Is Trauma Something You Can‘t Recover From? // Guest Sandi Derby

I think because we're all so unique and we wanna show the audience that really there's not one path or one type of loss that brings us to this method. Right? So if you wouldn't mind just kind of maybe starting there. Absolutely.

And I feel like the reason I have such passion for this work is because of how I found it, why I found it. I grew up in a very abusive home and there was a lot. There was physical, verbal, sexual abuse for a majority of my childhood. The other ingredient in my home was denial.

So bad things are happening, but we're going to pretend that they didn't. So I suppressed a lot. I went out into my life and I ended up a methodic. I used meth for three and a half years and then I walked away from meth rather miraculously.

And I think for a lot of people you would think that oh my gosh, well there it is. I walked away from meth. I found this amazing community like okay, my life is good, but it wasn't. Like I was waking up every morning, I was anxious, I was depressed, I was having a hard time functioning.

And even though circumstantially my life was better, I feel like my heart was really just shattered in pieces and I didn't even know it. And I had done other things that had been helpful. Like I had done therapy and I had talked to people, but I was still carrying these burdens that I didn't know what to do with. And so what happened is that there was a friend that was in this community that I had found and she reached out to me and she said, you know, there's a grief recovery class and it's starting and I want you to do it.

And I went, oh okay, sure. I had zero intention of doing it. I just kind of was like very people flaisy with her but I was like I am not sitting with a group of people. Grief is clearly not my issue.

So I just, I was like sure, sure. And I looked and I was like, oh, I could get the book online. This was in 2006. So I get the book and she called me maybe a week and a half later.

And she said, how is that group going? And I was like, oh, I got the book, I'm fine. I said to me, she said either you make that call or I'll make it for you. You need to do that.

Wow. And I will tell you, I cry today when I think about that because that's a really good friend. Like that's a really good friend. And so I went to the group and in all honesty, I hated it every step of the way.

I was like, where am I going? I'm feeling all these things. Where is the force through the trees? Why is grief the issue?

But along the way, I started to discover some things and I started to discover like, I have lost a lot. There's a ton of loss in my life. I'm actually in a lot of emotional pain. And I might have all of the wise and the intellectual connections at this point as to why things happened and why I showed up the way that I did, but none of those addressed the fact that my heart was just really broken.

And so I did every step, I did the homework, I did everything I was asked to do. And we got to that final exercise. And I did it. And I was one of those that had that instantaneous boulders came off my shoulders.

And I was shocked. And I remember looking at the specialist that was leading the group and I said, oh my gosh, it worked. And she said, well, yeah, of course it did. And I said, you don't understand.

I think this was going to help me. So that was my initial, like what got me there and kind of my initial experience with the work. Wow. OK.

So let's stay there for a second if you don't mind, Sandy. And thank you for having the courage and emotional honesty to share your story with our viewers. I appreciate that. I crashed and burned with drug and alcohol, too.

And I'm sober now and have been sober for over 20 years. And so that's a part of my story, too. And I just, I want the audience to hear that, right? Because I know a lot of people in recovery that gets sober in all different types of ways.

But rarely is the conversation about grief. And loss, right? But almost always, that's why most of us get into drugs and alcohol, right? And I know that sounds crazy, but it's the case.

I mean, it's like in the recovery communities, we don't talk about grief a lot. And so again, just thanks for sharing that part of your story. Now, another thing that I kind of want to cover, you mentioned it, and I want to go back to it. You said that I had basically, I'm going to paraphrase, but you had a lot of awareness about what you had been through, right?

You had a lot, it sounds like you'd done discovery work, right? Whether that's through therapy or other things getting sober, I don't know. But there was awareness there, but it can correct me if I'm wrong. But the actual emotional turmoil had not been resolved or even really looked at.

It's very true. I had done a lot of, I had done therapy, and it was helpful. And I had done other workshops. And I had done other things.

And to your point, yes, I had a lot of awareness. I sometimes I call it like the psychology of the why. I had all the why's. Well, this happened because of this.

And my parents showed up that way because of this. And I understand that this piece connects to this and no wonder my life looked like this. But all of the why didn't do anything for my heart. So as a result, even though I had a lot of understanding and knowledge, I didn't have the fruit in my life.

It's not like I was waking up going, OK, everything's different. It was like I was waking up going, I feel so heavy and burdened that I don't know how to function. And maybe I know why. But that isn't resolved.

That isn't better. I'm still in a lot of pain. Yeah, wow. And you may be listening to me like, yeah, Sandy or yeah, Cole, I get it, right?

There's a difference between intellectual awareness of what happened and the why's of the story, the psychology of why I love that. And I haven't heard that. But on the other side. And so you may be even like, yeah, I get it.

There's the emotional stuff that needs to be dealt with. And then there's intellectual. But even if you're aware of that, I want, you know, just as a thought experiment over the next couple of days, think about every time you have some sort of emotional piece of your day that happens. And just watch how quickly you go to the intellectual.

You go to the brain box because you can kind of get this concept, but still not understand how much you do this or I do this or Sandy does this because it's really what's ingrained from a very small age is every time we have an emotion, go to your head and stay in your head about it. Don't live in that emotion. And again, we could spend the rest of the podcast giving you examples of this. I don't think you guys need it.

But if you look at somebody in, let's say kindergarten or first grade, they're much more processing, willing to process their emotions in that moment. If you go and watch school, school age, kids, third grade, fourth grade, you can already see them bottling up that stuff. The minute that emotion bubbles up, you see them squeeze it down and you see them go to their head to cover it or whatever. And then that doesn't go anywhere.

That's not process. That's now accumulated, right? And that's, as adults, what we are all walking around with for the most part is a ton of accumulated, unprocessed emotional stuff from our past that we've intellectualized, that we've gone on great quest to understand why this happened or how this happened or why they did what they did. And but emotionally, that is irrelevant to our healing, right?

Awareness does not equal emotional recovery. Our whole goal with this work is emotional recovery. So I just wanted to touch on that because you mentioned in your story. Okay, so you get into this work, you don't want to be in this work, you're skeptical of this work.

All of that's okay if you're listening, right? That's very normal and natural. I know I was that way too. But you have this kind of very profound reaction and experience when you do the completion work, which is at the end of our kind of work is that.

And so where do you go from there, Sandy? Well, where I went from there is I kept using the tools. So it wasn't just this one and done. There were layers, there were other people, there were many, many people in my life that had had significant emotional impact on me as a young person and even as I got older, even poor choices and relationships and all that type of thing.

So I just kept using the tools and I kept getting more and more complete. And what started to happen is... And real quick, so sorry, I'll turn it right back over to you. But what Sandy means by getting more and more complete is she is picking different relationships and different losses from her past one by one and then going through the process on this relationship and that relationship, that loss, right?

So that's what she's saying right there. So go ahead. Yeah, and I, one other point I want to make to that too, Cole, I just tying in what you had said before, you know, that psychology of the why, that intellectualizing had been part of my coping strategy. It had been this thing that if I can understand why then maybe I won't feel bad.

And so it was this endless pursuit of let me figure it out, let me intellectually figure it out because then maybe if I can understand, I won't feel bad. But again, it was the wrong tool because no matter how much I learned, no matter how much I discovered and connected, I still felt bad. So these tools actually gave me the freedom to go regardless of the why, this is how it impacted me emotionally. This is the emotional response that I had and this is the bolder that I've been carrying around with me emotionally speaking all this time and now I have a way to release it.

And so what started to happen is is I use the tools more and more and more. One of the things that I used to describe myself as is I used to say, I always felt like I was watching my life on a movie screen. I felt very removed from my life. I felt like I'm way over here and I'm watching my life happen on a movie screen.

I was completely disconnected. And I was very unpleasant. I was always off in fantasy or daydream, even when I wasn't using drugs anymore, I still wasn't present. And so one of the things that started to happen as I did more and more of this work and used these tools is I started to get really present.

And I went from being very emotionally unaware to being emotionally aware and emotionally intelligent and present and my thoughts became clear and my relationships started to shift and change. And the things that mattered, I actually started to live life as if it mattered and that had not happened for me before. So things started to change for me a lot. Wow.

Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know if this is just kind of a trait of addicts and alcoholics, but I'm the same way. Like I escape through fantasy, through being out of the moment. It's why I like smoking weed actually is because I could just daydream for a long time, right?

Or even when I got into other drugs and stuff like that, it was all about just being anywhere but my present moment, right? And then after I got sober, I still had that habit. And even though I was sober, I could still do that and burn a lot of time in those other places. Okay, so you're doing this work and if you realize, okay, the key to this is not understanding the wise, right?

But the key is actually working through the stuff emotionally, processing the stuff emotionally. And you found this tool that is approachable, that's pragmatic, that can allow you to do that one loss at a time. Because like you said, and I know your story, you had a lot of loss growing up. You had a lot of stuff to work on.

And that can be very overwhelming when someone's like, all right, we're gonna meet once a week and we're just gonna work through all this. It's like, where do you even begin, right? And with this tool, I love it because it's like, oh, we're gonna bring in here. And then we're gonna go here.

And that's all gonna be self-der, I mean, that's gonna be directed by you. So anyway, so you get into it. When did you kind of shift to, because some of us get here and we're like, we have a lot of personal work to do. Some of us get here and we do one relationship or do one or two completions and go, oh my God, I wanna share this to other people.

Can you talk me through when you kind of rounded that corner and we're like, okay, I feel like I wanna share this with other people? Yeah, I feel like, I mean, immediately upon the experience that I have or had rather, I wanted to share it with others, but I did it more by inviting people into other people's groups. So I had a dear friend who was a grief recovery specialist. And I remember, you know, Vicki, and I remember one of the classes that she did, one of the groups she did, she was like, I think half of this group came because you told them to come.

So I definitely was already an advocate for it, but I was a business person. I was in the business world in the corporate sector. I had these dreams and aspirations and I owned a company and I had a business partner and I went through another significant loss. And it was the loss of the business.

And not only losing the business and walking away from something that I thought was gonna turn out very different, huge loss of a dream, not only was that significant, but it felt like it lost the identity. So much of me was wrapped up in that business and in the future and this is how it's gonna look. And now everything was different. And I remember having this moment of like, what am I going to do with my life?

Like, where am I going? And it just really hit me that grief recovery had been such a part of my life. I never stopped using the tools. I never, like I didn't just do that one completion and walk away.

I had kept going. And so I went to my friend and I said, I wanna get certified in this work. And there were actually, I kind of, it was in a community where several people were certified. It wasn't kind of new to that community, but my friend looked at me knowing the profound experience that I'd had and she's like, definitely.

Like you are definitely somebody who should do this. So I did the work in 2010, like I did the outreach program. I did the group in 2006 rather. And then I got to the certification in 2010.

So by the time I got to the certification, I had worked through at least 12 or 13 losses or relationships. You know, I'd done that work on, on at least 12 or 13 before I even got there. Wow, yeah, that is, that, I would say that is very unique, very, very unique. I think most people, when they come and get certified, they may be worked on one loss or two losses.

So to come into certification at 12 or 13 losses is very, very impressive. But just because you have so much awareness of the method at that point, for those listening, sometimes this method is absolutely painful and gut-wrenching and there's a ton of anger. Sometimes it's more bittersweet and you know, you're just kind of wanting to process that final goodbye to someone. It really depends on the loss you're working on.

And again, out of your own life, they can feel very different. So to have 12 kind of, 12 different completions there is, is incredible and very unique. One thing that we, we were together in West Lake Village a couple of months back, Sandy and I did a certification training together where we kind of co-led it. It was a great experience, an amazing group.

If you're listening and you were part of that group, hello, I miss you. We had like 19 people there and just everyone there was ready to go to work. They were okay doing personal work. They were excited and interested to get these tools help other people.

And we're just blessed on who we get to work with on a regular basis, right? But in the car, I think going to lunch at some point, you talked about someone, I think kind of like steering you away from grief recovery or at some point just because they thought your losses from your background weren't a fit for grief recovery. That you had too many losses. It was a different thing.

Will you just remind me of that and kind of tell that story if you're willing to? Oh, absolutely. I feel like not only did I hear that from more than one person, but I also thought that myself to be honest, Cole. I thought, you know, I really thought, I've been through, you know, all of these traumatic experiences.

I mean, Cole, you know my story. It's pretty intense. I let when I say I grew up in an abuse of home, it was repeated abuse. It wasn't just a one time, and it believed me abuse even one time is one too many.

But it was repeated from a very young age. And it was a pretty consistent verbal abuse and physical abuse. There was a lot of sexual abuse, a lot of different abusers, you know, sexual assaults from a very young age. And so I think even in my own mind, and definitely in what I heard from other people, is it's too like that's too much.

That's too many things to have happened that year. That's too much trauma. And quite honestly, what I believed, what I had been told, what I'd even experienced a bit in therapy, was I'm going to have this less than life for the rest of my life because of these experiences. So I'm going to be, you know, in trauma, I'm going to be living in fear, and I'm not going to have that fullness of life because these experiences are just too much.

And I think sometimes the problem is, is that that word trauma becomes this word, that like if you've been traumatized, there's no coming back from it. And the best that you can do is hope to cope with what happened. And cope by cope, that just means, okay, stay away from anything that feels like it's going to activate that, live your life very boxed off and very much in fear. And I don't think that was a good narrative for me, and I don't think it's a good narrative for people.

And I can say that from personal experience, because the truth of the matter is, in every single traumatic experience, there is a loss to be grieved. You know, I know we talk about in grief recovery that loss is so much more than death. Most of the people that impacted me are still living, but I still lost a lot. I lost identity.

I lost my innocence. I lost safety. I lost boundaries. I lost community.

I lost love. So I lost all these things. I lost myself. Having the tools, and these were not, what I love about the method is these are not these really complex, hard to figure out tools.

It's like the brilliance of taking something that can seem so big and so arduous, and making it this very simple structure that meets you in your heart regardless of where you are, is so deeply profound. And so being able to walk through that experience and go, you know what? I can grieve what was lost. I can't change what happened, but I can do something about the loss.

I can do something about what was lost. I can do something about all the pain that I carry inside. I don't have to work around it. I don't have to, you know, go, oh, okay, I can't touch that.

I can walk through it. And that changed my entire life. And so I really feel like that is a narrative. It's a societal narrative that is unhealthy because it can put us in a place where your best hope is to kind of just survive through your life.

And I'm not going to say that I've had all easy experiences, you know, even even sense healing, like I've had some amazing things and some hard things, but I'm living and I live. I don't wake up and I don't hide, I live. And I know that a big part of why I live is because I learned how to grieve and I learned how to get emotionally complete. Because I think there's so much passion in our hearts.

There's so much that springs up from our heart that can't be found in our head. It's in our heart. And when you walk through that pain, whether it's a pain because you've lost something sweet or you've had really sour things like me, you discover things like identity and passion and purpose. And for me, I started to live life in the moment and present and life started to have all of this meaning.

And so I'm not opposed to people saying they've been through traumatic experiences I have. For me, I did not want to carry that as a label or a lifelong sentence, but I would told that I would. Wow. Now, in terms of, if you can think back, in terms of the people that were telling you that that was kind of your fate.

Yeah. Were those other victims of abuse, were those professionals, can you think of specific people that kind of were telling you that? There were professionals that definitely told me that. It was, I remember at one point, one professional telling me, like, for example, you had all these needs for your mother.

Okay, so my mother was not abusive, but my mother was the denial side of the home to such a degree that it was almost sickening that she could have these things happen in front of her and just pretend like they weren't. So there was a lot of neglect and denial on that side. And I remember having this conversation and this professional saying to me, well, that's kind of the catch 22. Like, those needs were legitimate, they didn't get met.

You still have those needs. And so, but you don't really, you're not really gonna have a way to fill those needs. So you're just gonna kind of be stuck in this cycle of, like that didn't get addressed. And well, there's your catch 22.

And I'm like, that's really hopeless. Yeah, and untrue. Yeah, true. Wow.

Instead of hearing those needs were legitimate, the fact that they weren't met is also a loss. Yeah. And you can grieve the fact that those losses weren't met so that you can have healthy connections in your life in the present, which would have been a much better framework. Yep.

So you're, so you're kind of hearing this from authority figures. People you're viewing is, hey, you're the professional and the message is really like, man, there's stuff you're just not gonna really recover from. It's just gonna be part of you. Did you hear it at all from other victims that had similar traumas and stuff from their childhoods?

Definitely. Definitely. I feel like what I heard and there is definitely, I think a really strong narrative out there that once these kinds of things happen, you're never going to recover. You're never going to get over it.

And I feel like that's kind of the language that I heard. Like you're never going to get over it, Sandy. You're never going to get over what happened. You're always going to live with this and it's always going to greatly affect you because one of the things in my story, Cole, is that I suppressed a lot of it for a long time.

So I suppressed it. I acted as if it hadn't happened. And of course it was bubbling up and then I'm, you know, a meth addict and I walk away from meth because I've discovered like, oh wow, I have just tried to tuck all this stuff away. So some of it that I was walking through was kind of the shock of coming out of like, wow, I have buried this stuff and not wanted to look at it.

And now I'm looking at it and I'm like, I cannot believe this happened. But yes, of course it happened. Like I've always known it happened, but I haven't wanted to see it. And so I was also reeling from that.

And then to hear other people say, you'll never get over that. Or, you know, wow, almost, and I feel like there were victims that would say that, but I also feel like there were people that didn't have those experiences that would almost kind of back away from me. In a sense of like, ooh, okay, that's a lot. You know, sorry that happened.

You're, you know, you're just gonna have to fight to, to try to find some pieces of joy in your life. And so it, it almost from both parties felt like salts in a wound. Like, wow, I'm uncovering this stuff. This is really hard.

This is really painful. And now I'm hearing these narratives from people that I'm trying to connect with and have community with that are either saying, don't look at that. Parents did the best they could, don't look at it. Or, you know what, you'll be lucky to find some shreds of happiness in your life.

Just try to find those, because you're never gonna, you're never gonna live a full life. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, it's so, it's thank you for that. And it's heartbreaking, obviously.

And what's very fascinating to me is we have many different communities, let's say, of grievous, right? So, in your case, let's say abuse, childhood abuse, sexual abuse, right? And that group has been victimized, right? So I don't wanna minimize that by any stretch of the imagination.

I'm not trying to minimize that victimhood, that everyone in that group is victimized. I was sexually abused when I was a child. And like you said, one time is enough to change your whole life forever. And that was the case for me.

And so, yes, of course, you feel like a victim. A child that's abused by an adult, or another child is a victim. So that, you know, that group can sometimes be like, well, you can't recover from this, right? But then we could go pick another group of grieving people, right?

And for instance, like the group who has lost a child, right? And that group will be like, you don't understand what this is like. This is the worst loss, a marginal forever. And that group will be like, this is, you can't recover from this, right?

And then you'll take the group's suicide survivors. And I don't like that term, but we don't need to get into why I don't like that term. But anyway, someone who has lost somebody to suicide, and that group will say, you can't recover from this, right? And there's this thing where we have many, many groups of people where like that's cool, coal that you do this work for people, but you don't understand my loss is different, right?

You can't recover from this loss. And then you have a bunch of other people who have not kind of found any tools that were helpful for them. So they kind of just were a firm that believed for that thought. Yeah, no, I agree with you.

And then what's heartbreaking in your story, Sandy, is people who went on to get a bunch of tools and skills to help people are also kind of affirming that, hey, there's nothing you can do. So let me ask you this, how was, how is grief recovery different in terms of the facilitators, in terms of your other people in your group? How did it feel different and when did it feel different? Like you said, I know you're skeptical early on, but when was the shift for you in this work that said, wow, this is different from the other thing, both the authority figure, the leadership, the facilitator, and then also the other people on in it.

Can you, do you have a sense of when that shifted for you? To be honest, I feel like the experience of it being different was right away. I get into this group and even though yes, I was skeptical and I had a lot of feelings come up as I was walking through the work, but I think the reason that I had a lot of those feelings come up is because I was finally in an environment that was safe. And what I mean by safe is I was in an environment that wasn't trying to give me a narrative, it wasn't trying to help me connect the intellectual dots.

I was in an environment that was saying, I'm curious about how you felt about what happened, regardless of why. And that shift I felt it immediately. Like even the part when we talked about, hey, what are the things that you've gone to, right? What are the things that you've gone to?

What are the behaviors? What are things that you've used to distract or get some short-term relief versus actually, you know, being able to process your feelings? Even that was more about being curious about those things versus condemning. So instead of it being like, oh my gosh, yeah, I used method.

It was like, oh yeah, I used meth and then I used coffee and work and working out and sleep and like all these things. And it was just, there was this environment of being curious. And then the other thing that was so key is that because of the way the group is structured, nobody was giving me an intellectual reason and not feel why I felt. They weren't giving me advice, they weren't telling me to go read a book, they weren't telling me, oh, well, let me tell you about why your parents showed up the way they did.

They weren't doing any of that. They were literally listening to hear me. And so what happened is those feelings that I had been carrying for all those years. And I appreciate what you said about that because I had people when I was first connecting to this, say to me, well, that stuff happened a long time ago, right?

It's been 25 years since some of these abuses happened. So why are you talking about it? And I'm like, but it feels like it just happened yesterday emotionally because I haven't processed any of that stuff. So here now I'm in an environment where now I'm able to actually discover what I'm carrying inside as a result of what's happened.

And I'm having a person and people that are listening to listen. So there's this compassionate space that I hadn't experienced before. There was nobody trying to give me a narrative, there was none of that. And so it helped me to go, wow, there's so much pain in here that I didn't even know was there.

I think the reason that I had some of even the cynicism and some of the anger and some of that stuff come up even during the process is because I was connecting to the pain for the first time. Like I was truly connecting to it and then having an outlet for it. And so it allowed me to get really emotionally honest. And I just hadn't had that before.

Wow. Emotionally honest, without judgment, without someone else directing you towards where they think you need to go without constantly moving back up to your brain and figuring stuff out intellectually, they just let you be in the emotional space and gave you kind of the room and the safety for you to make this work what you want it to be essentially. Because that's what I see a lot of the time when I'm guiding people through this method. Look, I do mostly the way I do this work right now just because I'm focused on the certifications is I'm working, I'm walking people through the method in three days.

That's like going through the method at 150 miles an hour. That's a very fast way to do it. I think for certain people, it's a great way to do it. I know for me, that's my preferred way to go through the method is very intense, quick, and I'm dedicating a couple of days towards something that's been hurting me for maybe years, right?

Other people, it's much better for them to go through this work in eight weeks. You have some kind of breath in between each weekly meeting and you can kind of like think about stuff and decompress. And that's a beautiful way to do it too. But whichever way you go through this method, this is going to be what you make of it.

If you skate along and you don't dig very deep and you kind of just live in your head and you don't really go down here, it's probably going to be just kind of one among many experiences that we're just kind of not that helpful for you. But if you dig in and you really go down to your heart and you really follow the instructions, you really can change your life. And that's what I love about this work is this is, this is really, you're going to get out of it what you put in. Not what I put in as a leader, not what I say as a leader.

This is truly you changing your life and it is up to you to change your life. And really, that's the only way I think human beings can truly change is from within. And my critique of other kind of things and other programs is sometimes we rely too much on what this other person next to us in the program is kind of telling us it's going to be or again, there's too much guidance from the facilitator on what this is going to be or the work we need to do or what the possibilities are of this work. Like we don't put, I was just doing another podcast where we talked about that.

We don't promise anything in our work. We don't tell you what the outcome will be, but we also make sure that you understand that you are in the driver's seat and you are responsible for your recovery. Now, Sandy was not responsible for the abuse that took place when she was a little girl and couldn't defend herself. I don't need to take responsibility for that when I was abused.

I was six years old. I had no part in that. I do have a part however, when I come to the grief recovery method at 20 and I have to make a choice. Is this going to be my story?

Is this going to be my identity or is this going to be a part of my story? But me still getting to choose what I want my life to be at 20 years old or 30 years older, 40 years old. That's where I love this work. It is empowering to people.

Empowering to people who became a victim when their husband at 30 years died. It's empowering for people who became a victim right at childhood and did not have a chance in terms of a safe, wholesome environment, right? Right from the very beginning and everyone in between. But everyone in the program, again, no matter where you start, at some point either comes to the realization that no one is coming to save us but us, right?

No one is going to do the work for us but us. And if we don't have an outcome, it's on us because in some way, shape or form, we didn't dig in and really couldn't admit to it. And that's where I just did a YouTube video a couple of weeks ago, just kind of on this, you know, you have Big Pharma, you have Big Agriculture, you also have Big grief. You have large organizations where their whole mission is to keep grief as your identity, front and center.

That is how they exist in the world is for you to make sure you are crystal clear on your grief. They don't care if it happened a year ago, they don't care if it happened five years ago, they don't care if it happened 20 years ago. When they ask you who you are, they want to make sure that your loss comes into the conversation at some point in the time, well, I do this professionally and I do this and then this happened to me at a certain point in my past, right? They need that in your identity and that's not great for covering.

I mean, if you're working with Sandy or me and you come for one loss and you do the work and you go, oh my God, that was amazing and I'm off and running, we'll be like, go, go, tackle the world, be whoever you want to be, like we're rooting for you. On the other hand, you may come like Sandy where you go, you know what, I got some other work to do here. I really like this method, it feels good. Can I do some other relationships on it?

Because I still got some other work to do and I'll say, yeah, as long as you want to be around doing the work, do the work, but the whole goal of the work is to be different than when you started to unpack that stuff and let it go and get complete with it, right? And that's really the core difference between our work and a lot of other people's work is our whole business model isn't designed about you hovering around our stuff forever or you needing us forever, right? And that's the key. And so my advice to you and then I'm gonna turn it back over to you, Sandy.

My advice to you was really when you're looking into something, what is the structure of it? Is it set up for you to keep going back week after week for the next five years? Is it set up if you're a part of this organization for no one to really move forward in whatever they're struggling with but really our whole unity is in the camaraderie of the pain and the events that we're kind of stuck in from the past. I know this can sound insensitive, but truly it's the exact opposite of that.

I'm saying this publicly because I love human beings and I care about human beings and I want them to be and reach whatever their potential is, not have some past hurt no matter how painful or tragic it was from the past, be your identity forever full stop. So sometimes we have to say these things that are uncomfortable. Just do, I mean, you know, so anyway, go ahead, Sandy, anything on that? Yeah, oh yeah, this is huge.

This is, I love that you're talking about this and I love that this is a grief recovery method principle because it changed my life. I really appreciate what you said, Cole, about, you know, when things happened to us as a child, like we are a victim. I was dependent on people that greatly failed me, you know, that should have protected me, nurtured me, cared for me. Not only did they fail me, but any response or behavior that I had at that time at seven years old was not my responsibility either.

I was a child and I was dependent on adults. But what can happen, and it definitely happened to me for a while, is that then as an adult, I can almost carry that same mindset forward whereby I am continually victimized in my life. And I really had to come to a moment. And my moment was this, my mother was the denial ingredient in my home.

So when I started to speak up and say, these things have happened, my family, particularly my mother said, no, they didn't, you're lying. And she turned the tables as did other family members and tried to say that I'm crazy. I, you know, have all these things wrong with me, which I don't, and refused, right? And so here's what I did for a period of time.

I started to confront my mother a lot and we started to have these arguments. And then my mother said, if we're gonna talk about your childhood, I'm not going to talk to you. Because my whole thing was, there's abuse in the family. We need to talk about this.

This has got to stop. But here was the driver behind me. The driver was, there was a part of me that was like, man, if I can just get my mother to fully acknowledge what happened, to believe me, to admit it, then I'll feel better. And as hard as that is, and as much as we could all understand why I would want my mother to get it, the truth of the matter is, is that who was in jail?

I was. I was in jail. I was a victim. Why?

Because I needed my mother to do something different in order for me to feel better, in order for me to move forward in my life. And what I realized through the process of the method is that, you know what? My mother may never change. But guess what?

I can. It's not my fault what happened. It's not my responsibility what happened. I bear zero back there.

But I can do something about today. I can do something about the pain, even if nobody around me changes. So that moment of empowerment, we need to talk about this. Because if that hadn't happened for me, I wouldn't be here.

I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. I wouldn't be living how I'm living. And so I came to this moment of like, if she never changes, I'm gonna do something about the pain. And I'm gonna walk through it, and I did.

And it's really good that I did that because my mother is still in the same place. Nothing's changed. I wrote a whole book about my experiences, my healing journey, grief recovery's in there a lot because it was such a big part of my healing journey. I changed names, but you know, they're not happy that I've done that and that I've published this book because they're still in that denial.

But I'm not. And so coming out of victim, what it did for me. And when I say victim, meaning that mindset of everything around me is dictating my experience versus I have the power to do something, it changed everything. And this is what I tell people who have this idea that like, well, no, you're never gonna get over it.

And it's like, listen, I can't change what happened back there and I'm not okay with it. I am not somebody that's like, all of my experiences made me who I am today. I'm like, nope, I wouldn't want any little child to go through what I did and I wouldn't want me to go through it either. But I can talk about it and I can communicate it and I'm not in pain anymore.

It happened, but it doesn't have me anymore. I'm not in pain. I could feel sad about those things. Of course, sadness is a normal human emotion, but pain is that heavy debilitating, I can't move forward.

And when we're in this place of everything is still happening to me and I have no power, I think for me what was happening is I was also identifying with the pain and that had become part of my identity. And it is not just pain, right? And I don't want that to be my identity. And so walking through the method and being able to release it, I actually found my true identity and really who I am.

And so there's so much power in this topic. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And this is a very bad example, but I'm gonna use it anyway. So this is out of my life.

When I played baseball, I played Division I baseball in college, I wanted to be a pro baseball player. And I had people growing up that, you know, coaches that tell me I could do that. And through some events and basically a fight, a physical fight I got in in college, I blew out a bunch of ligaments in my knee. And I felt like the victim of that fight in those circumstances, right?

And okay, but Cole, we're talking about sexual abuse and we're talking about losing children and why are you even talking about baseball, right? And the point is in my frame of reference at 20 years old, where I felt like all myself worth in my whole future was wrapped up in this dream. Over night, basically, that dream was gone for me, right? My things wouldn't be the same, right?

And then there were also parts of my journey at 20 to kind of see another level of talent and not even, you know, and be like, man, I don't even think I'd get to pros even if I didn't get hurt. There was a bunch of stuff, but anyway, the point being is I basically turned my back on baseball and didn't watch baseball, didn't go to baseball games, didn't talk to my friends about baseball after that. The pain of that loss was for me to just pretend it didn't happen. Well, flash forward 20 plus years and guess what?

My kids are all playing T-Ball and Little League Baseball. And so now I am being confronted basically with this unfinished emotional pain from my past because my kids are now participating in this sport, right? And here's my point. When I first started bringing my kids to like competitive Little League practice and I, you know, maybe I wanted to offer to help coach or whatever, I was always having to bring up like, hey, and just so you know, I played Division 1 College Baseball, you know, I would have to say that.

It was, it had to be a part of my identity. And because I'm aware of this work, I was like, wow, that's showing me, I'm way unfinished with that event from my past. I have some work to do around that, right? I'm the, for me having to say that to random dads over there, you know, they turn and be like, oh, that's, okay, that's cool, you know, or they'd be like, wow, that's really cool or whatever.

But just the fact that I was having to say that, it's part of my identity because I'm unfinished with it. And I had to go and do some work around that old past loss because the problem was is then when my son, let's say he struck out three times, right? Well, this is a real problem to me, right? Because I am all wrapped up in him being in the big leagues and him, you know, and he's just sitting here thinking it's your one of literally.

But it, but all my unfinished business, right? And me doing these things. So I had to go do work. So I'm not one of those dads that like is all wrapped up and like, oh my God, why'd you strike out?

Why it? I can't believe you did that. We got to go, you know, like that stuff is insane. But that's what we do in unresolved grief from our past.

Now, I'm using kind of an example here that is kind of, again, kind of trivial, trivial. But I see dads all the time and coaches all the time that are coaching their kids improperly and kind of abusively, honestly, because they're unfinished with their past. And if you don't understand that like griefs are part of this and trauma and all those kind of things, then you're gonna keep doing that. And some of these guys are straight up destroying their relationships with their children.

Their at least baseline destroying their relationship with baseball, you know, and it's like, so my point is unresolved grief from the past affects all of us every day. But if we're unaware of it, then we can't really course correct, right? So through doing work around unbeing unfinished with my personal story, I can now just let my kids have fun playing baseball. And wherever they take baseball or don't, it's not really a big deal to me.

It's like now more for the joy of them enjoying the sport or not. But that again, you can play that across everything. But my point is to circle back to things being our identity, me being unfinished with this past grief equaled me having to tell everyone how far I got in baseball, right? It's part of my identity.

And a lot of us as grievers, that is us. And at some point in the conversation, I'm gonna wrap into it how I lost this person or how I'm a widow or how I lost a child or how I was abused from my past or how I had this life altering health thing. If you are one of those people, I'm giving you a hug right now. And then I'm just saying that's unresolved grief.

That's being a victim of things that happened in our past. But Cole, I was a victim. Absolutely you were. But today in real time, do you still wanna be that?

The answer's yours, the choice is yours. Sandy, I don't know if you've seen this, but you wouldn't believe sometimes that the hate mail I get just from having recovery in the title. Just the term recovery can royally piss people off. And again, I would challenge you.

Why does that word trigger you so hard? Why do you have such a problem with the term recover? Now again, I've heard every argument, but what I'm gonna tell you from experiences is because we still wanna be the victim on some level. And the thought of moving forward pisses us off.

And that's cool. You keep sending hate mail to me. I don't care because at some point you'll show up and give this work shot or you won't. That's ultimately your call.

Again, not to minimize or negate what we have been through. And for some of us, right? You may be hearing this and your loss was three weeks ago. And so you being upset that I'm saying this is totally valid.

Like cool, you feel like a victim and this happened three weeks ago and you are a victim, right? But some of us this happened like in baseball 25 years ago or more, you know? And I'm still having to tell people about my identity as a baseball player. I see that a lot of the time in the veteran community, military veterans, some veterans you meet and it's just like, oh yeah, I was a super ninja secret squirrel.

But you don't know that until you've known them for seven months or a year. And then they mentioned you go, Bob, really that was you, you know? It's just a piece of their story. Other guys, they're like, I'm on the USS Reagan and here's a shirt and, you know, and like, you're gonna know my identity immediately.

Like, I'm gonna make sure, right? We can all kind of do this. And a lot of the time when we need to do this and it feels kind of over the top, it's because we're unfinished with that experience or that event or something. So that's just kind of a clue, hey, maybe there's some work you can do on something.

I think too, there's so much power in the completion because when we're holding onto the pain, when we're holding onto that identity and holding onto, you know, this happened to me, we're not living. Like, I wasn't living when I was holding onto those things. I wasn't living when I was fighting with my mother and just like, no, she needs to get it so I can feel better. I wasn't living as a matter of fact, what was happening is what had happened to me now had me.

And again, it doesn't mean that what happened to me was okay. It doesn't mean there's not consequences, it doesn't mean there's not boundaries, it doesn't mean, I mean, I took action, I definitely did. But I would say because I'm not carrying all that pain, I have so much more freedom not only to live my life, but also now for that story to be to help others, to be powerful because that's what I've chosen. Some people might have things in their story and they might be like, you know what, this isn't something that I'm gonna talk about moving forward because I've gotten complete and it's just not something that I really wanna think about anymore or whatever, whatever, that's your journey.

But for me, this now became something empowering and powerful. And so I fully agree with that. I would say one other quick thing I would add to that too that I have also seen when it comes to pain and identity, I think sometimes let's say somebody is they've lost a spouse or they've lost a child. They can then mistakenly believe that if I hold onto the pain somehow I'm honoring and holding onto the person.

So holding onto the pain is now I'm honoring, I'm hanging onto the person and I've had them tell me that. And so I've had lots of great conversations with people where they're like, yeah, but if I let go of this, then I'm letting go of the person. And I'm like, wow, think about that. Pain is pain, how can you honor anybody by holding onto pain?

Do you not realize that you have much more freedom to honor that person when you're not carrying the pain? Do you not realize that by you holding onto the pain, you're not, not only, like I said, you're not honoring them, you're not honoring you. A lot of times when people are holding onto the pain that can't even talk about things, but they mistakenly believe that. And so I think that's another thing that comes up around pain.

And I think that's another reason why I call people fight that recovery word because it feels like, oh, you're telling me I can recover well, then that means that what happened didn't matter. And I'm like, no, it matters so much that if you hold onto the pain, you're going to be buried in it versus actually living and doing with that whatever you would want to. Yes, I'm so glad you brought that up. That is a huge piece of this puzzle.

So thank you for bringing that up because that is very normal and natural for a lot of us to do that around different losses. It's like, no, I'm dishonoring them if I smile ever again. Like that's a very real thing for people, absolutely. I think another aspect of that call when it comes to pain and identifying with pain, I know for me, it also felt like if I let go of this pain, then I'm saying that what happened didn't matter.

So not only so for me, with an abuse story, it was less about, oh, pain is how I hold onto the person. It was more about, well, if I release the pain than I'm saying, it didn't matter. I'm saying that it's okay. So I'm dishonoring myself if I let go of the pain.

So and again, these are all, they're like these mistaken beliefs around pain. Because I get to honor things way more now than I did before and I see that with multitudes of others too. Yeah, that's absolutely, that's great. And like you said, these are just kind of pieces of misinformation that are promoted in society because no one really, I shouldn't say no one, most people have never really looked at grief as deeply through the lenses we have.

And so even as crazy as it sounds, but kind of modern therapy, they don't have solutions for a lot of these pitfalls that we feel with grief. Certainly you go to a member of the clergy or a leadership in your church, around grief specifically, they don't have the tools there. You go over here to a psychiatrist, like no one has really developed stuff specifically around grief where us and some other programs, but obviously I'm biased towards ours, we have looked at like every angle of hundreds of thousands of people from every type of grief you could imagine. And we will help you sort out some of these things.

So if you feel very stuck on letting go of the pain because you feel like it did matter or wherever you're at or you're gonna dishonor that person if someone in town sees you smiling, like we can help you with these things. We do help people with these things on a daily basis, right? So just know that like this is our bread and butter. This is our bread and butter is helping people with grief and loss and trauma specifically.

Going back to one thing you said Sandy earlier, would you mind giving the audience an example or two? It could be out of your life or not, it's up to you. But when you said like every traumatic event I believe has grief attached to it, I think that's what you said. Would you mind giving us some practical examples so that like kind of people know what you're talking about?

Yeah, absolutely. I again, kind of if you look at like my experience, right? So sexual abuse is traumatic. It's also a loss of boundaries and personhood.

It's also a loss of love, and need, and connection, and protection. So grieving what was lost actually helps me to heal from the event. Or I've had somebody let's say that was in the hospital room with a parent and the parent dying in front of them in a very kind of scary way, right? Like I think the person is exexeciated, and so they were like that is so traumatizing.

And I get that. Yeah, that's a really shocking thing to have happened in front of you. There's also losses with that, right? There's loss of of expectation.

So I, I, I hoped that, you know, my parent was going to live longer. I hoped that even if they were going to die, it was going to be in this really peaceful way. So now there's that loss of expectation. There's that loss of safety.

Often there's a loss of power for this person. It was like, I couldn't do anything to help them in that moment. So there was this loss of power. And so when you start to define it that way, now it's like, Oh, I have this framework.

And now I can identify where, where's the grief? Where's the end result? Reef. What, what is my heart saying?

And I've seen that across the board. I mean, I know Cole, you and I hear a lot of really intense stories. I mean, I hear stories like mine and I hear stories that are like, oh my goodness, religious abuses. Terrible things, ways that people die.

And sometimes those events are seen as this is just this traumatic event. And I think the challenge sometimes with it just being a traumatic event, it's like trauma. And the narrative of trauma is like, okay, you've been traumatized. There's your label.

Yeah. And, and I'm not saying those things aren't traumatic. But now you just put a label on somebody and that label says that's a label you'll carry forever. And I love that what we get to do is go, but what was lost there?

Where's the losses? Because you can, you can find those losses. And now there's something to grieve and thereby move through the pain of that experience. Wondervilly said.

And I totally agree. Another way to look at this is whether you are a witness to it or not. Let's say that someone in your family was murdered. Okay.

Let's say that you were across the country and you just heard about this. The cause of the death has tremendous amount of energy for you as a griever. Of course. Now, let's say that you were actually in the same parking lot when your loved one was murdered.

Right. That is a very traumatic event for you to witness. Okay. But let's say that that was your husband of, you know, 25 years and you dated 10 years before.

So you've been with this person for 35 years. A lot of the time what the focus will be about is the cause of the death or the traumatic part of how the relationship ended. And that can again, is there work to be done there? Absolutely.

You know, and are there, are there people that are more qualified than me to help you with that? Absolutely. But what happens is is what I see right now because trauma that term is very popular. Is that people want to focus just on the traumatic part of the event.

And we're missing the 35 years of of relationship that you had with your husband. There's a bunch of unfinished emotional work to be done out of that complete 35 years. And yes, there's, you know, if you're to graph it, there's probably your longest intensity line is the way that that relationship ended the murder of your husband or whatever. But there, but most people won't help you go look and help you get emotionally complete with the totality of everything in that relationship.

Another pitfall that I'll see is if you had a loss that was traumatic that was in the public eye. A lot of people will get a lot of attention by being interviewed over and over by all the cable news stations. And what does that producer on that cable news channel want? They want that emotional painful reaction from you time after time after time when you retell that story.

Okay. On some level that is serving us, right, we're getting attention. We're getting hugs. We're getting people like I can't believe what you've been through.

And that can be a real pitfall for us because then again, someone comes along with the term recovery. And on some level subconsciously, you're like recovery is not going to really serve me like what I'm getting right here. Now I'm giving you an extreme example and we've worked with people who've been in the public eye and we have just seen sometimes that can be a roadblock in them actually. Doing the work that I or Sandy did, which is recovering and not being that have that be our entire identity sometimes grief and trauma and loss can become your identity.

It can make you famous. It can it can, you know, add to your financial wealth. It can do some crazy stuff. And again, I'm giving you some extreme examples there.

But to take it back to most of us, if we go to a traditional grief support group and maybe we've been there for four or five months, everyone's familiar with our story. Well, maybe next time we tell that story, we have to really go back as deep as we can to that pain because that's when we get the hugs again and the love and the attention that that maybe we deeply want. So there are pitfalls that we all go through all the time by focusing on the pain and the sadness over and over and over and not start looking for other tools. So just another thing I wanted to add to this conversation Sandy, because I feel like we're kind of going to some of these places, right, where.

At times these things can be absolutely our medicine, it can be our armor, it can be the only way that we can get through the next day. Okay, so we're not trying to say look, Sandy had a bunch of survival tools that she had to have to grow up in the environment she did. And we want we wanted Sandy to have those tools and she developed those tools for a reason to protect Sandy. But then at some point Sandy rounded the corner and said, that's not how I want to carry on with my life.

That's not how I want my my relationships to be now. Those aren't the people that I want to attract to me or allow into my life. I am changing course now and. Sandy, we're at an hour four and I want to thank you and I'm going to kind of let you close this out, but.

Sandy's backstory her life is an extreme example, but I want everyone listening to this podcast that this stuff pertains to all of us because grief victimizes us when we have that grief. And then at a certain point that is different for all of us, but really it's really mostly about when you're deciding to to. Move from victim to empowering yourself to to pivot. It's going to be different for everybody, but what we don't want is it to be years and years and years or for a lot of people unfortunately their whole life.

Yeah, you know, so that's why we have these uncomfortable talks and I think at times I, you know, I worry, oh my god, is this going to sound insensitive. Does this sound call us because you're not going to get this from a lot of grief experts out there, a lot of grief experts are going to just always be we're going to be the we're going to pat you on the back and we're yeah this is your new normal and. Hey look, I'm going to tell you about my identity as a griever to and this is kind of the way it's going to be for us like you can you can find a lot of very large organizations where they find you find a lot of camaraderie there you find a lot of unity there. So you're not going to find a lot of people talking like we're talking right now, which is like yeah yeah we've been there too, but you don't have to be there forever and and sand and I can have unity in being.

Finding recovery we can find unity and yeah we've both been through some really traumatic stuff and we can both smile and live life to the fullest right now in spite of these other things and that's what we want for people so that's why sometimes we we go into these kind of waters that you're not going to hear from other people. So anyway sandy you are you are again just a dear friend of mine I have the most respect for you just so you know anyone listening sandy and I are doing we're only doing another one of these for the rest of the year we're going to do a certification training where sandy and I are co facilitating it so you're going to get two trainers for. For the entire weekend and we've done one of these before and I think it went so so well that we're doing another one again there's only one this year and so those dates are September 20th through the 23rd in West Lake Village California that's a little bit north of Los Angeles so if you want more information on that please set up a call with us and we'll tell you more about that if you're considering certification and you want an in person experience and one of the most important things that you can do is to get a certification training.

So I think that's really important and that really is special because there's there's two of us doing them look into that but sandy let me turn it over to you and anything you want to close with and also make sure you mention where people can find you if they want to get in touch with you or work with you all that good stuff. Yeah absolutely and I'm really excited about our training together because we had such a great time last time colonizing absolutely awesome. There was a couple couple thing quick things that I do want to say just as people are listening one of the things that colonize are saying is really and truly the only way out is in so we're not here saying don't look at things just go live life to the full we're saying I like to use the language you face embrace and release the pain so you're not you're not just looking at it you're not just embracing it but you walk through the steps you face it.

You embrace it like yes this happened this was really hard and then you release it and that's the path to living life to the full we bring this other language in because nobody else talks about this nobody else talk about a body else talks about that there's actually a path to where you can live where the lights can come back on. And so I just really wanted to communicate that because from my heart to yours whatever your story whatever's affected you I want you to hear that it truly matters it matters what happened matters don't go with the narratives and that are out there that it's like you