Breaking Free from Trauma: Transformative Stories from Expert Guests

Transform Trauma to Love Yourself with Blaise Kennedy

Michael: And so, I'm curious for people who are hearing this, and they're like, yeah, I would love that, I would love to this idea Blaise, to like be honest and have consciousness and to do all these things that you're talking about that seems so magical, but yet so far removed from me. Like where do they start? I think every step that you take is an important step. I do not like creating hierarchies and steps because it seems chaotic, I think every fucking step matters. But where do you start to get into honesty?

Blaise: Well, yeah, the first part's pretty important, it's pretty essential. I want to just go back to something you said I'll get to your question in a roundabout way. You said we are both the cause and the solution to all of our problems. And as I began treatment, I still didn't understand trauma very well, it was a word that wasn't used in treatment a lot, they were asking similar questions, but didn't understand it very well. I've gone on to take a very personal deep dive and studied it in as many ways they possibly could. And what I would say now about trauma is being dishonest with ourself or leaving our bodies or moving away from our feelings or avoiding the truth is a life-saving measure that we do because the reality we are experiencing is overwhelming. So as much as lying is a problem, or being dishonest is a problem, it's also the solution. So, when you look around, when I look at the round at the world now, it just like it was for me. I don't see a bunch of people who weren't working very hard, it's almost the opposite. I see a bunch of people who are working very hard, but because of the nature of trauma, they can't feel the energy that they're expending to avoid themselves, they can't experience that because that's the nature of trauma is we expend energy to suppress what's happening in our nervous system, and then we separate from it.

So, when people don't know how they feel or they're not able to have healthy relationships, or they're not able to do what's in their best interest, for me, this is not because they just don't have enough motivation or because they're not good people or it's because they have experienced trauma in their life and they are really stuck in the symptoms of trauma. And so, for me, how I got out of that was with some desire, I had some amount of desire, some amount of willingness and a lot of support. I had a lot of support. I had a lot of people either holding my feet to the fire or showing me the way or holding me when I affirming me when I did the right thing. I had a lot of support and I didn't know it was going to work. And I basically had mentors that said, Hey look, this works. Try it. Try it and see for yourself if it works. And they would hold my hand through the process, they would say, no, that doesn't feel, that's not it. Try again. And then I would do it they see, yes, see? See how good that feels when you don't have to carry that burden anymore? And I learned by being around people who are further than me. 

So, if somebody, if I was talking to the you from 13 years ago or the me from 13 years ago, my advice would not be just try harder to be honest and do something radically different from what you've known your whole life. Figure it out yourself. I would say go be around the people who understand the problem as deeply as possible, and who have experienced them and the most amount of personal transformation. Get as close to those people as you possibly can. And recovery is a great start. It was a great start for me because there are people in recovery rooms who know a lot about the problem and I hate used to go to AA meetings and the things people would say that in meetings people don't even bat an eyelash at. You know, like people tell the worst stories about what they've done and the room just says it's okay. Right. It became in those rooms, I started to witness there is a currency to being honest. And this culture of people recognizes that and they will affirm you even if you don't know if it's going to work yourself, you need to be around people who are going to affirm when you're doing things the work and who are going to help you see when you're not and are going to support you through those early years where you don't know if this is actually going to be transformative. And what happens over time is as you start to see this work, you can put your foot on the gas, you can start to drive your experience a little more consciously. You can start to consider your life strategies and you have a memory or a felt sense of what works and what your body wants. This distortion between what you think and what you feel starts to resolve itself more and more, and you can start of trust yourself that there is a direction, you can feel it and you can navigate towards that. But the early stage, you know, in treatment, they would basically say you have to hand your life over to people. And they're saying, you have no experience of success in this. You cannot be the judge of where you should be going. You need to sort of turn your life over to a higher power in a community. That's a very hard thing to hear. But they make a good case for it, right? They say like, look at the state of your life. And eventually, you know, addicts go, yeah, you know, I can see that. But many people who have trauma aren't addicts who are going to treatment. What do these people do? How do they find something just sort of a larger intelligence that they can scaffold their life with, or a mentorship program that can support them to make these changes? Or who can they watch that really knows how to do something different?

When I think about what I want to do in the world, I've helped individuals at many different levels, people with very different ambitions, whether they want to be, you know, their deep and spiritual path, or whether they suffer just specifically from the effects of trauma and I've worked with groups of people who, your therapists or spiritual seekers who want to take this really far and what I've recognized is the most useful thing that I can do in the this world is create culture, and that's what you're doing, that's what you're doing. This is a cultural change that needs to occur, it's not up to the individual to change the reality that they live in, if they could do that, they would. What's really needed is for our world to stop producing people who are so disconnected from themselves, right? Generation after generation of people who are born into trauma and get lost and sucked into it and have children from that state, that needs to change, and that's not an individual problem, that's a collective problem. And so, if you are someone who's trying to make a change in your life, my recommendation would be get as close to the people who recognize that and are trying to make as collective change as possible. Stay close to them and figure out what they did and get them to listen to you, share your troubles with them. Make as many mistakes along the path of healing as you can. Look at what works, be around people who can really help you figure out what works and what doesn't, just get involved with people who can help you figure it out. Don't do it privately. That's the number one thing, piece of advice I would give you. Don't make your healing process a private journey. When you express things and look at them when they're outside of you, when you share them with a therapist or a friend who is knowledgeable or you work through it in, once it's outside of you, you'll be able to see it much more clearly when we try to figure it out from just looking internally at ourself alone, we don't get the same perspective on it, that the perspective that we really need. So, make a mess, go find people who will take that on with you.

How Resilience Will Set you FREE From Childhood Trauma and Abuse with Kenneth Nixon

Michael: But I started to understand forgiveness and I understand more so and more deeply how it was really a necessity for this journey, and I was able to forgive people like my grandmother, forgive people like in my life, who even to this day, I don't really want a name, but I was able to add forgiveness for them and then for myself, when I did that led down the path of compassion, self-love. And actually, the thing you mentioned, which is something I did not understand at all, was showing up even on the hard days. And so, I'm wondering what was something that you had to forgive? What was an experience for you where you were like, I have to do this so I can break free? 

Kenneth: So, the way you just put it, hit the nail right on the head for me. Forgiveness in my context was always for myself because I don't know that I can ever get to the place of accepting and being willing to fully acknowledge some of the intentional hurts and traumas that the adults in my life inflicted and did not consciously work to alleviate. But forgiveness unlocks the power that trauma in those circumstances had on me and prevented me from moving forward to be able to live a more healthy, productive life that not trapped and beholden to those certain things.

So, for me, forgiveness, allows me to not necessarily forget or to ever get to a place where it doesn't inform how I interact with some of my family or other people in my life, especially during those periods. But it really allowed me to be on a path of healing that put me on a platform of empowerment because I'm at a place now where I can freely tell my story because it is transformed for me to something that I utilize as a bomb almost, for the advocacy work that I do to say, here is my story and here is why I'm involved in the work that I do. And it gives me access to be able to let people know that they're not alone, that they're not unique, their circumstances may feel unique and it may feel personal, and in a lot of ways it is. but that there are those out there who are able to share their story so people feel that there is a safe space to not only access some of their internal power or healing process, but if you feel led to actually do something to help others potentially avoid the same circumstances then there's a path to that as well.

Michael: I think the path to that only exists in reconciliation and forgiveness. You know what this crux of this show of Think Unbroken of everything that I've been working on, I is like transformed trauma into triumph, right? I think we have a moral obligation; I really do. Like, I don't necessarily mean at this scale, and certainly not for everyone. This is a path that I kind of was like walking down the forest path and I just fell into a rabbit hole like I never saw this coming. But it just made sense to me, I was like, here we are. How do we use the voices of those who have been through incredibly painful events and allow them to share their story and their journey, right? And that platform, it doesn't have to be this, it's in your own home, first and foremost, with your friends, with your neighbors, your peers, your church, your community. And I think that you have to get there by first forgiving yourself. Right. I mean, dude, I've done some sh*t like, I don't even know that I want to even say publicly. I am like, I will go to prison still. Like, I don't know where statues of limitations are on some things. And I'm just like, I had to sit and do the work. And I had to show up for myself, I had to forgive myself. And that is one of those things that is so incredibly difficult because often we destroy ourselves independently and individually, far more dangerously than anyone else who hurts us. What was forgiving yourself in this journey like?

Kenneth: Well, for me, right? So, there were so many people, my stepmother, my aunts, my uncles, anyone who had a cursory understanding of what was going on, but did nothing. I had to tap into some forgiveness of them in order to get to a place to forgive myself, right? For me, that anger and everything that was built up, it became a wall that until I was able to forgive people, I couldn't access forgiveness for myself, right? Forgiving myself for not grieving, forgiving myself for and being afraid to cry, like this false sense of masculinity that I should not cry, that I have to s*ck it up and tough it out. Forgiven myself for not having enough curiosity. And what I mean by curiosity is being curious about who am I, who am I trying to become? Like, why am I here? What is the purpose of all of this if I can't find my identity as I progress out of this?

So, forgiveness, for me was multifaceted, but I had to get to the place where I allowed myself to, you know what, it's okay for me not to be okay. It's okay for me to be angry. It's okay for me to go through different levels of emotion, from anger to sadness, to frustration because that's all a part of being human. And forgiving myself for not allowing the wholeness of who I am to feel those emotions in a deep way, and then being able to wrestle with them, right? Because if you don't feel your emotions and allow your body to relieve anxiety through crying and through some of the natural processes, you can't fully wrestle with, well, why am I feeling this way? Why am I crying right now? What is it that's within me that is being released and how I manifest this in a way that gets me to a better place of forgiveness, but also a better place of healing.

Unlocking Trauma: A Somatic Approach to Calming Your Nervous System with Irene Lyon

Michael: So, the first part is, can you break down those systems for us a little bit more in depth? And the other part of it is if you are a person who is listening and disassociated and not sure where to begin to step into who you are and your systems and your body and recognizing and all these things, where do you start there?

Irene: So, I'll do a tiered science lesson of the nervous systems ‘cuz that will explain parasympathetic cause parasympathetic often gets thought of as just rest and digest. So, our autonomic nervous system is basically the governing of the fight, flight, and freeze. So, fight flight is that sympathetic that like, I wanna fight you or I wanna flee ‘cuz this isn't safe. And then the freeze is a portion of the parasympathetic, a portion of the autonomic that numbs us out when we sense we can't fight and we can't flee, we will go into a free state. Kiddos, infants, children, people in abusive relationship situations, even if it's like a surgical trauma or we're trying to fight, but we're being held down, our system will go into this freeze response. Now if we go back up to the whole autonomic nervous system, we've got the sympathetic fight flight, the parasympathetic I like to call the parasympathetic and how I've been taught the slowing down nervous system. And there's two types of slowing down. One is that shock freeze, numb out, disconnect, go into kind of death prep mode, it's like the blood pressure's going down, the heart rate goes down, the oxygen exchange goes down. I'm getting ready to die basically is what that is, that's what we would go into if we were to say shock. Like I often use the example if I was to break my leg and my big artery and my leg is spurting out blood, I want my system to go into that freeze shock to preserve blood, lower blood pressure so, that's one part of the parasympathetic.

The other part of the parasympathetic is what's called the ventral vagal. And the ventral, it just basically means front of the vagus nerve. I'm being very kind of basic here, but the vagus nerve is also the shutdown but another portion of the vagus nerve is the social engagement. So, remember when we got on the talk a little while ago, I said, oh, having a bit of a conversation, it PEPs me up a little bit, I was a little tired. I'm way more awake now because we're engaging, I'm using my higher brain, there's a little bit of sympathetic going on cause I'm having to use my hands and all that. But the ventral vagal aspect of the parasympathetic, that is something that when we are born, it isn't fully working, right? It's why an infant can't talk yet; it can't communicate with us so that, I'm gonna park that for a second. And then we have something called the dorsal vagal branch, and that is part of the freeze. But there's one part of the dorsal vagus nerve, which comes out of our brain, part of our cause is all parasympathetic, it slows us down into fashions. So, I've kind of jumped a bit. One part of the dorsal is that shut down freeze, we call it high tone dorsal. It's very quick. It puts us into shock. Danger, danger, danger. The other part of the dorsal is called low tone dorsal. Low tone dorsal, that's the rest digest often when you hear people talk about the parasympathetic, they say that's the rest digest, it's actually accurately the low tone dorsal of that vagus. Are you following me there? Got these branches.

So, when we have had a lot of stress, chronic stress, trauma, injuries, we've been shut down, we haven't been able to express typically the human system is living in a mix of high tone dorsal shut downy energy that numby, freeze associated along with the sympathetic fight flight. But the interesting thing with that is you can have them both on at the same time. So, what'll happen, and this is what often gets missed, is someone will be living, numbed out and not feeling very much. And under that is a whole bunch of sympathetic adrenalized fight flight energy that is being trapped, it's literally being depressed. This is what we know of as depression, chronic illness, this is where the ACE study comes in that you mentioned at the beginning, right? The ACE Study and its findings that is it like those kids that are grown up in adversity, there is this sympathetic gas on with this high dorsal tone break on.

So, paint that picture. Go back to the other one.

Ventral Vagal is social engagement. So, a common thing that people will say when they have had lots of trauma and adversity, they are terrified with connecting with people. It social anxiety, I don't wanna go out. A person will blush, you know, they might even faint if they feel too intense interacting with someone. So, if we have been brought up in a lot of that high tone dorsal and sympathetic, our ventral ability to engage and be empathetic and calm down is going to be less on our wires, aren't gonna be strong in that domain yet the good thing is with neuroplasticity, we can build that back up, as you know. And so, the ventral is a very important part to bring in to play when we start to heal this.

The other part is that low tone dorsal, the rest digests. This is why we know when someone is recovering from trauma, we need to eat well, we need to rest, we need to slow things down, we need lots of time for self-care and nurture because we have been trapped in that high tone, dorsal sympathetic for so long. And so, what often happens, Michael is especially people who are overachievers and are just going like they know they have a trauma history and, oh, I've kicked that. I'm fine. I'm fine. I can do lots like high achievers, we'll see this. If you ask them to slow down and like take a bath or read a book or go on a vacation, they'll go stir crazy because their system is wired to be in fight flight, which can be seen as workaholism like excessive exercise, shopping, sex, whatever it is. But then they have a shutdown situation where their system also knows how to totally dissociate, disconnect and numb out, that kind of thing. So, when we start to heal this system that has been in that situation of high stress, we need to start bringing back the ventral, that social engagement portion along with the low tone, rest, digest, but in a way that is, do you know the word titrated? Have you come across that word?

Overcoming Trauma with Dr. Marie Cosgrove_ A Journey of Healing and Positive Change

Michael: And we all find our ways to kind of push that through. And it took me really until I was probably like 27, to recognize the impact of that, to create the framework, to have the shift to be able to move forward into life as you were navigating this in as a kid, I think for most of us it's just kind of at face value we say, oh, this is our reality not knowing that there's something different. When you were going through adolescents, teens, into your twenties, so on, how did you start to navigate that shame and that guilt ‘cuz so many people carry it when it's not even hours to be carried to begin with?

Dr. Marie: So for me, I started working really at a young age, as soon as I was able to legally work, I started working and I thrived in that environment. So, for me, and this was not right, but I'll share with you later why, but I felt that I got my value for my work, for my work ethic. And so, as I rose up the ranks, you know, by the time I'm 21, I'm a VP of marketing for a bank, for financial institution. And so, I was doing very, very well in the work environment because I thrived, I didn't want anybody to know about, it was a place where I could hide my past and no one would know, and I would take it to my grave. But it was after many failed relationships, I went through domestic violence and that was something that followed me in my personal life. And I did not understand at that time that it was my value. I would value myself, my self-worth based on my past. So, I attracted someone like that because I had no self-confidence. My first husband had no confidence in me and would beat me and tell me, nobody, you're lucky I married you; nobody would want you, you're a product of rape, you had no dad and I believed these lies. And somehow put my value or my worth based on my success in business. So, I had it all backwards and it took my second marriage when I got home and my kids kneeling on the ground, I came home early from a business trip, they did not expect me there. And second husband stepdad is on the couch with a belt buckle and the kids are crying and I said, what happened? He said, the kid said, he hit me, he hit us. And he said, no, I didn't hit them. I would never hit them. And I turned and I looked and I saw blood coming down the shorts of my little one. I just grabbed those kids and I ran, I never looked back and I said, no one will ever touch my kids again, no one will ever abuse them or lay a hand on them. And that moment I decided, I'm gonna find out what is wrong with me, why am I doing this? And I just delved into personal development at that time, I was very involved in the church, the church was not supportive, which is not biblical at all. But they kept telling me, I need to go back because he's the head of the house. So, I drove into my scriptures and I remember reading scripture which says, it's better than a man hang himself with a millstone than hurt any of these little ones and I said, why? You know, you're telling me that I need to obey this man that beats my kids. But it also says that a man is supposed to love his wife as God loves the church and he is, that's not a loving act and if he's not obeying God, I cannot obey him. And I basically told that to the church and I left that church and I left church all together and then I came back to God, not to that church. And I came to the realization that I had it, you know, all backwards that my value and my worth didn't come from money, it didn't come from how successful I was in business, it didn't come from my background, it didn't come from being a product of rape, it didn't come from what happened to me. My value was given to me by God and only God, and that's who I know I belong to and nothing else matters. And because I know that now, of course, I see that every single person is a valuable person, every single person on this earth has a purpose. Now, that doesn't mean everybody will recognize that purpose, that doesn't mean everybody will recognize their value, but it is my goal and my desire to share that with the world that you do have a purpose and to help find that purpose for you. And I strongly believe that and I believe it's through this resiliency that helps us to overcome because once you recognize that, all of us have challenges in life, and even when you come to recognize these truths, you will still have challenges, you will still have crazy people that try to come into your life and try to destroy you because we have free will. And so not everybody knows their value, not everybody knows their purpose, and so their purpose is to destroy because they don't know anything better, that's where I used to be. And when you have the keys to be able to unlock like resiliency, such as being adaptable, being able to move out of your comfort zone, being able to be empathetic, then you are able to pass right through that so it doesn't faze you anymore, you're like, okay, it's not big deal that, you know, whoever's trying to hurt me, you know, I will just get them out of my life and you learn to walk away from those situations. You learn to allow those people their space and get out of their space and get into, back into your space and you're able to push things through things much quicker, much faster. And you know, adversity just doesn't faze you anymore because you're onto bigger, better things.

Michael: Yeah. And I think one of the things we have to recognize as individuals is like, religion does not always serve the betterment of self. Right? Not, i.e., like relationship with God's, spirit, universe, but like this organized religion structure because to me it, I listen to what you said initially I go, that's nonsensical, how would you ever want to push a person to be in a place of danger because that's what we do. Right? The ultimate, like honestly, I think about church a lot because I grew up Mormon, I spent a lot of time in church and I always thought myself like, church is really a very fixed mindset, right? It's so by the book and you're like, wait a second guys, you can't see the forest for the trees here, why don't you take a step back and evaluate the fact that maybe how we've always done it isn't the way that we should do it? And I love that you took it upon yourself to make an incredibly difficult decision, the right decision, I dare say, to go and change your life, change your family's life, ultimately, probably step into ending a cycle before it even begins or goes further. And I think that's really beautiful and powerful and as you were speaking, I just couldn't help but think, you know, there's so many people who they haven't been able to do that, they're stuck in those circles, they're stuck in those relationships and that religious trauma and abuse. And I wrote something down here and I'm curious, how do you recognize purpose? Because I do think if you can recognize purpose, if you can understand values, it does give you the fuel to create change. And so, I'm wondering like, what does that look like for you? And as you stepped into that personal development journey for yourself, creating this shift in your life, how did you leverage that purpose?

Dr. Marie: So for me, how I recognize purpose is each and every one of us are individuals, unique. Now, I mean, we're all the same in the sense that we all have two arms, two legs, we all have a heartbeat, that's the one thing. I mean, cuz some of us, you know, have lost our limbs through accidents or born that way through, whatever reasons. But every single person has a heartbeat.

One of the things I recognize when I got FDA clearance for a device, I had been fired from a company and then I started another company and I got FDA clearance on the device that had a bunch of different biomarkers from being able to identify risk of stroke, diabetes, things of that nature. And one of the things that it tested was your heart rate and your heart beat has a unique signature, which is really interesting because nobody has the exact same heartbeat, I mean, we all have a heartbeat, but every single person on this earth, their heartbeat is unique, you have your own electrical signature. I mean, we have electricity running through our bodies, and doctors can identify if you've had a history of a stroke, if you've had certain tachycardia or certain things going on with your heart. So, I found it very interesting that we all have a heart, that our heartbeats are completely unique and we all know that, you know, our fingerprint is unique, our irises are unique even our voice box, nobody has the exact same one and we use it in technology. So even if you don't believe in a creator or that someone created you, even science has proven that there is no one like you now, growing in, growing out working for big financial institutions I remember being told by management that you're replaceable. I'm like, no, that's not true. You are not replaceable. So, for me, as recognizing number one is you are unique, that means something. If you are gone today, no one will ever replace you. Number two is we tend to live in a society and a culture where we're copycat. Someone has a very successful podcast, everybody tries to copy that method, you know, whatever it is, we're copycats. The most successful people are not copycats. If you look at the top, so I do a lot of speaking internationally and I share stages with people like John Maxwell, Brian Tracy, Les Brown, Nick Voyage, I just did an event with him last weekend, Dr. Rome. And one of the things that I learned is all of these guys are hugely worldly successful, they're worldly known speakers, but they're all completely different. And yet if you take one a speaker course, they teach you the exact same thing, it's like, no, you are not a copycat, you are unique. And once you embrace your uniqueness and you embrace your skillsets, instead of trying to copy, you know, somebody else's skillset. So I wanna be like this person ‘cuz this person is so amazing, it's great to admire someone and admire their skillsets, we should elevate each other, that is wonderful but don't forget about your own skillsets.

And I share this in my book, how important that is to identify what are you good at? And just because in somebody else's eye it, it's not a like, wow, that's amazing, it doesn't matter. You can take your skillset. And if you can use that to change the world to help somebody else, how is this gonna benefit the next person? You can change the world, and it may be different for you than it is for somebody else.

My daughter, for example, she has a degree in nursing and she has a beauty spa, a lot of people in the family or a lot of family members, they look down upon that like, woo, why did you let her do that? Like nursing is so much better now. She has a beauty spot, they look down on that, they don't realize she makes five times more through her business, as a business owner than she would working as a nurse, and she enjoys it, that's her passion. Her passion is, she loves beauty. She loves making women feel beautiful. So, I told her, you follow your passion, where is your gifting? Where are your gift sets? And you use those, she's also an artist, so she sells her artwork and things like that. Cheesecake Factory for example, that started with a woman who loved cheesecakes baking in her basement and now it's a huge, I think it's a corporation, but there's cheesecake factories everywhere, and that's my favorite place to go. So, it can be something as simple as making a great pecan pie, it can something, you know, you're an inventor, but you're afraid of launching your product because it's never been done before. And we tend to follow patterns, oh, this has been done before. It's gonna be successful, no, it's not, that's why there's inventions and it's those people that recognize their skillsets, that recognize their value, that are they have the courage to go out and take that risk and do that invention and patent it, and then launch that product.