Trauma is not just the event itself, it's how we experience it. For one person, they may be traumatized by something that someone else isn't.

We look at the past so that we can grieve our losses... But when we never look back, we just push things down. We minimize. We turn a blind eye. We suppress and repress. We stay stuck. 

So consider, if you were to come just as you are, if you were to just be yourself, who are you innately? Describe that person. Pause the episode if you want, come back to it after I'm done. Journal, sit in quiet reflection. What would the authentic parts of you be if you let them to be?

Another way codependency shows up is by one person neglecting their own needs because remember they're so hyper focused on everyone else. They're so focused on keeping the peace, on making sure things are all stable around them, trying to create a sense of safety without so they feel safety within.

You are your own person. You have autonomy. You're connected with other people, but again, the other people's ways of living do not need to be imposed on you. We each need to come to our own decisions and actually allow ourselves the space and time to decide “How do I want to live my life?”.

Fun is important. Fun is necessary. Fun is healthy. As I've been on the healing journey, I've been able to laugh more freely and appreciate a good joke and recognize that sometimes when people are being sarcastic or bantering back and forth that I don't have to take it all seriously.

When we resource ourselves, we support ourselves, we actually then have the capacity, we have the mind, the wherewithal to be able to figure out how we can then support and help other people. Then we are benefiting the global cause.

It is possible to embody those parts of yourself that you thought were lost, that are so far in the past that you wonder, will I ever be like that version of myself again? Yes, you can be if you want to be. Yes, there are ways to be that and to be who you are today and to allow them to blend together in this beautiful way.

We think that taking things into our own hands, we think that controlling will be a means of feeling safer, will be a means of getting the end result we want, but we really don't have control over any part of our life.

Having to keep it all together when I felt like crumbling. Taking it all on when other people weren't asking that of me. They were willing to take part of it off my plate but I wouldn't let him. I actually couldn't even see it.

As painful and as challenging as it is to feel the grief, it is necessary to moving through it. Within that grief is heartache and disappointment. It's anger and sadness. And that may be uncomfortable, but friend, I invite you to feel it. You don't have to feel it alone.

In many homes the full range of emotions are not tolerated. And certainly it's not modeled in knowing how to feel, what to do with our feelings, how to repair when there's a damage to the relationship.

I didn't want to disappoint. I didn't want to cause somebody discomfort. It crushed my heart to see someone disappointed because of my actions. Now I know that they're responsible for theirs and I'm responsible for mine. And what I do doesn't need to determine how they feel.

It’s very natural that we're gonna look at the caregivers, the parental figures we had, and in many ways we're gonna model them. We're gonna look up to them with respect and admiration, no matter whether they deserved it or not. And we're going to create a life that mirrors the one that we saw, the one that we experience, the one that we heard about.

I've done this complete turnaround where now I say, all right, I'm actually gonna slow down to be able to notice what I'm feeling and sit with the discomfort of it. I'm going to slow down the pace of my life so that I'm not depleted and exhausted. I'm going to live in a way that not just gives my children choice, but gives me choice.

So like I mentioned before, messy is kind of the norm for what we're talking about here. Like you don't grow without a level of chaos, a level of difficulty, a level of pain. So it doesn't mean it's always that way and things don't transition, but you have to expect that. Even if it's just mistakes, like I mentioned before. So I feel like relationships have at times been more difficult and then at times been 10 times better.

I love you bringing up this idea that we engage with the voice of critic because we open ourselves up to understanding more about us instead of just shutting it down because we're afraid of it or because of all the other reasons. I just, I could feel that so deeply when you bring in that element. And I do think there's a key there. 

Dysregulation to me sounds like when you can't focus and you're not in control of yourself and something else is in control of you and you can't handle anything well. You're not focused.

We all deserve to get to talk about how it is for us living our life, how it is for us, managing our emotions throughout our days. This is not an easy thing to do. 

When it comes to conscious parenting and faith practices, I think it's really important that we allow ourselves to have permission to do it differently than our parents or the others that we respect are doing. It's easy to compare. It's easy to allow judgment to come in the way.