Making Peace & Beyond Podcast: Recent Episodes
Jamie Norton
Have you ever wondered how to make sense out of your messy life? Or wondered how to live in peace in the middle of a stressful world? Welcome to the Making Peace & Beyond podcast where Cleveland-based counselor and author, Jamie Norton, talks with guests about life's struggles and how to live in the peace, joy, and freedom Christ died to give us.
None of us are exactly alike. Our histories, needs, feelings, beliefs and perceptions are different. The more time and space we share with another individual, the more individual differences we will inevitably confront. Conflict avoidance resulting from a dysfunctional or abusive history, fear of rejection, survival responses, and lack of problem-solving skills can and will destroy relationships over time. Healthy relationships are built on a foundation of love, truth, and acceptance that allows us to address conflict in a way that helps us to trust that the relationship can accommodate and grow from individual differences.
In this podcast, Jamie talks with her colleague and fellow counselor, Mark Valley, to explore common barriers and faulty beliefs that block honest communications in relationship and offer positive tools and approaches that can help to resolve and grow from individual differences.
Life is not a mental illness. Life happens! Life hurts! Pain, loss and suffering are inevitable. God gave us the process of grief to adapt to change and to integrate loss. But we live in a world where we believe we should be “happy” all the time and we have come to think something is wrong with us when we hurt or suffer. We tend to avoid or numb pain and suffer in silence. We never embrace the painful truth or grieve it. It ultimately hardens our heart and we become angry bitter victims. Although we cannot control what happens to us, we can choose our response. During this episode, Jamie will visit with Dr. Tisha Carter to discuss healthy grieving and how embracing our pain and suffering can be an opportunity for spiritual, mental, emotional and relational growth.
Anxious, stressed, irritable, lonely and exhausted? Ignoring your body, your spirit and your relationships? Are you working so hard to get to somewhere you are not that you never get to live where you are! Are you becoming a human doing instead of a human being? There is a place where we can live in peace, rest and relationship—it is called the present. It is the only place that we can really be alive, love, heal, grow and live in peace. We have such pressure to worry, plan, or focus on the future. Our busy-ness pulls us away from our present experience and relationships. In this podcast, Jamie and Vanesa Alcantara discuss the importance of keeping your head and body in the same place, living fully in the present and trusting the One who goes before us with our future.
Follow Vanesa and Soul Scan on Instagram @vanesaalcantara @soulscanwomen.
Register for the Soul Scan Women's Conference at the link below!
https://crossroadswired.ccbchurch.com/goto/forms/1079/responses/new
At some point during our lifetime, we all will be victimized. Life is inevitably filled with pain and suffering. Relationships will hurt and betray us, we will experience loss and disappointment, and life will seem unfair and often brutal. Unfortunately, we have become a society that has developed a false belief that, “once a victim, always a victim.” Many develop a victim identity that leads to an angry, bitter and helpless outlook on life, keeps others at arms-length and prevents healthy relationships. Our hurtful history becomes the justification for hurting others and not working toward a brighter future. However, there is a huge difference being having been victimized and living as a victim - we CAN heal!
In today’s podcast, Jamie talks with Michele Abraham, a fellow counselor, to examine the dangers of the victim mentality and the healing necessary to move beyond painful experiences into a restored and healthy life.
Are you tired? Are you always running, hustling, overworking, overwhelmed, stressed out, feeling like your life is on the edge of a cliff and will fall apart if you let go for a minute? You may be suffering from the “illusion of control.”
The truth is that you never had control in the first place. The illusion of control has plagued us since the beginning of man. What would happen if you released your grip on your situation. What if life was less about striving and more about surrender. What if you realized that your attempts to control what you cannot control are controlling you?
In this podcast, Jamie talks with Rose Vinci, Life Coach and Making Peace and Beyond leader, about issues of control and the gift of freedom that comes from surrender.
Shame is the universal emotion and perhaps the most difficult to understand and manage.
Shame is more of an experience and is very difficult to define in words. It is the experience of
vulnerability, helplessness, and inadequacy. It makes us want to hide or disappear and live in
secrecy. In its’ various forms, shame isolates us from each other and prevents us from
becoming all that God gave us the potential to be. When shame permeates our life, it makes us
afraid to be known and restricts our ability to receive love.
In this podcast, Jamie meets with Josiah Stumbo, the Young Adults Pastor for Grace CMA Church,
to discuss the various characteristics of shame and offer practical ways of healing. They talk
about how to find freedom from the devastating effects of shame in our lives and receive the
love of God, who already knows everything about us and loves us anyway. They point out that
finding the courage to come out of hiding and allowing ourselves to truly be known, we can
receive the love and of others and establish authentic community.
Did you know that the number of people in the US that were diagnosed with a mental illness jumped from 600,000 (.003% of the population) in 1955 to 50 million (almost 20% of the population) in 2022. Two significant influencers for the dramatic increase have been the creation of the community mental health system and the development of psychoactive medications. Both have grown prolifically since the early 1950s. Is 20% of the population in this country truly mentally ill? Have we begun diagnosing the normal pain and suffering of life as a mental illness?
In this podcast, Jamie talks to Brock Lutz, a mental health therapist who is currently the director of health services at Hillsdale College. With a combined 65 years of experience in the field, Jamie and Brock do not deny the reality of mental illness. But could it be that the current mental health system not only fails to help people recover but often actively prevents recovery for those seeking help with life’s struggles?
While emphasizing the true healing power of Christ and community, they suggest that pain and loss are often an opportunity for spiritual, emotional, and mental growth. They point to overdiagnosis, overprescribing of psychoactive medications, the control of insurance companies, and the permanence of diagnostic labeling as problematic and often destructive. Jamie and Brock believe in personal responsibility for individual behavior and the essential nature of a relationship with God and a caring community in leading a normal and healthy personal and relational life.
Are you still living like a victim because of something that happened to you in
your past? Would you like to have the freedom to move beyond? Perhaps the
biggest barrier that keeps us trapped in yesterday is unforgiveness. Unforgiveness
not only keeps us stuck in the negative experiences of our lives, but it is mentally,
physically, socially and emotionally damaging to us-not the other person.
Forgiveness allows us to give up unrealistic hope that we can change the past and
frees us from the bitterness, resentment and wasted energy spent on trying to
change what we cannot change.
In this podcast, Jamie Norton and Micheal Campbell will discuss some of the
myths and misunderstandings about forgiveness that prevent us from embracing
this amazing gift. They will help us to discover the incredible power of forgiveness
that Christ died to give us.
Do you find yourself doing some of the things your parents did even though you said you never would. Of course you do! Our first understanding of ourselves, our world, and how we fit into it are learned from our family and becomes the foundational lens through which we view ourselves and others. Whether we like it or not, our perception is influenced by the people we grew up with. We are all born into a story that is already going on. For generations, family rituals, beliefs, rules and patterns of behavior have developed the story of who and how “we” are, what “we” believe, and what is right and wrong. Unfortunately, many “family authorized” truths turn out
to be, not only false, but a dysfunctional and destructive family legacy. In this podcast, Jamie and her son, Ken, break the “no- talk” rule of dysfunctional families and talk about three generations of their family and how their family legacy of addiction influenced each of them. They examine their personal journeys into self-destruction and addiction and how a loving and gracious God offered them a new language and a new life.
Take a moment and ask yourself: Am I enjoying fulfilling relationships and living a life filled with joy, meaning and purpose? Or am I living a life of struggle, discontentment, stress and difficult relationships? Am I doing things that I vowed not to do or condemning myself for my perceived imperfections? Am I trying to survive life as a set of problems to overcome or see experiences as opportunities for growth. Welcome to the Making Peace and Beyond podcast series where we explore and discover how to thrive instead of just survive. In this first podcast, Jamie Norton and her guest, Michael Campbell examine how our life stories are influenced positively and negatively by those who came before us and live life with us. We introduce the Making Peace and Beyond process of embracing the painful realities of life in an intentional way in order to understand them and to learn from them. Integrating our past into our present enables us to be the whole and joyful adults that God created us to be and to be a light shining in a dark world.