Healing Trauma as a Christian Mama

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.

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 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 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 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. 

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. 

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 

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! 

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 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!  

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!