, what you’re about, what feels right to you, what feels like the path you want to walk, tuning into those feelings, tuning into that knowing and taking the steps into that version of yourself. Being in touch with the five senses, being in touch with your emotions, and the emotions of other people. 

    These are all different ways that you can conceptualize that word “intuitive.” Just kind of knowing without knowing why, right? It’s like it’s just the truth. And so that has been a really important practice for me and a really important unlearning in my life of not equating spirituality with religion. Another piece of intuitive spirituality for me when I talk about “knowing without knowing why is journaling.

    I love to journal, I fill up journals like nobody’s business. And sometimes I will use some prompts or I will also just do kind of, some free writing. And I feel like that’s more of the spiritual connection for me is free writing, not really knowing what I’m gonna write about, but just opening up my mind and my heart to what wants to come through. And that has been a really profound way for me to express myself. I will go more into journaling later because it is, I think of it as its whole other resource, not just a spiritual resource. So I will get to that in a little bit. 

    The next resource I want to talk about is this kind of going back to the first one with you going back to yourself. But body work. The body as we know the body keeps the score. And treating our body well is going to help us feel safe in this moment in time. However, you can adjust from the sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic nervous system, you will be doing your body such a huge service. 

    So this can range from massage, floatation therapy, cold showers, cold plunges, acupuncture, chiropractic support, movement, sitting in the sauna. Anything that you can do for your body, eating well, things like that. And just taking care of some basic needs, like your body temperature, so wearing clothing appropriate for the season that you’re in. Sleep, getting eight to nine hours of sleep a night. Some bodies need less, some bodies need more. 

    Just depending on who you are. Knowing yourself at a deep level and giving yourself what you actually need in terms of sleep. Like I said, food, like eating nutritious food, and drinking enough water, like these kinds of things are so important to emotional healing and to physical healing and to spiritual healing. Your body is the vessel that carries you through life. And so what is one small thing that you could do today to add to your arsenal, right? 

    Something that I have enjoyed doing is so I go to the gym, and I do like a 40 minute ish workout. Nothing too crazy, just like something to get my blood flowing. And sometimes I’m a little out of breath, things like that, get my heart rate up. And at the end of the workout, I love sitting. We have a dry sauna in the shot, a dry sauna in the gym, excuse me. And I love just sitting in there for like 10 minutes this morning. 

    Actually when I did that, I opened my notes app and wrote like a whole Instagram post and then posted it on Instagram, so it helps me kind of open up my body to be more of a channel to be more of a vessel for those spiritual lessons I was talking about. But it doesn’t have to mean that for you, it can just be just that basic taking care of your body. Especially if you’ve experienced trauma, especially if you’re not used to being treated well. 

    Treat yourself like the royalty you are, treat yourself like the important person that you are by doing nice things to your body for yourself. This can also be like pleasure, right? So one of the stress hormones cortisol that builds up in the body all day long, when we’re worrying, when we’re anxious, when we’re overthinking and all of that kind of stuff. When you have an orgasm, it flushes all the cortisol, you know, out of your bloodstream, it filters it. 

    It goes through its processes to get you know, eliminated from your body. Your body is such a powerful and complex and beautiful organ, like your whole body is just this one big organism that just wants nothing more than for you to have a good life. So these are some things you can do to take good care of it. I saw something recently, I got an email from one of the float spas here in Richmond. 

    They have now an ice water plunge as well as a hot sauna like and they call it this fire and ice treatment. And that’s something that I am really wanting to try. And so I’ve been turning my the shower water cold at the end of the shower. And if you want to learn about that cold water exposure and all of that; Wim Hof, I would say, is a really good resource for that, and why that’s so good for our nervous system. I’ve been trying to rev myself up by doing my cold showers because I know that water is going to be really cold. So, it’s something I want to try.

    And then going so the fifth resource I want to mention that I want to delve a little bit more in depth to is journaling. So I mentioned that a little bit before in the intuitive spirituality section of this podcast. But I really believe and so for me, I’m an Aquarius and I’ve mentioned this before, I’m very much in my head. I like being in my head. 

    I like that I’m just reading Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson and he says something in there about how the brain is the most important organ of the body and I’m like, “Yes, sir.” Because I keep hearing all of this about how the heart is the hardest place to be. And I totally agree with expanding the heart space. But I just love hanging out in the brain. So I loved reading that in that book. 

    So for me, I just feel like journaling, in my own experience, has been a practice that supports all other practices in my life. If I’m doing any intense body work, or if I’m trying to figure something out with my body, I’m going to open my journal and write about it. If I’m having a hard time with a family member or a friend, I’m going to open my journal and write about it. If I’m having difficulty at work, or something is bothering me, I’m going to open up my journal and write about it. 

    If I’m sitting at my altar in the morning, and having my meditation, and I’m having an intuitive download, I’m opening my journal and writing about it. Like it’s just, it’s what I do to support myself in all other aspects of my life. With journaling, you can do it in many different ways. Like I mentioned earlier about using prompts or free writing, if you’re familiar with the holistic psychologist, she offers a future self journal that has some prompts in there. 

    It’s meant to be kind of like a pretty quick kind of check in with yourself every single day really focused on keeping promises to yourself. And that’s all repairing teamwork, and very beautiful. There’s also free writing. That’s more of what I do is just kind of opening up the journal on saying what wants to flow through today. 

    You can also get books that have journaling throughout them. The next resource I’ll talk about is the Mindful Self Compassion Workbook. And that has prompts all the way through it. But journaling is so important, I think, because there’s like this aspect of record keeping. I’m a social worker. So that’s something that I value very highly. So you get an inside look into your patterns, your thoughts, your inner workings. 

    You can revisit all of these writings that you’ve done in the future, to see how far you’ve come to see how much you’ve learned and grown, you’re able to really see all of the progress that you’ve made all of the celebrations, all of the challenges, the ups and the downs and how you pulled yourself through how you maybe even asked for support how you got your community to help you out. 

    So journaling, I feel, is just something that can give you a lot of evidence to support why you are a good person and why you are trying and how you are showing up in your life. And to give you lots of reasons to be on your own side. That is my personal take on journaling. It is a very grounding practice. And especially so I used to go to breathwork classes before the pandemic. 

    That was something that after breath work, because we’re so much in this kind of spiritual space, in breath, work and in our bodies, and just really like flowing, that coming back down to earth. And like putting pen to paper and writing down my experiences. If I had any visions, or any breakthroughs or any aha moments, I would want to capture those pretty quickly. And really just sitting feeling my body on the ground, feeling my journal in my lap, like feeling the pen in my hand, writing the words down. 

    It was just such a beautiful way to ground this very spiritual thing, to claim it as my present moment and to say, “Okay, this is what I’m going to do with it going forward.” Yeah, lots of reasons to journal. I think, if you don’t journal, I would highly recommend doing it. If it’s intimidating, I get it. And I would just so much love to talk with you more about why that is and what we could do to help you out with having this be a less intimidating mode of healing.

    I mentioned a few minutes ago, this sixth resource I want to talk about is the Mindful Self Compassion Workbook. I mean, gosh, it is just I was telling somebody about it a couple weeks ago, and I was saying, “It’s like 17.99 on Amazon. But if you spent like $1,000 on it, it would still be worth it.” It is probably one of the things I recommend to most of my clients because it’s so practical. It’s so relatable. 

    It’s so everybody gets it like when you read chapter one, and she talks about, or I should say they talk about because it’s written by two people, how we’re so quick to offer kindness to a friend. And we beat ourselves up in our own mind and we make ourselves out to be these monsters, right? And people read that and they’re like, Oh, that’s so relatable. I do that all the time. Why is it so hard for me to be nice to myself and take my own side? 

    I really believe that if every single person on the planet received this workbook and really did the work, that we wouldn’t have the violence and the hatred that we have today. We wouldn’t have this anger. We wouldn’t have racism. We wouldn’t have sexism. We wouldn’t have homophobia, like we wouldn’t have these problems. Because what people are dishing out is what they think they deserve is what they think of themselves. 

    There’s this thought around like, the whole world is a mirror. So if you’re willing to treat somebody badly, if you’re willing to hate another whole group of people, imagine what it’s like to be in your own mind about yourself. And yeah, we’re not talking about people that literally have narcissistic personality disorder. But just like everyday people that have hate in their heart, that’s a big problem. 

    I believe that if people could treat themselves with more gentleness, and more kindness, then every interaction that we would have in public and in the greater world, would be so much more peaceful. And I really, if you don’t do anything else on this, from this podcast, as far as resources. I fully, fully, fully recommend that you grab this workbook, and give it a try, especially if you have a lot of negative thoughts about yourself. 

    The workbook has 24 chapters. It comes with, like I said, there are journaling prompts all throughout, so plenty of opportunities to practice and reflect on what you’re learning. And in the back, there are several recorded meditations that you can access after purchasing the workbook. And so it’s really just like this one stop shop for if you want to start being more kind to yourself, if you want to start practicing meditation. 

    If you want to be more in this cycle of giving and receiving, like you deserve love, and you deserve to feel happy, confident in your life, if those are the kinds of things that you’re trying to incorporate more of, like, go get this workbook. It’s kind of a no brainer. Yeah, I mean, I can’t really speak highly enough about it. It’s a really beautiful practice. So I highly recommend the Mindful Self Compassion Workbook by Kristin Neff, and Christopher Girma.

    I will definitely link this in the show notes. There are many versions of this on Amazon, but I recommend one specific one. It has a view of walking from a boardwalk into the beach. And there’s a really nice sunset. And it says the Mindful Self Compassion Workbook, a proven way to accept yourself, build inner strength and thrive. Yeah, I just really liked this resource. I can’t recommend it enough. So we’ll link that in the show notes for you.

    The seventh resource that I would love to recommend to you is the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study. So namely, the questionnaire and I will link this in the show notes as well. I changed some of the language for my clients, because some of the language is strange. The choice of words is strange. I’ve even had clients say, “Uh, I can’t relate in this way. But I can relate this way.” I’m like, “Oh, thank you for pointing that out. That is not inclusive language.” 

    The PDF is available for free online. The reason I recommend this is because I believe that knowledge is power. So the ACES study, yes, it’s a bummer. It’s all about abuse and neglect and exposure to violence in childhood. But I think that this information is really valuable. It pings back to episode one when I talked about the neurosequential model of therapeutics. So our brains and our bodies develop in relationship to our treatment and our environment. 

    So if you’re struggling with things in your adulthood, we can probably trace it back to something that happened in childhood. The way that this study even came about was that one of the researchers was holding a group with people that went through some, I think, like gastric bypass surgery or something like that. Or they went on some like women that were trying to lose weight. 

    When they were having great results and they left and they came back and they were gaining all this weight back and he was wondering why and when they surveyed these women, it turned out that a very large percentage of them and the women that were gaining weight back had all been sexually abused in their childhood. 

    So that got this researcher, really, not to say excited, but he was like what is going on here finding the correlation to adverse childhood experiences and health outcomes in adulthood. A couple of other things that I’m going to link in the show notes is a TED Talk by Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, about ACEs. There is a movie called Resilience that was put out a few years ago that goes into what ACEs are, and why they’re important to know about. 

    But like I said, I think that this knowledge is power. I think that it can help you understand yourself better if you experienced adverse experiences in childhood, it can help you kind of take some of that weight off of your own shoulders, like “Oh, this is my problem, I’m never going to get better. I always do things this way. I’m such a failure.” 

    When we experience adverse experiences, when we experience trauma and childhood, it literally changes the way that your brain and body has developed over time. And it’s become adapted, or mal adapted to your environment and your treatment. And so it’s not your fault if you’re struggling with these things. But the fact that you’re willing to look at it, we can offer some solutions for like, how do you deal with this? Right? 

    So that is why I recommend this resource so highly. I do this the ACES questionnaire in the first session with all of my clients, just because I want to have a baseline of “Who is this person? Where are you at?” Not to say that if your ACEs score is zero, that there’s “No, I shouldn’t have any problems, because my score is zero.” No, there are other things going on in life that maybe aren’t childhood trauma. But some of my other clients have like eight, nine.

    There is a documentary about a woman that has an ACES score of 10. And she has helped the researchers with some work. So that would be something interesting to check out if you were curious about that. But I’ll definitely link some things in the show notes as far as ACEs, I think it’s a really valuable resource for people to know about. 

    I’m always talking about that on my Instagram, and with my clients, of course. So if you ever have any questions about what ACES are, I’m definitely here for it. And please reach out to me if you do. 

    Then the last resource I’m going to recommend today, so this is number eight. I’m going to have some events coming up in 2022. And I think that these will be morphing kind of into a membership with me. But I’m going to be combining a lot of these resources that I mentioned into events. If you are thinking like “God, this is so much I have no idea where to start or like this seems cool, but I need maybe some guidance, or I see Elise as more of like a mentor with this.” 

    Do not fear, because I’m going to be offering drop-in groups. Well, they’re called drop-in group sessions. They’re just really going to be events that will be live. And yeah, opportunities for us to come together. Though. They’ll range from, you know, experiential, to teachings, to conversations to sharing, like all kinds of things. That yeah, visualization, reiki distance, healing, mirror work, maybe some somatic experiencing movement, things like that. Compassion, mindfulness practice, like all kinds of things.

    So I hope that you will get excited for those events. I’m really excited about it. More to come on that soon. If you want to learn more about that, definitely subscribe to my newsletter, as well as follow me on Instagram. Because I will be talking more about that in more frequency and depth as the days and weeks and months go on. So I would love to see you there. 

    Okay, so those are my top eight resources for healing that I talk about the most either with my clients or with other people, anyone that will listen to me, my Instagram community, and with myself. These are things that I’ve done myself and that I can see a big difference in my own thinking, in my own perspective, in my reactivity, which not to say I’m not reactive, but it’s gone down significantly. 

    I just feel like my quality of life is so much better since implementing these things. There are more and more and more that I could go into, but I don’t want to just dump it all here in this episode. But these are the ones that come to mind and the things that I use the most in my life. As this podcast goes on, I might even talk about more in the future. But yeah, these are my top resources that I find myself talking about the most. 

    I appreciate you being here listening to this episode, I hope that you got something out of it. If you did, I would so much appreciate you rating my podcast and leaving a review. That would be really amazing. I would love to hear your insights and hear your questions, comments, please. 

    Like I said, follow me on Instagram so we can keep the conversation going. I’m always down for a conversation there and subscribing to my newsletter so that you can keep up with all that’s going on on my end. And yeah, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it, and I will catch you on the next episode.

  • Returning Home To Yourself From Childhood Trauma

    Returning Home To Yourself From Childhood Trauma

    Listen On Spotify Here

    Have you observed negative patterns in your behavior for reasons you can’t seem to pinpoint? Often, these stem from childhood trauma we think we have already buried or forgotten. That’s why sometimes, we can’t explain why we respond and behave to circumstances the way we do. Living our purpose as our authentic self requires healing from childhood trauma we don’t talk about. And more than anything, it starts with self-knowledge.

    In the first episode of Returning Home, Elise talks about how she became a therapist. She shares her own experiences of childhood trauma and how it has helped establish her vision as a therapist. Elise delves into Dr. Bruce Perry’s Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics and the functions of the nervous system. Remember: childhood trauma healing is much more beyond the mindset. It requires work both in our body and our subconscious mind.

    If you want to be one step closer to healing from childhood trauma, then this episode is for you.

    returning home after childhood trauma
    Here are three reasons why you should listen to this episode

    1. Learn the meaning behind the name “Returning Home” and how you can benefit from it.
    2. Discover the importance of learning about the nervous system’s different functions in understanding childhood trauma healing.
    3. Find out how mindfulness practice can help in healing from childhood trauma.

    Resources

    Episode Highlights

    [01:08] Returning Home: The Podcast

    • The rationale behind the podcast is to serve clients and people in the community around therapy.

    [01:34] Becoming a Therapist

    • Elise wants to be part of creating a world where people want to have self-knowledge.
    • Deep self-knowledge leads to love and acceptance of ourselves. It allows us to expand fully in our most authentic expression.
    • Elise became a therapist to get to know herself better and heal from things she’s experienced.
    • Becoming a therapist helped her step more fully into her life purpose.

    Elise: “Everybody deserves to be able to feel the freedom in life to express themselves and to pursue the knowledge of themselves and have access to resources to live as their most genuine, authentic self—doing things that align with their values and being able to live as their full, true identity.”

    [03:25] On Pain

    • Elise arrived at her vision of the world she wants to live in through pain.
    • Going through challenges and difficulties is part of the human condition.
    • Elise grew up afraid of the world, feeling like a misfit and a black sheep. 
    • There was a lack of connection and warmth in her family. Her anxious attachment style made it hard to connect with other people.
    • She came from a family of immigrants. One of her siblings committed suicide.

    Elise: “Hurt people hurt people, right? That people who are suffering tend to be the people that are inflicting suffering on other people.”

    [05:18] Alleviating Suffering through Therapy

    • Elise wanted to be somebody who could provide intervention and alleviate suffering through connection.
    • Her sister committing suicide put some things in perspective for her.
    • She wanted to be her true, authentic self. That Elise is someone she didn’t feel she had the permission or the example of how to connect with it.
    • Elise decided to go to graduate school and become a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW).
    • She majored in Women and Gender Studies. It fed her love of learning and challenging the situations she gets immersed into.

    [07:00] Becoming A Licensed Clinical Social Worker

    • Elise opened her eyes to potential career paths and did information interviews.
    • She realized that the people who were doing the things she wanted to do were LCSW and therapists.

    [07:23] Discovering Trauma and Creating Her Own Life Path

    Going to graduate school made Elise discover the childhood trauma in her life. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) is a 10-question questionnaire around childhood trauma.

    • Elise scored 4 or 5 in ACEs. The highest score is a 10.
    • She wanted to be an example of what’s possible when you decide to take your life into your own hands.
    • Becoming a therapist was the way she could create her own path as well as her clients’.

    [09:14] Her Vision of Being a Therapist

    • Elise’s initial vision of therapy was a romanticized, cozy therapy office.
    • Her training included work with children in many experiential modalities.
    • The type of work Elise likes to do is creating warmth and safety in therapy for clients.
    • Her vision evolved and changed throughout the years.

    [11:37] Dr. Bruce Perry and the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics

    • Dr. Bruce Perry developed the theory called the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics.

    As a child psychologist, he is an expert in child development and the effects of childhood trauma on children’s brain development. Learning about the effects of trauma on children’s development changed Elise’s life.

    • The model focuses on the developing nervous system of fetuses, infants, and kids.

    [13:30] The Brain and Its Functions

    • The brain stem develops from the bottom up. It starts developing 16 days after conception.
    • It controls the heart rate, breathing, body temperature, and blood pressure.
    • The diencephalon cerebellum or the midbrain controls coordination, movement, balance, sleep, and appetite.
    • The limbic system controls the social and emotional skills of children between ages 3 to 12. It develops into adulthood.
    • Neocortex controls concrete thought, abstract thought, advanced thinking, and problem-solving. It doesn’t fully develop until the mid-20s.

    [16:31] Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics Approach

    Trauma-informed training and education around what goes on in the brain of developing kids are critical. The theory shows that children who have experienced childhood trauma have “pins” in the parts of their nervous system. It affects how the rest of the system develops.

    • The nervous system changes the way it develops on a chemical-biological level.

    [17:57] Childhood Trauma Healing Goes Beyond Mindset

    Trauma intervention and healing are so much more beyond mindset. Trauma has physical ramifications on the body and the subconscious mind. The top 5% of the mind is the conscious mind, while the bottom 95% is the unconscious mind. All childhood trauma is in the bottom 95%.

    • Our formative experiences impact how we see life. 

    We need to bring the body into work to heal from childhood trauma.

    Elise: “We need to bring a level of gentleness and a level of understanding and a level of compassion to our work. Because the choices that we make are more often than not very much caused by this unconscious process that’s happening that is beyond our ability to just think through it. We have to really work with the body.”

    [19:32] The Importance of Co-Regulation

    • Elise worked in a school and did intensive in-home counseling for at-risk youth. She used the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics approach in her work.
    • Infants need co-regulation when something triggers them. Time, intention, and education can help rewrite how the nervous system interacts.
    • Our brains can change, learn, and grow because of neuroplasticity. 

    Neuroplasticity allows us to become who we’re meant to be rather than a reflection of our childhood trauma.

    [22:20] Mindfulness Practice and Mental Health

    • Mindfulness practice and training helped Elise turn theory into practical, real healing.
    • She started practicing mindfulness seriously in 2016 through Mindful Schools.
    • Mindfulness helped her slow down and be in her body and experiences. It helped her face herself in an authentic, honest way.

    She stopped drinking in January 2020. A lot of her conditioning, traumas, and patterns have come to light in terms of healing from this experience.

    [24:35] Accountability and Ending Generational Trauma

    Generational trauma is real.

    • While accountability is critical, people do better when they know better. This knowledge should be on a learned level, not just on an intellectual level.
    • Decide to be the one who chooses not to perpetuate harmful patterns on future generations.
    • Forgiving people without letting them in your life is an acceptable approach to healing.
    • Inflicting harm to other people often roots from the subconscious and unconscious patterns people aren’t willing to see.

    [26:51] The Therapy Space

    • Elise’s vision as a therapist sometimes puts her at odds with therapy.
    • Therapy isn’t only about results. It’s more of a safe space to process and talk through life experiences while feeling seen, heard, and validated.
    • In Elise’s work, therapy also involves challenging clients to expand, learn, grow, and try things differently.
    • She ties together clients’ present circumstances and past experiences that have shaped them. Then, she helps them embody who they truly want to be.

    Enjoyed this Episode on Childhood Trauma?

    If you enjoyed this podcast, please make sure to subscribe and share it!

    Leave an episode review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in to this episode, don’t forget to leave us a review. You can also share what you’ve learned today with your friends to help them embody their true, authentic selves. Anything is possible when you return home to yourself. 

    Have any questions or lightbulb moments? I’d love to hear from you! Feel free to hit me up on Instagram or send an email at elise@elisekindya.com. 

    Thank you so much for listening! For more episode updates, visit my website. 

    Podcast Transcript on Childhood Trauma

    Elise Kindya: Welcome to Returning Home, the Podcast. My name is Elise Kindya, and I am a trauma-informed and intuitive therapist. This podcast is a space that I have created for you to discover a deeper understanding and love for yourself, which leads to expanding what you think is possible in your own life. My goal is for you to feel excited to live your life as your full, authentic self. 

    By listening to these episodes, you will learn things like how your brain works, my favorite resources for healing, stories from my own life, practices that you can press play on to add to your healing toolkit, and so much more. I invite you to return home to yourself in big and small ways to live the life you desire on your terms. You can live connected, empowered, and aligned. When you return home to yourself anything is possible. I can’t wait to share all of my insights with you. Now let’s begin.

    Welcome to episode one of Returning Home, the podcast. I’m so excited that you’re here and that this is getting done. Making a podcast is something that’s been on my mind for a while. When I think about why I want to make a podcast, it’s really to serve my clients and other people in my community around what are we doing. The place that I really want to start is my story as to why I became a therapist. 

    There’s a specific psychological theory, a model of working with people that when I learned about it in grad school, my mind was just blown. I really want to talk about that in a little bit more depth here. I’m gonna let you in on some things, kind of pull back the curtain a little bit. 

    When I think about what kind of world I want to be part of creating, it really speaks to my desire to become a therapist, and why I’m here. So the type of world that I want to be part of creating is where people want to have self-knowledge. I believe that knowledge is power. I believe that when we know better, we do better. I think that when we have this deep self-knowledge, then that can lead to love and acceptance of ourselves in order to expand fully into our most authentic expression. 

    So why I became a therapist was I wanted to get to know myself better. I wanted to heal from some of the things that I’ve been through. In learning these things and working with other people, it’s really helped me to step so much more fully into my life purpose. I believe that everybody deserves to be able to feel the freedom in life to express themselves, and to pursue the knowledge of themselves, and have access to resources to live as their most genuine, authentic self, doing things that align with their values and being able to live as their full true identity. 

    Like I mentioned, how I arrived at this vision for the kind of world I want to live in is through pain. Of course, I think we all go through challenges. This is part of the human condition. This is part of being a human being is like we have to go through things that are difficult. I grew up really afraid. I grew up afraid of one of my parents, and afraid of the world, and never feeling like I fit in that well. I always felt like I was the black sheep like everything I did was wrong. It was under a microscope, and everybody was going to be able to see everything I was doing wrong. 

    I grew up with not a lot of connection or warmth in my family. I had a really hard time connecting with other people. I felt like when I got really close to people, I would do things that would sabotage the relationship. In attachment language, I have anxious attachment. So that was always a struggle for me—feeling like I could just never be seen for who I truly was and that it wasn’t good enough. 

    In addition, one of my siblings committed suicide. My family is immigrants. On my dad’s side, my grandmother was an immigrant. On my mom’s side, her grandparents were immigrants. There’s just this level of like we fit in, but we don’t. We belong, but then there are these different things about us. It just feels like I didn’t fit in. 

    I learned that hurt people hurt people, right? That people who are suffering tend to be the people that are inflicting suffering on other people. I wanted to be somebody that I could provide an intervention that could alleviate suffering, that could help people change through connection because I was so disconnected. That brought me on this journey. Especially once my sister committed suicide, I think that really put some things in perspective for me. 

    I changed some things about how I was relating to people in my life. I had different standards for what I would, for lack of a better word, put up with. Things were different. I wanted to be my true authentic self, like the name of this podcast, right? Returning home. I wanted to really get in touch with the Elise that is deep within me, that I didn’t feel I had the permission or the example for how to connect with myself. 

    That’s when I decided to go to graduate school to become a licensed clinical social worker. After I graduated from college, I wasn’t really sure what I was going to do. I majored in women and gender studies. I just really love learning. So that was something that definitely fed that need that I had to always be reading and learning and challenging the situations I was immersed in. Living in a very patriarchal society, I always wanted to challenge things. I definitely found the opportunity to do that through my studies but wasn’t sure what to do as a career. 

    So I was working on a nonprofit. Then, I started opening my eyes a little bit more to what other people were doing that I thought, “Oh, I want to do that.” Then, I started doing informational interviews and realized that a lot of the people that were doing things I wanted to be doing were licensed clinical social workers, and they were therapists. 

    I didn’t necessarily know it at the time, but I had been through a lot of trauma in my life. I don’t know that in undergraduate school in college, I didn’t think about it like that. But once I got into graduate school, and I started learning a lot more, that word “trauma” was coming up a lot. I was realizing, “Oh, I’ve been through some traumatic experiences.” 

    There’s a study called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, and there is a 10-question questionnaire that you can look it up online. But once I took that, my ACES score is like a 4 or a 5, and the highest you can have is a 10. That helped me realize, “Oh, okay, so what I’ve what I’ve been through isn’t necessarily normal, or isn’t how it’s ‘supposed to be’.” So, being in grad school, I realized, “Oh, I’m in the right place.” By being a therapist, I originally was working with children. I just really wanted to be an example of what’s possible when you decide to take your life into your own hands. 

    When you decide to take responsibility for your life, when you know that there’s something better out there for you, when you have faith that who you are on the inside is good enough and is capable, and you can make your life what you want it to be. It doesn’t just have to be what someone else tells you it should be or as my mom likes to put it, not letting somebody put a script in your hands and tell you, “This is your role. This is what you have to do.” So I felt like becoming a therapist was the way that I could do that for me, and I could also do that for my clients. 

    Originally, when I was in grad school, I had this vision of being a therapist. If you’ve ever been in therapy and before the pandemic years and years ago, having that kind of vibe of there’s the waiting room, and it’s cozy, and there’s magazines, and maybe there’s a candle, or there’s an essential oil diffuser, there’s tissues, there’s comfortable chairs and pillows, and you have this really cozy atmosphere of the waiting room, and the therapy office, and all the plants, and all these things, right? 

    That was very romanticized in my mind of like, “Oh, I really want to have an office. I want it to be this really cozy space where I get to hold space for people.” I really love creating spaces for people. Part of my work and my training included work with children, and I got training in sand tray therapy, play therapy, and these other experiential modalities. That was something that really fed my soul because I loved watching the kids make their own safe spaces in the sand as part of this therapy. Maybe I’ll go into that in another episode, I’m not going to go so far into that today. 

    But it’s just like the type of work I like to do with people is creating that warmth, and that safety, and that container of therapy, right? Of course, now we’re in 2021, my vision is a little bit different, but that’s what it was back in 2010, 11, 12. But as you know, things tend to work out differently than we expect, and oftentimes, better than we can even imagine. That has been a really interesting experience, a really fun experience over the last couple of years, is watching my vision kind of evolve and change and watching how I work with people change and grow. 

    Of course, there’s even more still coming. I have dreams that are in the works currently. I’ll definitely be expanding on that more as we go. But that was where I started my dreams of all of this. I remember sitting in a classroom and learning about this man named Dr. Bruce Perry and his work in psychology with children. So he is very famous. You might have seen him. He’s been on Oprah. He’s written many books. He’s also in the true-crime world, not by his own choice. He was married to somebody who was a victim of a pretty famous crime. That’s for also another podcast. 

    I learned about this theory that he helped to develop, which is called the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics™. Dr. Bruce Perry is a child psychologist. He’s an expert in child development, the effects of trauma on brain development in children, neuroscience. This is a field that is, even since I learned about this originally, 10, 11 years ago, it’s exploded, right? But when I learned about this, everything started clicking into place. Even on my resume, you know at the top of your resume, where it’s “professional mission.” 

    Mine was really being passionate about understanding the effects of trauma on children’s developing brains and bodies. I’m going to go into that a little bit here because I just think it’s so important. It’s so valuable. It’s something that changed my life when I heard about it. When I share this with my clients, I see light bulbs going off and they’re like, “Oh, okay, so this significant event happened at this age; this explains a lot.” So I just want to unpack this a little bit with you right now. 

    The Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics™ very much focuses on the developing nervous system of fetuses, and infants, and children. If you can imagine the brain and the brain stem, it actually develops from the bottom up. So the brain stem and even below that is the spine and the spinal cord, that part of the nervous system starts developing 16 days after conception. This part of your nervous system, your brain stem, it controls your heart rate, your breathing, your body temperature, your blood pressure. So very fundamental, important, completely out of our conscious awareness, we don’t think to control this part of ourselves. This just automatically happens. 

    Moving up to the next part of the brain. Going from the bottom up, if you picture the part of the brain that is connected to the spine. This is called the diencephalon cerebellum. Or another way to put it is the midbrain. This controls coordination and movement. So picturing a baby learning to grasp, roll over, crawl, and even standing up, taking steps. So you could also picture a toddler running and playing. This part of the brain really controls balance. It also controls sleep, our ability to fall asleep, stay asleep. It controls the appetite and the ability to recognize whether you’re full or you’re satisfied. It also controls, like I said, motor regulation. So balance. 

    Moving up to the next part of the brain is the limbic system. This is young children between the ages of 3 and even up to 12. This is our social and emotional skills. This is around emotional reactivity, even our attachment to people, that concept of closeness, the ability to read people’s facial expressions, as well as sexual behavior and urges and things like that. The limbic system is still even developing up into adulthood, our mirror neurons, our ability to pick up social cues and learn things. But they really start coming online in school-aged children. 

    Then, going up to the top. The last part of brain development, this is the neocortex, which controls concrete thought, abstract thought, advanced thinking, problem-solving. This part of the brain is not fully developed until our mid-20s. Another exciting thing about that is neuroplasticity. Our brain can always change. This theory, this approach to therapy, especially with children, is what’s so vital to me in working with people that have experienced trauma. 

    I think that trauma-informed training and real understanding and education around what is going on in the body and in the brain of developing children and how that has effects on people as they grow older because this is really biological, right? This is where “The Body Keeps the Score” comes from, where that saying comes from. I know everybody’s read that book and is really passionate about that. But this is what it means. 

    From this theory and the work that Bruce Perry has done, is you see, with children that have experienced trauma along these different parts of brain development, there are literal pins in those parts of the nervous system. If you experience trauma in utero or as an infant, that affects how the rest of the system from there on develops. So that’s where the body is keeping the score. Your nervous system is literally changing the way that it is developing on a chemical biological level. 

    While yes, we can heal from our trauma, and that’s really the work that Dr. Bruce Perry has put in place, there are interventions you can do to help heal. But that’s why this is so much more beyond mindset. There’s actually physical ramifications on the physical body, as well as in the subconscious mind. 

    When we picture the mind as an iceberg, that top 5% is our conscious mind. Then, the bottom 95% is our unconscious mind. All the trauma that happened as a child, and especially as an infant, and as a very young child is all in that 95%. It really helps write the program that we’re seeing in our life. Like it’s the type of world we expect to see, is largely decided by those really formative experiences.

    This isn’t just about deciding to change. This isn’t about thinking, “Oh, I have this problem and I’m just going to think my way through it.” We need to bring the body into work, right? We need to bring a level of gentleness, and a level of understanding, and a level of compassion to our work. Because the choices that we make are more often than not very much caused by this unconscious process that’s happening that is beyond our ability to just think through it. We have to really work with the body. 

    As an example, I worked in a school for a few years. I also worked doing intensive in-home counseling for at-risk youth and was certainly using this approach in my work in those locations. If you think back to what you needed as an infant, what infants need, what one-year-olds, two-year-olds need, they need to be regulated. We need co-regulation, right? Like, rocking them, breathing with them. This was something that was applied to children 6, 7, 8, 9, right? Because they are brought all the way back to when they’re triggered. 

    When something has happened, they’re brought all the way back to that where that pin is in their nervous system, and they can’t regulate themselves. They need help regulating. So rocking them, or passing a ball back and forth, maybe dancing, maybe deep breathing, mindfulness and things like that, that’s going to help with time, and with intention, and with teaching them that this is going to help heal what’s going on underneath the surface. 

    That stuck energy can move, and you can, eventually, rewrite how your nervous system interacts. But it needs to come with the knowledge and the training and knowing how to do that, right? This is what’s really exciting about the brain is neuroplasticity. We can change. We can learn. We can grow. We can become more of who we’re meant to be and not a reflection of the trauma that we’ve experienced, right? 

    This brought so much, so much light to me at age 24. Like I’m sitting in the classroom, and for so long, I’ve always wondered, “Why am I the way that I am? Why do I do this? Why do I act like this?” Like I was explaining earlier in the episode, pushing people away? “Why is it so hard for me to have these close relationships?” This was all clicking and making sense. Because when you think about when significant traumas happen, there was a pin stuck there. 

    So it’s just been really helpful, I think, for me, in my own personal life, to unlearn this way of being and to understand that I can be more of myself when I acknowledge the trauma that I’ve experienced, when I give myself permission to take up that space and to see, “Okay, this is why I am like this and this is what happened,” I can be really honest with myself about what happened and I can now choose to move forward and to be my true authentic self through that. 

    One really important thing that helped me to bring this out of theory and out of intellectual understanding and into actual healing has been a mindfulness practice. In 2016 is when I really started practicing mindfulness in a more serious way. I was learning through an organization called Mindful Schools. I was being trained through that because I wanted to bring it into the school I was working in. A big part of the first module of their training is, if you want to teach mindfulness to kids, you have to embody mindfulness. 

    You have to be mindful and practice mindfulness. That was something huge in my life that helped me to really slow down, and be in my body, and be in my experiences, and acknowledge, “Who am I? How did I get here?  Who do I want to be going forward?” and being able to face myself and saying, “I actually really want to be myself.” For so long, it’s been all these layers of conditioning on me that made me feel unworthy to be who I truly am. So mindfulness helped me face myself in a really authentic, honest way. 

    Even up to today, so it’s 2021. In January of 2020, I stopped drinking, and so much more has come to light from that experience and so much more of my conditioning has flooded to the surface. I’m able to unpack my trauma. I’m able to look at my patterns. I’ve been able to really heal a lot of what I had been putting on top of myself for all those years in response to my trauma. 

    As we get deeper into all of this healing, talking about what can be done to really be your true, authentic self—I’m definitely going to put out an episode on being sober because that has been something, for me at least, that has been probably the most significant thing that I could do for myself on that journey. Just wanting to acknowledge that accountability for harm is so needed, and generational trauma is really real. 

    We can’t point to one specific person and say everything is this person’s fault. Yes, there needs to be accountability for when someone inflicts harm, but like I said at the beginning of this episode, I believe that when people know better, they do better. Knowing isn’t just on an intellectual level. It’s on a learned level. It’s on the level of “I feel this in my body. I am embodying the version of me that knows better and is doing better.” Right? So it’s about deciding to be the one who chooses not to perpetuate these patterns on future generations. 

    Teaching people who are waking up, how to take ownership of these patterns and putting an end to it is my life’s work. I love working with people that are awake, and they’re looking at their stuff, and they’re looking at their own patterns and their own behaviors and saying, “I’m done. I’m not doing this anymore.” That is something I’m so passionate about. I think it’s really important to… Yeah, we don’t let people that have hurt us have access to us. But we also don’t need to hold on to the anger around that forever. 

    Forgiveness has been huge medicine for me. You can forgive people and still not let them in your life. I think that is a completely acceptable way to approach the healing process. There’s this level of, yes, people need accountability for what they’ve done. But I don’t think people wake up in the morning and choose, “I’m going to be a terrible parent. I’m going to be a terrible sibling. I’m going to be a terrible coworker. I’m going to be a terrible president,” whatever it is. 

    These are all such subconscious and unconscious patterns that people aren’t willing to look at yet. I want to live in a world where we hold out hope that people want to have self-knowledge and they want to take ownership of their patterns. Those are the kinds of people that I love working with. Sometimes, this desire in me and this vision I have of the world that I want to live in, it sometimes puts me at odds with therapy. 

    Therapy isn’t so much about results, necessarily. There’s not pressure to have any kind of results to be this new embodied version of yourself that’s actually your authentic self that you’re returning home to, right? But therapy, it’s a place to process what has happened that you’ve never been able to tell anybody before. It’s a safe space to talk through your life experiences and to be seen, heard, and validated. But in the work that I do, sometimes, it’s also about challenging my clients to expand, to learn, to grow, to try things differently, to do something new. 

    That sometimes puts me at odds with my mission as a therapist, right? But the way that I bring that together is that I really use our time, as a therapist, to work through what’s currently happening in your life but also seeing how your past experiences may have shaped the circumstances or may have shaped your behavior that then led to the life that you’re living now. So then, how can you embody who you truly want to be now so that the future is more of your conscious choice? That’s been really exciting. 

    That is what I’ve got today for my first episode. I’m really excited to share this with you. I hope that you learned something. I would definitely love to hear from you. If you did learn something from this episode, if this sparked any kind of questions, or aha moments, or lightbulb moments, I would just love to hear that. Feel free to reach out to me. My Instagram should be linked in the show notes. That’s really where I like to hang out. 

    Thank you so much for listening today, listening to my story, how I came to become a therapist, and now, working with people on these kinds of past traumas and how that is shaping who they are today, and this model, the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics™, by Dr. Bruce Perry that really changed my life and validated so much of what I’ve been through, and I hope that it helped you as well. I will look forward to seeing you in the next episode, and I will talk to you soon.