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finding your authentic self through courageous inner work

This episode brings together key moments from my conversations with five leading therapists on the topic of healing childhood trauma and finding your authentic self. You’ll hear insights from Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Shefali, Dr. Nicole Le Pera, Dr. Daniel Siegel, and Dr. Richard Schwartz on how to navigate and process painful experiences. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of how courageous inner work can lead to resilience, self-awareness, and profound personal growth. These conversations unveil transformative paths towards healing and reclaiming your authentic self. As Dr. Daniel Siegel says, “The journey is not an easy one, but it is worth it.”

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • How to look inward and get curious about what you are feeling deep down inside
  • Practices and techniques to give you a greater understanding of behaviors, reactions, and beliefs that have been with you since childhood
  • What some of the common challenges are when doing this deep inner work
  • How truly loving yourself includes facing some hard truths but not harsh judgments
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This podcast is intended to educate, inspire, and support you on your personal journey towards inner peace. I am not a psychologist or a medical doctor and do not offer any professional health or medical advice. If you are suffering from any psychological or medical conditions, please seek help from a qualified health professional.

dear gabby #195 Mar 04, 2024 emotional wellbeing

heal your trauma with wisdom from leading therapists: dan siegel, richard schwartz, shefali tsabary, nicole lepera, gabor mate

On this show, sometimes a lot of what I do is, mainly coaching and workshopping, deer gabbing people, and sometimes I'm this bossy B. I. T., you know what, comes out, and I can be that way, but it's because of this fierceness and this desire for people to grow fast and to step in, and you don't want to push somebody too quickly into that change, and especially if they're unwilling, but the willing person listening, because they wouldn't still be listening if they weren't.

What is a bold approach to move into that grace and that change that they can take to really go forward in their awakening, bravely, but not too quickly because you don't want to uncover too much too fast. You can't, even if you want to uncover too quickly, too fast and get to that utopic place at the end of the rainbow, it simply won't happen, right?

Because everyone goes, okay, okay, I'm awake now. I'm awake. What's next? Right. [00:01:00] Okay. I'm a conscious parent. Now what's next? It doesn't work intellectually. It's not a concept. It's not an idea. It will only occur through an expansion of consciousness. So even when people ask, but, but how will I do it? when I leave that job, how will I know what to do next?

I go, that's not a question to be answered right now, right? So we can only start where we are right now with the consciousness we have. And the consciousness will not expand until we do that work. So intellectually, we can think we've gotten it or desire it or, and therefore, if it's on the vision board, we are ready to actualize it.

But it simply won't work. We will regress very quickly. And that's why. People regress because the brutal nature of this business called inner work is that if you're not honest about it, and if you're not going to take a full accountability, it will not work. So, but that's okay. And regression is part of healing and regression is good because you get to [00:02:00] see, damn, my ego is stubborn.

It doesn't want to leave me. It loves me like the best lover I've ever known. It just doesn't leave. It's a dear to me. Like. It's like sticky glue. So once we can see that this ego, this false persona that we've developed from a conditioned childhood of fear is a formidable ally and foe, we will not be able to befriend it.

The ego is not here to be vilified. The ego developed in us to protect us. against the ravages of the unconsciousness we received in our early years. So it is a beautiful attempt to receive love and worth, but it is a primitive attempt to receive love and worth. So it's here to protect. So regression means that the ego roars back because the ego is not believing us that we're healed because we haven't healed.

Whenever we fall back, it's a sign. That, [00:03:00] okay, there's more work to be done. This pattern is really rigidified and we don't have to shame ourselves or want to be faster than our neighbor because there's no comparison here. There's no competition and there's no perfect destination called consciousness. I love that you're talking about befriending the ego because I've become a student of internal family systems of Dick Schwartz, IFS therapy, and I've, also practiced it for eight years in my own practice with my therapist and.

What I love most about the principles of IFS is very much what you're saying, which is the protector parts, the ego. must be befriended. It's not about shaming them or blaming them, but it's about befriending them so that they can get out of their extreme roles. And so when we can look at our ego in those moments where we regress and say, okay, thank you for revealing to me that there's more to heal.

That's such a profound way to, put on your big girl pants and keep going and show up more. I really want to [00:04:00] echo. The fact that I hear this through line that the journey isn't easy, but it's worth it. And, I'm living to tell that I know you are too. And so here we are, we're kind of like, cheerleaders for personal growth and spiritual practice.

I mean, I don't think there's anything else, right? I mean, I agree. What else is there? Everything else is just a reflection of that. It's just an outgrowth of that. So if that is not aligned and in synchrony with your most authentic self, then everything else will be a split or schism reflecting that inner schism.

So, you know, once we embrace. that life is about just pointing back to how we need to become more whole. Then we, when we have that lens, we're like, Oh, okay. More work to be done. There's always more work to be done. I mean, it'll never finish because our quest for wholeness is always going to be aspirational.

There is no perfect, you know, if child number three comes along and we were great and conscious with child number one and two. Child [00:05:00] number three is going to evoke and, uh, undo some old stuff that you had no awareness was still lying buried. So it's not about being upset with ourselves, as you said, or shaming ourselves.

It's just understanding that the process, the journey, as you said, is the growth. It is the growth. There is no outcome that's the growth. The process is the growth.

Now, let's talk a little bit about the origins of shame because so we're talking about a shame response and then building up all these different ways of numbing that initial response.

But the shame is actually important for us as children because it creates the need to Be bonded to the parent, if you know, if the parent walks away, the shame response is to go run after the parent. But to your point, if that shame isn't tended to, if that response isn't cared for with the co regulating parent, then we're gonna, we're gonna find all these other ways to protect ourselves from feeling that shame.

In the moment now, let's say [00:06:00] you are just for the first time listening and you're like, oh wow. Um, shame may be what's behind my addiction. What's a first step into getting into the, safely getting into the inquiry and the curiosity behind the shame? Yeah. So to go back and to speak to your point, we need those relationships because we're so dependent.

We need to stay bonded to the best of our ability so that someone cares enough, quote unquote, loves us enough to continue, right, to meet our needs.  we all have. This usness inside of us, right? These desires, these ideas, you see it very clear in most children. They'll say what's on their mind, they'll dance around, they'll express themselves.
And when we didn't have a safe environment or an attuned caregiver who could hold that space for that self expression. the reason why mom or dad or whomever the caregiver was might've left the room might've been based on something We were doing, we might be crying, we might, you know, be looking for [00:07:00] support in some way.

And if we don't have a caregiver that's equipped enough in navigating their own emotions, they might take leave for whatever reason. Where shame comes into play, because developmentally we don't have the maturity to understand all the different reasons why mom or dad or caregiver, whomever might not be able to tolerate us in our state of need right now.

And because all of our brains, even from infancy on, seek to make meaning, as again, as a drive for survival. The quicker we can understand an event that's happening to us, the quicker we can deal with it if we need to. So we all have these little meaning making brains and again, lacking the developmental maturity to understand that, you know, maybe mom or dad didn't have.

And emotionally attuned parents. So when we cry, they're completely overwhelmed with how they feel about it. So they take leave to create safety for themselves. The only, one of the only narratives that our developmentally immature brain can assign is something that's based. Us. It's because of something we're [00:08:00] doing or not doing.

And the more consistently that happens, so say it is around sadness, you come and you express sadness to your parent. And again, they continue to, to divert their attention away or to not be available to help you process your sadness before long. That part of you isn't gonna feel safe to continue to express because.

Parent, caregiver left every time you do that. So now you feel like, okay, this is a part of me that's not desirable. It's shameful. This is a part of me that I can't continue to show the world because the impact on the world is someone leaves me. I get abandoned when I'm in this state of being. So then we internalize this belief.

And for some of us, we throw a lot in this grab bag of parts of me, parts in terms of parts work included that aren't acceptable, that are shameful. And then we continue again to repress. So as we're going, you know, as on the healing journey, we have to understand that that's part of ourselves still, even if we stopped expressing this sadness or [00:09:00] this way of being this artistic expression, maybe even just stop sharing our ideas.

Doesn't mean that that energy go back and right. Going back to that charge doesn't mean that that essence, that part of ourself. It's still there. So becoming aware, um, becoming a conscious witness as I often talk about of these aspects of ourself, of our repression, of the places of our life that we're shameful about.

And the way that we can begin to observe is. In real time, you know, do you see yourself speaking your thoughts freely? Do you see yourself comfortable and safe to share your emotions? Do you see yourself able to connect with and express your desires or your wants? Or are there certain or all of your relationships where It just doesn't feel safe or you don't feel worthy enough to have that space or to be heard or to be seen in that way and then that becomes that, that point of exploration.

And for a lot of us [00:10:00] understanding, even hearing maybe a talk like this, understanding that the reason we might feel shameful isn't connected to something that we are lacking or that we express, you know, very readily. It's connected to these earliest environments and experiences. So it's not that we are unworthy.

We definitely have a deep rooted belief. And now all of these behaviors to protect us from feeling unworthy, though, we're not unworthy. And for a lot of us, that Allows us to work with our shame, which really just simply means observe it, understand it. And then over time that gifts us with the opportunity to make a new choice, maybe to just show a little more of yourself in this safe container in this safe relationship.

I'm a developmental attachment trained person. So ?.What it is basically is patterns of communicating in the first years of life can be studied in our study. And then they determine the way a child at one year of age will interact with a parent [00:11:00] in a separation paradigm, which then involves a reunion. And so then we see certain patterns of attachment.

Basically, it's the way the baby has learned to deal with this particular parent in their relationship. So we never say that the attachment category is the child's. We say it's the relationships.

Yes. Right. So this is a really important first point. Beautiful. The second point is that You know, that pattern with your primary caregiver tends to stay unless their relationship changes and then influences the way the child is in school and in camp and stuff like that.

The third point is that the best predictor of The pattern of attachment that the child will have to you turns out to be not so much what happened to you, but how you've made sense of what happened to you, which is incredibly liberating because people hear about attachment and they go, why should I bother to learn about [00:12:00] that?

Because Whatever happened to me, I can't change that, which of course is true. So why do I want to know about it? Cause what happened to me was horrible. Well, the reason you want to know about it is because while you can't change what happened to you, you can change how you make sense of number one, what happened to you.

Number two, how you adapted to what happened to you. And number three, how those things have affected your development as an adult. And that's how you liberate yourself by the making sense process. So, when I heard about that in 1985, Blew my mind wide open. And I said, Oh, my gosh, I need to learn what that's all about.

I was really interested in the brain and attachment, which the attachment researchers for the most part were not. So I was like a, you know, maybe a little bit of irritant to them. But ultimately, you know, we all got along to figure out how is this individual called the baby adapting to, in one case, secure [00:13:00] attachment, which is about 65 percent of the population.

What's called insecure, but I don't like that term. So I use the word non secure avoidant detachment, about 20 percent of the population where it's emotional distance. Then about 10 to 15 percent are non secure, ambivalent attachment, where there's intrusiveness and inconsistency. And then later, they would develop a fourth category, which overlaps with the other three, actually.

But in the research, it has a big effect. And that's called disorganized attachment, when we have experiences being terrified of our caregiver. And that can be anywhere from, depending on the study, 5 to even 30%. Of the nonclinical population. So that's an overarching thing of the four categories of attachment in our field developmental attachment.

And then what we do is we follow these babies. Into their, primary school years, their adolescence, their young adulthood, their maturity and can [00:14:00] say that if you had security, if you had non secure avoidant, non secure ambivalent or non secure disorganized, we can predict certain general patterns.

over hundreds and hundreds of people. And in the AAI, the adult attachment review, we now have over 20, 000 subjects that have been studied. And we can predict that the way you've made sense of your life as a parent is the best predictor of what your child will have as an attachment to you. The way that you've made sense of yourself as a parent.

From your attachment experience as a child, right, is a predictor of how your child will attach to you. The best predictor. I mean, you're talking 85 percent predictability, huge percentage. What about those of us, myself, who definitely had non secure attachment in different forms, probably more than one, and has [00:15:00] done a boatload of beautiful personal growth and awareness and spiritual practice, and is now very consciously Using methods like yours and detuning and leading from self, please tell me that I won't be bringing up my child the same way.

So Gabrielle, that you are the poster child of what we mean by making sense. So you know, I remember this moment of, um, you're having a dinner at the research training program in Virginia. To my left was Mary main person who created the adult attachment review. To my right was Mary Ainsworth, the co creator of John Bolivia.

The entire field of attachment research, and it was a very noisy restaurant and I was between the two Mary's so for three hours, the two of them turned to me and the three of us had this deep, credibly powerful, inspiring conversation. I was just new to the whole field. And so what Mary Ainsworth had discovered, which many people have found.

You can literally in this research instrument, you can show someone had reports the most horrible kind of childhood you can imagine, but they've made sense of it. And like you're saying, you're making sense process. And then we follow their Children and they're securely attached. Yes. So when I heard this from the Marys and the Marys, the two Mary, Mary Maine and Mary Ainsworth, you know, I, as a therapist, I was saying, you know, something Everyone needs to hear about this because people are so scared, understandably, to go back and reflect on what happened to them because it was so painful back then.

Why would they do it? This is why to do it. The research instrument, the adult attachment interview is the only instrument, according to Bessel van der Kolk, when we were teaching together recently, that assesses the difference between just are you were you traumatized or not versus have you resolved it?

The AAI, the adult attachment interview, can assess This person has made sense of their trauma, [00:17:00] the developmental trauma of abuse or neglect. And now they've come through with what's called a coherent narrative, which is the making sense process. Essentially, they've integrated their brain so they can have integrated relationships.

They can have that part, presence, attunement, residence, and trust. And now what happens is, even though that was your childhood history, you've taken the time and had the courage to make sense of what happened. You free yourself up from what the studies also show, sadly, is that if someone did have a terrible experience in early childhood and doesn't take the time to make sense of it, unfortunately, the research shows they're likely to pass it on, you know, transgenerational childhood trauma. So there is this call to action from this empirical research finding that making sense of your life makes sense to do.

You know, hearing about all these parts from different clients. And I started doing the same practice with different With [00:18:00] others fighting the same thing. I started as a system thinker.

I tried to make a map, you know, try and figure out. Are there common distinctions across people? And you just identified some of them. So what became really clear right away was there were parts. Who, before they were hurt, were these happy go lucky inner children. When we have access to them, can give us so much joy and creativity and want to love other people and just want to be playful.

But once they get hurt, then they are no longer so much fun to be around. As they're the most sensitive parts of us, and they get hurt the most by these traumas. And they take on these very extreme burdens about our worth and things like that. And so once they get hurt, we tend to want to run away from them and lock them up in inner basements or [00:19:00] abysses or caverns.

And kind of throw away the key thinking we're just moving on from the memory sensations, emotions and beliefs that came into us on the trauma and everybody around us is telling us to do that too. So as a result, we wind up locking up a lot of our juiciest parts. just because they got hurt. So for the part, it's insult to injury.

The insult was the trauma, but the injury really is our abandoning them and locking them away. and then they become even more extreme inside. And so once you get a bunch of these, what I call exiles, like you were talking about with your inner child, who is still stuck in the past, in these, these scenes of what you went through, once you get a part like that, then to make it in the world, you've got to have other, what we call protectors.

Who leave their naturally valuable roles and take on roles to try and [00:20:00] contain those exiles so that they don't take over and overwhelm you so that you don't have to feel those raw feelings all the time or and or protect them from being triggered by something that would happen outside of you. So some of these protectors.

It's also great to kind of manage your life so that nothing triggering ever happens and they can become very controlling. Like you talked about one of those, I think. Oh, I had, well, I guess we would say, and correct me if I'm wrong, I have a controller part that now, unburdened and not in her extreme role, has the ability to get a lot done and speak up when she needs to and take charge.

And she's an awesome part. I mean, she's the part that wrote nine books in 10 years. Right. That's the big part. I'm grateful for that part, but she's not extreme anymore and having meltdowns on calls with her team. Right. So, or just [00:21:00] constantly protecting herself and defensive. Such a beautiful example. Keep putting myself on there for you to demystify this for everybody.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's really great. So that's what we call a manager. So there's a set of parts who are trying to manage our life. Like I said, so you don't get triggered. They try to control everything. Like you said, they often become inner critics. They can also be very, as you said, critical of other people.

And they also are interested in keeping you a certain distance from everybody so you don't get triggered. They might want to make you look perfect, so nobody rejects you or criticizes you. They might try to make you perform at a perfect level. So they're really trying to do their best to keep these exiles from ever being triggered by any kind of negative comment or anything like that.

So we all have a bunch of those. We all have exile. And, you know, I have [00:22:00] one that can keep me out of my body, so I don't really feel much a lot of the time. Dissociated or, so we have, there's a variety of common roles. Some people, more often than women, have a part that tries to take care of everybody and neglects themselves.

I don't happen to have that one. I have another one, which is kind of like, tries to get everybody to take care of me. But anyway, these are common protector roles, manager roles. These what in traditional therapy would be called the defenses, for example, and the world has a way of breaking through those defenses and still triggering your exiles.

And when that happens, it's a big emergency inside. And there has to be another set of parts who immediately go into action to take you out. To get you away from those flames of exile emotion that are consuming you and make you higher than the flames or douse the flames of some substance like you were talking about, or distract you somehow until it all burns itself out [00:23:00] and it calms down in there again.

Firefighters. Firefighters. So we all have a bunch of these firefighter parts. who, when the manager's defenses don't work, are called into action and to take us out of our bodies out of, you know, out of our minds. Most of us have a hierarchy of them. So if the first one doesn't work, we'll go to the next level.

If that doesn't work all the way up to suicide is the top firefighter activity comes to the back. So, yeah, that's the map I created to try and understand all this.

Well, look, what strikes me is that I think you're both more spiritually gifted than I am, and also more spiritually disciplined than I am. We all have our strengths, that's not one of mine, you know?

Mm hmm, mm hmm, mm hmm. Yeah, we can jump into that actually, because what I share often is that there's The spiritual foundation that was such a strong through line before I found the therapeutic work [00:24:00] and that foundation in a way it was almost like a protector part for a while, right? So it's like almost using my spiritual practice as a way of getting above the suffering.

They call it a spiritual bypass. That's right. That's right. And I can think that part of me because That's all I could do at the time. I think that the integration of the two is what's mattered most. A lot of my listeners may not know this, but maybe they have been spiritually bypassing for a long time because that's all they knew how to do.

That was another form of protection. And when we start to get more integrated in our therapeutic journey, the two can really co exist. and support. And interestingly, I've personally been guided to many therapy practices that I believe are really spiritual practices. I can say that for Dick Schwartz. Yeah.

[00:25:00] So I'd love to hear where that intersects for you and what that means to you. Well, behind my left shoulder is a bookshelf, and that's a whole shelf full of spiritual books, which testifies to my own spiritual poverty, because whenever I run into a crisis, I go out and buy a whole bunch more spiritual books, which then I don't necessarily read or read only very cursory.

I've not been somebody with a disciplined spiritual practice, and reading your book, Happy Days, I also don't have the faith that you have. I can only call it that. You know, you really do pray and you call to a higher power that really speaks to you. So for me, it's been the other way around. My journey started more with working on my traumas and the traumas of my patients and all that manifested in all kinds of illnesses of mind and body.

And it was only later that I was guided to spiritual work. With my ADD personality, I've never been very disciplined about spiritual practice. [00:26:00] So it's almost like spirituality is something that's descended upon me willy nilly. I've done a 10 day Vipassana meditation. I've done other retreats. It's not like I haven't, but in terms of daily practice, it's really been missing from my life.

I haven't pursued it. And so it's more that I have to keep coming back to it. When I find that all the emotional and therapeutic work just leaves something missing and what's missing, of course, is the deep connection to the capital S self that Dick Schwartz would call it or the authentic self that I call it or other people call it.

Now some people use spirituality on the other hand as a way of not dealing with the emotional issues. They go into these wonderful states on the meditation cushion and they talk about God and heaven and the true self, but really they're quite disconnected from themselves because they haven't done the emotional work.

So that's what's interesting in spiritual practice is that they're great spiritual [00:27:00] leaders who've taught millions, who've been exploiting and abusing their followers. which gets revealed years later. This happens, of course, not just in the Catholic Church, but several great Buddhist teachers that have been outed as serial exploiters.

I don't want to name names. So here are these people who have genuinely reached deep states of spiritual awareness and realization, but have not worked out their traumas, and therefore they inflict their traumas. They use their power and their influence. To inflict their traumas on other people. And from my point of view, not that there needs to be a competition, but if somebody wants to get whole, I say, do the emotional work first.

And that's what I've been up to. Not to denigrate or dismiss the other, because I think we're not complete. If you just go one way or the other, but I think the bigger danger here is that people get spiritual beliefs and practices and [00:28:00] realizations and they leave their traumatized selves, essentially.

untouched and they're not even aware of it. So I think that's the bigger danger here. Completely agree. We have this shared language around different parts. The compassion I can see for myself and the decade of spiritual bypassing is that I wasn't quite safe enough yet to even remember my trauma. My trauma was associated trauma, and the foundation of my spiritual practice actually helped me create that safety to remember.

Now, upon remembering and doing the deeper work, I couldn't agree with you more. I think that deeper work is the true healing, and I thank my spiritual practice for helping me get there, but I couldn't sustain that. You know, throw yourself against the wall and then peel yourself off the wall and then pick yourself up back again with your spiritual practice.

That wasn't sustainable for me. And so the deeper work is the greatest spiritual practice of my life.