Healing Trauma as a Christian Mama: Recent Episodes
The.Holistic.Christian Danielle Elizabeth
Christian Mama's and trauma recovery coaches walking you through the healing journey. Integrating Christianity and Psychology and Intertwining Trauma Healing Modalities with Jesus, the true healer while still giving you practical tools, Strategies and Skills that support your healing, growth and connection to Jesus
This episode talks about emotional flashbacks and we go over Pete Walkers 13 steps of what to do when you have an emotional flashback
Emotional flashbacks are intense emotional states activated by past trauma (e.g., fear, shame, or feeling unsafe).
Emotional flashbacks may be hard to recognize. They can happen suddenly and it can be hard to pinpoint what caused them.
Emotional flashbacks are not typically visual or auditory. This means they can be harder to detect, and you may not know that what you’re experiencing is an emotional flashback. You might blame yourself for these feelings or think that you’re overwhelmed or emotionally dysregulated for another reason.
Psychotherapist Pete Walker who talks about this a lot says “Emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged regressions (‘amygdala hijackings’) to the frightening circumstances of childhood. They are typically experienced as intense and confusing episodes of fear and/or despair – or as sorrowful and/or enraged reactions to this fear and despair.”
This exercise is a great exercise if you are thinking about going on a healing journey or your already in one but are feeling stagnant or stuck plateaued.
Its a very simple exercise that helps you look at what does the future hold if you DO change and heal and what will it take. It also looks at the flip side, what are the hard parts of change and healing and where will we self-sabotage our own efforts and stand in our own way even though we do WANT healing.
This episode goes through 3 worksheets to help you know your own nervous system.The first is a personal profile map helping you understand how Fight, Flight, Freeze AND regulation shows up in your body, thoughts, feelings & behaviours The second is a Triggers and Glimmers worksheet that helps you know what triggers you OUT of your window of tolerance and glimmers that move you BACK into regulation.The third is a worksheet that helps you understand what can you do alone aka self-regulation and where do you need more support aka co-regulation These worksheets are so valuable to help you on your healing journey and in your day to day life. If you try any of the exercises from this season, this would be the top one to do!
This weeks healing exercise: Write your life story from your Inner Child’s PerspectiveThis exercise can be stand alone or piggy back off of last week’s episode of doing a Life Timeline. This is an exercise to begin to work with different ‘parts’ of ourselves. The part for this exercise is our Inner Child.This exercise can help us not only piece together what has happened in our life and what could be impacting us, but also the uncover the emotions behind it and see where some unprocessed stuff might be.
A life time line is a tool to help us organize all the experiences we've had in our life and give us a starting point for what to work on in our healing.
It can help us see why some experiences impacted us more because of other things we had going on or happening at that same time.
It gives us a birds eye view of our life and can be a helpful tool to use in our therapy or coaching sessions
This week's episode is about creating a safety plan for yourself. Even if you never use it, it can be so beneficial to have this because we really cant predict whats going to happen in our lives and its better to be safe than sorry.
In the episode, we walk through 4 simple steps to have in our safety plan to keep it simple but effective.
Check out my social media to get a visual look at this safety plan!
https://www.instagram.com/healwith_danielleelizabeth/
https://www.facebook.com/Danielleelizabethcoaching/
This was an exercise I learned from my counsellor in the depths of my own healing journey, she called it inner healing prayer.
In this episode I go over two different ways to do this.
The first is to use the exercise to invite Jesus into past trauma's and wounded areas.
The second is to use it to help in day to day experiences that happen in real time.
Either way, this is a powerful way to bring Jesus into your healing journey.
If you try this exercise, I would LOVE to hear how it went so please feel free to share any stories with me!
A genogram is an important tool for self-awareness, personal development, and relationship development. It can reveal how a person’s experiences today make sense in the larger context of their family-of-origin and past experiences.
A genogram can give you insight into the many different things that have happened in your family, such as negative family dynamics and family struggles, like divorce, death, and broken relationships. It also can help you understand why these things might have happened.
Sometimes more insidious traits can be passed through generations. Sometimes there's a genetic predisposition to addiction or depression. Other times, unhealthy ways of thinking and behaving are passed down socially, through example
Genograms provide a way for us to examine these patterns. They bring a family's strengths and weaknesses out into the open. Genograms set the foundation for nurturing generational strengths and overcoming weaknesses.
Great Article about Genograms:
https://www.olivemecounseling.com/blog/genogram
The trauma egg is a great tool to utilize to help gather information about things you've experienced and insight into your upbringing. In this episode I go through the process of completing the trauma egg and why each part of it is important for our healing journey
This episode I share 3 external tools I use to help with my anxiety.
*None of these are paid ad's or products where I get anything from so this isnt a sales pitch, I truly use these tools on a regular basis and want to share my experience with each for you.
The first is loop earplugs. These have been lifesavers for me as a busy mom of 4 who gets unbelievably overstimulated by noise. I get very angry and have bad mom rage when Im triggered by noise so I live in these most of the day and they have changed my life forever. I had no idea noise was such a trigger for me until I found these and saw the difference they have made.
The second is the Calmigo. It is a little device that helps regulate your breathing when you are starting to escalate. My kids love this more than I do now and reach for it regularly when they are dysregulated.
The third is a new device Ive started to use called the CalmCarry. I dont fully understand how it works so this is more me explaining how its helping me versus explaining how it works, all I know is it does work! I got it to help with my sleep and Ive been pleasantly surprised with how much its helping. Ive started using it during the day as well to help with anxiety and overwhelm and it helps during the day too! I also have found it very helpful while I travel because I am not a good flyer and used this on my last few flights and it helped!
Links to each product:
Loop Earplug
https://community.loopearplugs.com/s/danielle.f.22
Calmigo
https://calmigo.com/products/2020-calmigo-smart-calming-companion?variant=40247577247826
CalmCarry
https://www.theglowcompany.co/
Todays episode is a vulnerable one. I am joined by my husband Lorne to share our story publicly for the first time ever.
Our story has a lot in it that you don't see on social media. We lived for years and years in a toxic dynamic that eventually led to a 10 month separation. Our story has every thing you could possibly imagine in it: addiction, abuse, toxic dysfunction, codependency and more. During our separation, we had to truly let our old relationship die so that if we could get to a point to rebuild, it would be on a new solid foundation.
We share our story for a few reasons.
One to help any couple sitting where we were sitting; to give hope that there is a different way but that it is not easy. It takes an unbelievable amount of work to unlearn patterns of behaviour and rebuild on a new foundation, and even though its possible, not every person is willing to humble themselves to do that inner work required.
We also share it as a testimony of what God can do. Trying to save this marriage alone, we would be divorced by now...it is by HIS healing and HIS work in our situation, why we are standing together after all this time. He deserves and gets all the credit for this story.
Lastly, we dont share this from a place of perfection. We are deep in the rebuilding process and it is MESSY. Its not as easy to say 'okay we will stop all these behaviours and patterns that created this dysfunctional dynamic' No, they are ingrained and require hard work, time and lots of trying and failing to get to the other side. So this is not a story of 'being on the other side' but from a place of continuously doing the work to rebuild. Yes we felt we were in a place to start talking about it but by no means are we living a perfect marriage now, we are living a much healthier one with a lot of support and accountability to be able to share it now.
Thank you for allowing us to be vulnerable and share our story.
If this episode resonates with you, I would love to hear from you on any of the platforms below
Instagram: @thedanielleelizabeth
Facebook: Danielle Elizabeth
Email: danielle.elizabeth.coaching@gmail.com
This episode is the last in the series about The Rebuild, my signature program which is a step-by-step guide for the healing journey as a Christian women.
This last section is all about our Identity, as a Child of God and how we learn to stand in that and have access to the same power that rose Jesus from the grave.
We always look at in this section, who we think we are vs who we truly are between our self concept and our identity.
We look at how can we learn to love ourselves and got get caught up in the overly promoted 'self love' trap that begins to contradict our faith. Jesus doesnt want us to hate ourselves, so how to we love ourselves and still deny ourselves?
The last thing we look at is learning how to have self-confidence and show up for ourselves
This episode looks at the 2 last walls of the Framing section of The Rebuild, my signature program helping you tear down the lies, messages and faulty beliefs and rebuild on a solid foundation with Jesus. We look at Regulating our emotions, the importance of naming our emotions and learning how to feel our feelings without getting triggered and shutting down.We also look at the wall of Resources and how we can make actions plans and connections plans for our new emotionally, mentally and spiritually healthy life. The last thing I share about is the meat of The Rebuild program which is 'The Healing Exercise' which is an exercise I have created to incorporate many healing and trauma recovery modalities to give a tangible way to 'do' your healing
When we are healing, our relationships are a huge part of this journey. Our healing impacts our current relationships as we change who we are in our healing, which changes how we show up in relationships and what we tolerate as well. In this episode we talk about the core trainings in this section of the Framing part of the The Rebuild Program -Love Systems-The Drama Triangle and healing into The Empowerment Triangle-Trauma Bonds-Codependency -Boundaries and Bottom Lines
This episode is about Reparenting, one of the walls of the Frame section of The Rebuild.
Reparenting is a model of healing where we show up as the parent they never had. From a secular perspective, we are the parent but as Christian and integrating our faith, we also invite Jesus in to be the perfect parent with us. We still show up and are apart of our healing and this process however we work as a team with him.
A common misconception is that we have to reparent ourselves because our parents were horrible and failed us miserably. That is the case for some, but not all. Some of us had parents who did the best they could YET we were still impacted by things. Two things can be true at the same time and just because you need to do some reparenting work, does not mean you need to cut off your parents.
Other wording for this phase can be 'Parts Work' and an amazing modality is Internal Family Systems. Another way to say this is 'Separation Therapy' where we tease apart the different parts of ourselves and work 1-1 with them and then re-integrate them all back.
The different parts we work with in this reparenting phase are: Inner, Outer, Adult Self & God
If you need more support than you have, reach out today..I would love to support you on this journey!
Now we're rebuilding and in the rebuilding process we have to have a solid foundation and so have the footings which is our relationship with Jesus and our and how important that is and then these footings are going to be the foundation and the foundation like we've learned is the this solid foundation that really holds up the rest of the structure right it holds up the whole house, you build walls on top of that and put a roof on top of it you put all the bedrooms and all of the things in a house in on top of this Foundation.
It needs to be so Rock Solid so that the house doesn't fall down and or the weight doesn't become too much okay and so we're talking about that using this metaphor but think about this also from an emotional level right all of this stuff on top all the heaviness, the stress, the messiness of life... we need it to be on a solid foundation.
This episode is about what this Foundation stage has in it what it looks like and it go it's going to seem very simple but they're foundational things how I came up with this list of things. There's been a lot of research on what are the pillars of mental health what is like for what does everybody need and so all these researchers took all this information and put it together and they've kind of concluded that these are and I've added a few that I think are super important to but these are the things that we need to be mentally and emotionally healthy.
The next phase that we're looking at in this rebuild process is restoration.
Now we've excavated, we've removed all the debris, and before we rebuild, we wanna restore what was good. Not all of our story is bad. We don't have just trauma only, and so we wanna restore things that are good and what that looks like in a healing journey is.
Resolving wounds that we've had bring healing into our wounds. Really understanding our emotional needs, how to get our needs met in healthy ways. Another really, really important piece of the restoration process is forgiveness. And this does not mean restoration of relationships that you do not want in your life, but this forgiveness, being able to let go and move forward in your life is super, super important.
Another thing we look at in this phase is bringing Jesus into it, inner healing prayer. Bringing Jesus in to be the one who heals those wounds. Bringing him into the process and inviting him in is one of the most powerful things that we can. In all of our healing, but especially in this phase.
So the next phase of the rebuild we're gonna talk about is the debris removal. If you think about when you're excavating, you'd be excavating all these rocks, all this dirt, and then all this stuff is kind of exposed at that point. And sometimes when you're actually excavating in real life, you hit bedrock.
And you have to blast that bedrock so that you can get, be beneath it. And so then you have to remove all this debris.
So what does that look like in a healing journey? So it looks like removing the toxic shame systems that are at play, it looks like.
Grief, grieving the childhood that you didn't have, grieving the things that happened, maybe even grieving the parents that you didn't have. Grief is such an integral part of our healing journey.
And then another aspect of this is deliverance. There is a huge spiritual aspect to our healing and to our wounds, and sometimes we actually need to attack it from a spiritual perspective as well.
So that is what some of the things we're gonna look at in the debris removal phase.
Have you ever been watching one of those home builder shows and It's time to tear everything down to make way for the new project? At some point, after some inevitable playful banter with hammers, it’s time to put hammer to wall. Or in our case, it’s time to put the excavator to concrete slab and get rid of the existing foundation to make way for a newer, more functional rebuild.
The first step in The Rebuild process is to tear it all down. You may be thinking this sounds counterintuitive but it’s important to have a solid foundation. We can’t have a solid foundation if we’re building on top of existing emotional wounds, or unhealthiness or dysfunctional toxic behaviours. You have been struggling. It’s time to tear down these old thought patterns and start fresh.
The 3 main phases of our excavation process are to: uncover underlying beliefs and thought patterns, consider intergenerational trauma, and identify your attachment style.
This episode looks at the two first important phases of The Rebuilding process
Your Toolbox : Looking at different tools and strategies to regulate your nervous system!
Your Safety Plan: Creating a safety plan so you know what you are going to do if things get hard!
One of the most impactful things for me has been creating a Safe Base with Jesus. This is where I go to 'do the work,' to be refuelled by him, to surrender and forgive, to freak out and let all my big emotions out, and to have a safe place to do it all.
This tool is to create your own safe base for your own journey
This POWERFUL episode is the perfect way to end season 2.
We sit with Ashley Henriott, A Christ-centered Confidence coach and content creator (among several other amazing things she does)
Ashley tells us a little bit of her story, her redemption and how Jesus saved her life.
We talk about the road from Healing to Heaven, that place where we live after we have done deep healing but still live in this messy world before Jesus comes. How we must have boundaries and tools to keep us moving forward in healthy ways.
The powerful part of the conversation lies in talking about our identity and where that comes from the importance of knowing Jesus and the truth to not get swallowed up by the worlds lies or even false gospels.
We all have things that happened in our childhood that have impacted us. But if we don’t grieve the stuff that hurt us, whether it was intentionally done or not, it will hold us back from growing. Sometimes we had parents who couldn’t meet our emotional needs, or who were emotionally dysregualted themselves that we had to learn how to cope around that, or things happened like bullying or lots of moves that Impacted our childhood. We need to have our own grieving process so that we can let go (not forget or act like it didn’t happen) and move on and able to live as the person we were created to be!
Today we talk about Grief without loss.
Much of the time when we think about grief we think about when someone dies, but there are so many loss's we experience that cause emotional pain and today we talk about this.
Things like
-loss of a job
-loss of a relationship
-loss of the hopes and dreams for our life (also in regard to the two above)
-loss of a marriage
-loss of our old life as mothers, or the idea of motherhood (mother we thought we would be or the kids we thought we would have)
-loss of our freedoms and all the pandemic has caused us to grieve
We end the episode on a high note: how we can move to acceptance and that can allow us to have a future, even if we still are sad about the past.
An amazing interview with Amber Kuipers!
The next podcast series is: GRIEF
This episode is about Grief after loss.
We dive into
👉🏻 our culture's response to grief and how it can be harming those who are grieving, even from the church community
👉🏻what NOT to say to someone grieving
👉🏻what TO DO for someone grieving
👉🏻All the different roles we can play in grief depending on if we are grieving ourselves, supporting someone grieving or a mixture of both
👉🏻Ambers children’s book about grief ‘When Grey came to Stay’
👉🏻Her new sympathy card line and what’s coming up in the future for her in terms of grief boxes, new books etc
Connect with amber
Amber's Instagram: https://instagram.com/amberskuipers?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
Amber's Website: www.amberkuipers.com
Amber's Sympathy Cards: http://chasinghope.squarespace.com
Today we discuss the FAWN response. A great description I found "it is the maladaptive way of creating safety in connections with others by essentially mirroring the imagined expectations and desires of other people"
This is the hallmark of people-pleasing and codependency. We discuss how this looks as an adult who struggles with saying no, putting up boundaries and whose value is based on helping others or being needed.
We looked at how in relationships it shows up in abandoning our own needs for our partner's needs.
As parents it shows up as giving, giving and giving until we burn ourselves out
And most important, how it shows up as our kids who become the 'good kids' who never act out or challenge us and learn how to appease their parents in order to stay safe and connected. A big saying we talked about is 'people-pleasers began as parent-pleasers'
Today we are talking the FREEZE response and this one is tricky because it is really different from the other two we have discussed (Fight and Flight)
We dive into what is looks like as an Adult, in relationships, as a parent and how it shows up in our kiddos too!
The Flight Response is part of the sympathetic nervous system response, which means we are activated but want to FLEE asap!
We go into these in detail in the episode but a few things we look at are how this shows up in different area's of life.
As an adult you might notice:
- the need to stay busy or always be on the go
-riddles with worry, fear, anxiety or overwhelm
In Relationships you might:-Avoid hard convos or walk away in arguments
-Break up every time something gets hard
As a parent you might:-be unable to handle the crying and tantrums and just want to hide in the bathroom
-be overwhelmed or overstimulated a lot
Kid's Flight Response might look like:
-Running away
-Hard time paying attention, Restless, Hyperactive
-Sensory Processing Issues
We end the episode talking about how we can support ourselves and our kids in the FLIGHT response
This episode is all about the sympathetic nervous system response: Fight
Fight Response is filled with things like being👇
Defensive
Critical
Controlling
Angry outbursts
Starting Arguments
Yelling
Threatening
Blaming and Shaming
This weeks podcast episode is all about the Fight response
✨From our body’s perspective
✨From a relationship perspective
✨As a mom/parent
✨Our kiddos fight response
If you are ready to learn more, Register for the 2,4,6,8 This is how we regulate: RELATIONSHIP EDITION workshop!!
Register here www.danielleelizabethfoisy.com/links
Today we are doing an overview of
The Nervous System
Polyvagal Theory
Why this is important to our healing and relationships and parenting
How our Faith doesnt need to be separated from these trauma modalities
Today we get REALLY vulnerable about Intrusive Thoughts. Some facts about them: Intrusive thoughts are unwanted thoughts that can pop into our heads without warning, at any time. They're often repetitive – with the same kind of thought cropping up again and again – and they can be disturbing or even distressing. Intrusive thoughts are thoughts that seem to become stuck in your mind. They can cause distress, since the nature of the thought might be upsetting. They may also reoccur frequently, which can make the concern worse. Intrusive thoughts may be violent or disturbing. They may be thoughts of a sexual nature, including fantasies. They can also be about behaviors you find unacceptable and abhorrent. These thoughts, however, are just thoughts. They seemingly appear out of nowhere and cause anxiety, but they have no meaning in your life. They’re not warning messages or red flags. They’re simply thoughts. What gives them power is that those who experience them become worried about their significance. People may fixate on them and become ashamed, intent on keeping them secret from others. As long as you recognize that these are thoughts only and you have no desire to act on them, intrusive thoughts aren’t harmful. Read on to learn more about why intrusive thoughts happen and how you can manage them.
Interpersonal trauma – trauma the occurs within a personal relationship – is a relational trauma.
Relational Impacts of Trauma we discuss:
Survivors may not have had good role models as children for what constitutes a healthy relationship and/or they may not have received any instruction about them. To the contrary, they likely learned all about toxic relationships.
• Survivors had their self-worth stripped from them, so they don’t feel they deserve happy relationships.
• Survivors struggle with establishing trust – with others and with themselves.
We think we must immediately give anyone all of our trust, or none of our trust – there’s no middle ground.
• Relational dysfunction and trauma often lead to co-dependence as an adult.
• Survivors often adopt their afamily’s unhealthy world view, which colors their thoughts and belief about relationships.
• Black and white thinking limits a survivor’s interpretations of relationships.
This episode is the Emotional After Effects of Trauma. Some things we discuss in this episode are:
- Learned helplessness
- Impaired brain integration between left and right hemispheres and body o Left = cognition o Right = emotion o Disconnect in vagus nerve between brain and body
- Distress intolerance, can lead to conflict avoidance
- Emotional Dysregulation
- Emotional illiteracy
- Low emotional intelligence
- Lack of ability to trust
- Impaired ability to seek and trust happiness
- Lack of ability to self-soothe
- Maladaptive submissiveness and gratitude – akin to fawning
- Pervasive shame – potentially crippling shame
If your struggle with people pleasing, codependency, toxic relationships, emotional regulation
This epsiode is for you!
Some things we discuss in this episode are:
The Emotional Effects
- Learned helplessness
- Impaired brain integration between left and right hemispheres and body o Left = cognition o Right = emotion o Disconnect in vagus nerve between brain and body
- Distress intolerance, can lead to conflict avoidance
- Emotional Dysregulation
- Emotional illiteracy
- Low emotional intelligence
- Lack of ability to trust
- Impaired ability to seek and trust happiness
- Lack of ability to self-soothe
- Maladaptive submissiveness and gratitude – akin to fawning
- Pervasive shame – potentially crippling shame
Relational Impacts of Trauma we discuss:
Interpersonal trauma – trauma the occurs within a personal relationship – is a relational trauma.
Survivors may not have had good role models as children for what constitutes a healthy relationship and/or they may not have received any instruction about them. To the contrary, they likely learned all about toxic relationships.
• Survivors had their self-worth stripped from them, so they don’t feel they deserve happy relationships.
• Survivors struggle with establishing trust – with others and with themselves. We think we must immediately give anyone all of our trust, or none of our trust – there’s no middle ground.
• Relational dysfunction and trauma often lead to co-dependence as an adult.
• Survivors often adopt their afamily’s unhealthy world view, which colors their thoughts and belief about relationships.
• Black and white thinking limits a survivor’s interpretations of relationships.
Today we continue the series in How Trauma Shows up: The Impacts it has. Last week we looked at the neurobiological and physical impacts and today we look at the Psychological.
Most of what we talk about is the mental health diagnosis that are rampant in our culture today. Depression, Anxiety, Bipolar, DID, Adhd, OCD but also talk a lot about one's overtly connected to trauma: PTSD and c-PTSD.
As much as we go over these diagnosis's we also talk about how we can support, manage and heal AND most importantly, how our diagnosis's are NOT our identity as Christian women who are daughters of a King.
Trauma changes the way our bodies and brains function..this is one of the most powerful explanations of why we can’t “just get over it” and also offers HOPE that its not just because we are weak or bad.
In this episode we talk about the neurobiological effects of trauma, the physical effects of trauma and the HOPE that lie's in reversing the damage trauma has caused!
Today we talking about intergenerational trauma and breaking cycles. We talk about how trauma gets passed out, WHAT actually can get passed down, and how it can show up differently from generation to generation. We also talk about Family dynamics and a tool to help track the dysfunction in a family line. We end with talking about the importance of breaking these cycles for our children and the generations below.
In this episode we talk about defining Trauma. Not as much as one concrete definition but common elements, key concepts and impacts. We talk about Big T trauma vs Little T trauma, and types of Trauma's.
We also dive into giving an overview of how Trauma is dealt with; talking Top Down Approaches, Bottom or Body UP approaches and Heaven all-around aka how does Jesus fit into these modalities and what are aspects that are specific to healing with Jesus as the coach.
Is the world of trauma healing too self-focused?
Do Christians overspiritualize or Spiritually by-pass our struggles?
Our 1st episode co-hosting together starts the convo that we will be continuously digging into: What does healing and recovery look like as a Christian Woman?
Today we are looking into the big picture of a healing journey. I am going to share 4 different metaphor's of this process and you can pick which one resonates the most with you.
Today's episode if the first 2 metaphors of a healing journey :)
First: The Holistic Psychologist
2: Butterflies
This is so hard to do, but the best advice Ive ever gotten! If you don’t get to the end of your goal, or get the job, the relationship, the ANYTHING…that does not change WHO you are, or WHOSE you are!
This was in a sermon recently and I loved it so much. The reason I connected to it so much because as someone whose recovering from Codependency and People Pleasing, I morphed and changed so much into who others wanted me to be..I literally lost who I was.
As believers, we are called to be set apart and when I look at a caterpillar I see growth and transformation. Lets talk more about the different ways we can look at this quote!
Being prepared is KEY to our mental health, since we are pretty aware nowadays life can throw some curveballs at us (umm hello global pandemic). So when crisis hits, whether is big or something that triggers you in a moment…have a Crisis Action Plan to help you know exactly how to handle it
Its so hard learning emotional regulation along side your own children, who also have none...and somehow push all your buttons and triggers as they fall apart. All to say....Adult Time Outs are now a thing!
This game changer advice from Bree Card (go read her short yet amazing book ‘Dear overstimulated Parent: 10 small ways to save your sanity’) I am the definition of an overstimulated parent lol and some days, just suck. Some days I literally wonder if I’m superwoman. This little tip might seem small but it has a powerful effect. There is a freedom when you accept ‘today is a survival day’ rather then trying to push through and be productive…which generally makes EVERYONE miserable including you…and you don’t get what you wanted done, and feel awful at the end of the day. And then when the productive days arrive, it’s time to crush it with the energy and motivation pumping! So what type of day is it for you?
After I recorded this episode, I read this in my bible study:
We cause some of the wreck and ruin because we have a plan. We implement the plan and accomplish only what we can do. We ask God to bless out plans and then promise to give him all the glory when he does. Yet God is not glorified by making our plans succeed. He receives glory when HIS will is done his way.
He could accomplish more in 6 months through a people yielded to him than we could do in 60 years without him.
I am the worst at this, I am impulsive and quick to act on idea's...before others are finished thinking, I have already started the process! This can get me in trouble (in a lot of ways lol) but mainly when I run ahead of God!
Lets to dig into WHY staying on God's path and in his timing is BEST for us!
I spent years, I mean YEARS doing anything I could to avoid, push down, numb or escape FEELING.
After giving up all my crutches and intentionally letting myself FEEL, I realized...I have never let myself feel!
I know that sounds crazy, obviously I have had emotions...but to sit in them, let them be expressed, embraced and processed...nope, never.
As I learn to sit in my feelings, without trying to find something to make me feel better, I have learned something very important: THEY DONT LAST FOREVER! Even the overwhelming ones, they are intense forsure, but they do pass and something happens or comes up that moves us into another emotion. (sure we might come back into that feeling often, but I challenge you to name and notice your feelings and see how long they actually last. I think you will be surprised to see that eventually something happens where you are focused on something else or get distracted for at least a little bit!
Something helped me IMMENSELY is an emotion wheel. It helps identify what your feeling because if thats not normal for you, its so helpful to have a resource to just look at and be like 'oh yeah Im frustrated, or angry etc'
What I found helps even more with it, is that it helps you identify the feeling you are feeling and then leads you to the UNDERLYING feeling--the primary feeling!
When the waves of life come at us, we need to be anchored so we dont get swept up in the waves. Who (or what) are you anchored to.
Jesus is the only never failing anchor we can attach to, but are we connected to him?
It is so important that you find something that fills YOU up. You cannot pour from an empty cup, so its important to find the balance between getting enough pouring INTO you so your can do all the things, and not run dry yourself!
Especially if you follow The Holistic Psychologist, she talks about this a lot. But this is a way we can show up for ourselves and learn to reparent or build our confidence in ourself!
I have been on a journey to love and accept myself. To believe what God says about me...but also not fall into the trap of pride!! Not an easy one, and maybe will never be 100% there but if I can accept and respect myself, and truly believe I am loved, valued and accepted by God....Im happy there!
If I asked you to make a list of people you love..... how long would it take to add YOU?
Did you know that you can know your identity in Christ as a child of God, but still struggle to love and accept yourself?
I got to this point, and went on an adventure learning how to love and accept myself as who God says I am and truly believe it! But in order to do that, the first step is to KNOW what God says!!!
Thats what we dig into today!
Especially if you have an anxious mind, it is easy to feel pressure and and overwhelming urge to figure EVERYTHING OUT RIGHT NOW! Like this second, it cant even wait until later today. Unfortunately, for some things it's just not that simple and you might not to be able to do that in one go. So then what? That doesn't make that pressure go away? How can we combat that?
Let's dig into that today!
We are free to fail because we are secure in our position in Christ. This should be the most freeing and exciting message, but some have twisted this into a license to sin. The reality is, we are imperfect humans and we WILL fail...but we need to remember that we are free to fail because we have a relationship with God that will not be shaken if we do. We died with Christ and rose again, and no failure will change that.
Theres something special about having a place to connect to God. It can be ANYTHING you want, I used todays example as outside but I love having special places to worship, connect and wrestle!
Mental Health Hack 💞 Cut out OR protect from Toxic People
So I have been diving into the question ‘Can you have toxic people in your life, AND stay healthy yourself?’
I talk about in today’s episode about a bowl of apples with one rotting apple; the other apples will stay healthy, but eventually it will start to affect the whole bowl.
Now most people will cut out a toxic person, but what if for one reason or any other..you can’t or don’t want to. Is that possible?
Today we dig into that in more detail on podcast, but I will say: if you keep them in your life, there are a lot of measures you need to keep in place to keep yourself emotionally safe and healthy.
That Freedom, Peace and Healing is contagious! Sharing your story...could be someone elses survival guide.
One thing I have noticed about my generation, is the voice we have for healing, for trauma recovery, for mental health. Generations above see a lot of this as oversharing, airing our dirty laundry...and it’s easy to judge them for accepting the denial, to not talk about anything but we are all just doing the best we can...and trust me, our kids will judge us lol! Despite that, I love being on this side of breaking open generations of pain, and finding healing and restoration! So Be the cycle breaker, let it stop with you. Pass down HEALING to your children. The work is hard, but ohhh the reward, the blessing, the freedom you are giving for not just you but so many others....it’s worth it!
There is nothing you can do, to change another person. Sometimes our Strength can be disguised as strength, when really we are trying to change a person. Some peoples waves will drown you, no matter how hard you can swim
This was some Advice from our pastor at the beginning of my healing journey. There were other people involved that also needed healing, but one of the main things I have had to learn and accept is: I cant control anyone else. I can make anyone get the help, do the work, partner with God to transform their heart. But this is the key to it all: That doesnt matter. You need to do the work for your own freedom and peace, and when you change...things change.
In order to let go of control, and let God transform you. You need to get to the end now yourself, your resources, your efforts. As we get to the end of ourselves we leap into the unknown and allow God to show up and show us who he is!
There is a lot of talk about boundaries in recent years, and some great resources on them. I try and talk in today’s episode about maybe some new ways to look at them to give you a fresh perspective or another way to see them. Boundaries are so hard because at first you want to say ‘you can’t do this to me’ but really boundaries are NOT about the other person; boundaries aren't about telling another person what they can or can not do. Boundaries are about you, and your ‘property’ What you will allow, how you will be treated, and the clear expectation to others of how you will react if those boundaries get violated. My Counseller said to be once “you can’t throw boundaries on top of unhealthiness and hope it will fix it all” and I was like what? Isn’t that the point? lol but after digging in more, I now understand that boundaries are an amazing tool, but not a bandaid.
When we think of recovery, its easy to think about alcohol, drugs or pills (which are part of my story) but to be honest, anything we are using to escape, numb, push down, not feel or is just coping negatively needs some healing, processing, resolving and bondage breaking. Recovery in Christian Communities can be so shameful its easier to just hide behind the problem. But that only hurts you. Today we talk about what is recovery, and what are the steps you go through in a recovery process (from Stephanie Tucker's Christian Codependency Workbook)
Isolation is part of the journey, its not easy or fun but God needs us in a protected place where we can be safe to open our wounds and allow him to heal. This cannot happen when we are busy or using all the survival coping skills we've found.
The more I learn others experiences with healing, isolation becomes a common thread God uses to take us away, (not always physically) out of our comfort zones, into the wilderness to do the work.
Ask yourself: Am I listening to SHAME or GRACE??
*because... what you listen to, grows.
I started digging into the word VALIDATION today (which I now have created another post about emotional validation vs invalidation b/c I found some mental goldmines today!)
But I came across this ladies comment and I want to leave you with this for now.
“I realized that every second I spent doubting my self-worth, every moment I was seeking validation, I was depleting my energy. I was moving away from my destiny. It was time to look internally, return to authenticity and the masterpiece that God created, when I received my first breath of life. “
Where are all my people pleasers at!? So today we’re going to take a lesson from toddlers, who have ZERO issue with this tiny yet powerful word: NO! If your like me, you might have had an adverse reaction to that, because saying no to someone feels confrontational and terrifying! BUT let’s talk about it, why is it so hard? How can we start? For this one, I’m with you friend, but we can learn to say NO without guilt, apologizing or explaining ourselves!
As we heal, as we break away from the ways of survival, we need to unlearn these ways of coping that were keeping us safe. Thats no easy feat!
It takes a lot of work to rewire your brain, stop unconscious behaviours and RELEARN new ways that are healthy and serve us in our quest for a healthy life.
BUT, it is possible. Do not believe the lie that you are doomed to stay stuck where you are. Our physical brain can be changed, and we can literally rewire our minds to use new pathways that help change how we think, feel and behave!
You will come up with survival coping skills, whether you are conscious of it or not. Unfortunately, when they are unconscious..they tend to be negative and give us the instant gratification to feel better NOW. We need to take an inventory of how we are coping to get an idea of what we are doing...and if there are things we need to work on.
We are so willing to burn ourselves, in order to give other people what they need. And let me tell you from personal experience and to save you the pain....the burn hurts.
This week, I’m sharing things that got my attention and helped me look into codependency. I’d learned about it before, but never connected to it I read a few recommended books and I still didn’t totally resonate. Then I read this tiny little booklet by June Hunt I got from a waiting room...and it changed my life forever. When I was able too it in relation to my relationship with God..the conviction and eye opening became very clear. To not end this on a horrible note, I will share some hope from the other side of healing. Misplaced Dependency turns into Radical Dependence on God and living within the way he designed it...is indescribably better
Change sucks. Change is scary. BUT If we arent willing to change when its no longer serving us to stay where we are, that ends up hurting us more
Knowing how we operate helps us be more productive, actually benefit from whatever strategy are implementing because we are doing it within our own strenghts
This tiny little saying is changing my life!!! Ive always lived in a shame based world that said to myself 'i did a bad thing, I am bad' aka 'I yelled at my kids so Im a bad mom. HERE'S THE TRICK:
2 THINGS CAN BE, AT THE SAME TIME! I can have yelled at my kids AND still be a good mom!!!! I dont even want to waste any more of your time reading, listen and then click below to the smart people talking!
Link to the Episode between Dr. Caroline and Dr. Becky! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-train-your-child-to-understand-process-verbalize/id1334767397?i=1000518177075
Sometimes we can only focus on the next 12 hours, the next 12 minutes or maybe even the next 12 seconds. The more.... we plan, the more expectation, the more control and the more overwhelmed we can get. Especially in a hard season, give yourself this rule you cannot focus on longer than 12 hours from now.
Its so easy to say 'oh its not that bad' or compare ourselves to someone else's 'bad' BUT today I encourage you to not let pride and shame do the talking, and give yourself the freedom to get help!
We are SO hard on ourselves, and of course its so much easier said than done but its so important to do!!
Today we talk about the MPA on how to help ourselves step outside of ourselves but still help ourselves!
What youve been through is NOT your fault. If you had trauma in your past, that is not your fault. BUT Healing is up to you. Noone else can do it for you, but it will impact in a positive way not only YOU but the relationships in your life and generations to come. It might be hard, but doing the work to heal is what you need to do for yourself.
The more we hold onto things, the more anxious and stressed we get about keeping it. God designed us to live a life our hands open to receiving his blessings and also keeping our hearts open to him..not letting ourselves take over the control seat. The more I try and keep things on my own, the more control I need and the more
Life is unfortunately not consistent. You wont always feel motivated, you wont always feel like you've got it all figured out. BUT you always wont always feel awful! Even with a lot of low points in mental health, it lets up for brief moments and gives us a hot second to breath.
Being prepared can give us the appropriate expectations for ourselves and the world around us
No matter how far into a healing process you are, things will trigger you. It is my firm belief that major triggers are connected to deep meanings and unmet needs, and/or bring you back to how you felt when you felt that way for the first time...and your brain and body stored it.
Today we are talking 3 things to do when you do become triggered.
1) to help in the present moment, and as you recover from the heightened state it puts you in.
2) To process it and figure out if theres more that needs to be done
3) What can you do for the next time you are triggered like this?
A great little trick is to DO THE OPPOSITE OF HOW YOU FEEL. So if you are feeling sad, watch a funny moving If you want to isolate, call a friend. Today we talk about doing the opposite and how you can also take baby steps to get there!
Knowing what we do BEFORE we fall over the edge aka breakdown or crisis is so important because it gives us the opportunity to intervene. Somehow there is a rabbit trail that takes us to pottytraining a baby and carrying around a suitcase toilet which is hilarious and is left in for your pure enjoyment. Rate this episode and Ill send you a picture of me and my carry potty lol!
Its easy to shame and blame others, and see their faults. But being able to say sorry and admit your own faults is a direct mirror into your heart. And that is a reflection of where your head is at.
Life is busy, but if we dont take time to intentionally slow down, we miss things and we miss God speaking into the stillness of our heart.
It is so easy to find our value and worth in other things or people, but if it does not align with the truth that we are loved, valued and accepted by God and nothing changes that....then we are putting our value in others hands, which can be very emotionally damaging!
When live is going good; things are stable and balanced, and you are operating in healthy ways...we have the ability to take on more without becoming overwhelmed & stressed out.
BUT sometimes, in some seasons, we need to recognize that we need to switch plates. Our ‘backup’ plate has on the essentials, the things we cannot let go of (like keep us and our kids alive for example lol) sometimes it’s just the bare minimum.
This plate does not have anything extra on it. In seasons of high stress, change, overwhelm...we need to pull back, and switch plates in order to survive without falling apart. If we don’t, The more we take on will allow us to avoid and/or cripple us and in the end...the plate will break.
So today’s Mental Health Hack is to SWITCH PLATES when the going gets tough, and only focus on the essentials to stay away from overwhelm, unrealistic expectations and pressure.
Feelings go up and down and cannot always be trusted. BUT on the other hand, we need to feel safe enough to be able to feel our feelings without having them invalidated so we can process them in healthy ways
Healing is hard, its painful and scary. BUT the reward is freedom from bondage and the chains of toxicity, peace that satisfies your soul more than anything here on earth and transformation into a new identity who is secure and safe in Christ.
Do the work, its worth it.
Its so easy to get caught in the trap of comparison, but deeper than that it is a heart issue. If we are struggling to accept ourselves, we fall into the comparison trap so much easier.
It's okay not to be okay...it really is! BUT my heart screams DONT STAY THERE!
Awareness is key, we need it to move forward...but staying in awareness will cripple us! God has a glue that is unlike any other, that can heal wounds that seem beyond repair by our standards.
When we are focused on the storm; the fear and worry, the bad things that are happening..it is easy to get consumed.
But if we are focused on his truth, love, power and trust that he is in control....we are going to be in a much better place mentally
It is so easy to put others needs above our own, especially if we are people pleasers. But we cannot pour from am empty cup so we need to learn how to stand up for and prioritize our own mental health!
At the heart of codependency is believing that if we just love harder, just do more, just be better...that will change someone else
3 PRACTICAL ways to help.
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Move your body (Regularly) & NO this is not a fitness program....it can be stretching your body, it can be as simple as walking!
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Get Outside 10 minutes minimum a day - this will save you
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Light - Light can impact our brain in significant ways!
Did you know there are 7 types of Rest?
If you are not resting in the area you have rest deficit...you are NOT getting the type of rest you need!