Ever wondered, “How can I heal from trauma for good?” Join the conversation with Christian Counselor, Brenda Cochran; as we discuss a whole person approach to healing through trauma. Brenda, shares a new perspective on referring to “healing trauma” and instead refers to it as “healing the nervous system”. We discuss what is “Somatoemotional”, keys to healing, discerning between spiritual abuse vs. church hurt, and so much more. You do not want to miss this episode on how to heal from trauma. If you are seeking professional counseling help with an integrative approach including spiritual help, reach out to Brenda Cochran, at Zoe Integrated Health at https://www.zoeintegratedhealth.com/ or call or text at 623-235-4645; to learn more about how Brenda can help you. For more information on how to work with Dr. Ana, please click here.
Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole-person approach to your well-being, spirit, soul, and body. Join me your host, Dr. Ana Lara, a naturopathic, doctor, entrepreneur, and a servant of Jesus Christ. We are not just a body. We are spirit and soul. It’s time to integrate medicine and spirituality into our healing. Let’s get started.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. This is Dr. Alara, and today’s episode is episode nine. We’re going to talk about a whole-person approach to healing through trauma. And today I have a very, very special guest, Christian counselor Brenda Cochran. And before we bring her on, I want to go over her bio. Brenda has over 22 years of experience working with issues related to Christian women from a whole-person approach. She specializes in all areas of trauma abuse, including spiritual abuse and betrayal trauma. Her work initially started with facilitating women’s sexual abuse healing groups at her church in the early 2000s. Her approach evolved as mental health challenges changed over the years. Now she understands that healing trauma and abuse is integrative. She provides a whole-person therapeutic approach, engaging and transforming the whole person. She takes into account spiritual, emotional, physical, and social factors in treatment.
Nutrition and physical health are a critical part of the healing process. Prayers and specifically healing prayer is a vital component. She works in the present, the future, and as the Holy Spirit leads addresses the past when the client is fully connected to the Holy Spirit and feels safe, she is trauma-sensitive and is a healing survivor of complex trauma herself. She deeply understands the dynamic that comes with a decision to heal and how critical it is to incorporate the Holy Spirit into the healing journey. She also understands the potential for harm and re-traumatization. If the client is not able to understand she somatically feel safe in her body. She listens and prays, and both she and her client decide together what the most appropriate path is for healing. She does not practice one particular modality as she is spirit-led client-centered therapist. She is a board-certified professional Christian counselor through the American Association of Christian Counselors. Her EMDR training is Christian-based. She has completed the Internal Family System circle and a certified clinical trauma specialist. Lastly, she has taken numerous postgraduate courses and training through the Arizona Trauma Institute and N-I-C-A-B-M folks help me welcome Ms. Brenda Cochran.
Hi. Thank Brenda so much for having me. Thank you for having me.
I’m so excited to have you. I’ve known you before for a bit, right? But when I read your bio, I’m like, this is why I love the way you work. You truly are a professional that looks at the whole person, and I think that’s one of the things if you agree that we have in common, that we look at the whole person. So Brenda, thank you for joining us. I want you to share with our audience a little bit about yourself and what led you to get started in becoming a counselor. What’s your why?
Oh boy, my why? I’ll just jump right in and be completely open, vulnerable and transparent. And I knew as a very young child that I wanted to make a difference. It was something I think that God planted in me very, very early as a lifeline because I grew up in a very traumatic household, so I was exposed to trauma at a very young age, and God was with me way back then and he just planted in me a desire to help others. And I didn’t really know at a young age what that was. And I had a relative tell me, well, what you’re talking about is social work. And I’m like, social work. I’ve never even heard of that. And I ended up majoring in social work in the early eighties. I’m going to date myself at a school in Minnesota. And then I got pregnant, married, and a lot of my education was put on back burner.
I had a strong value of being a stay-at-home mom and really raising my kids and putting a big life insurance policy into their lives and moved to Arizona in 1990. My entire desire to contribute and help got disrupted because the Lord just pretty much said, it’s time to stop and slow down and start your healing process. And I had no clue what that was other than I knew I needed help. And if I could make a difference in other people’s lives, I had to get well myself. And so I started my own healing journey in 1990, and we can probably talk about that a little bit later if you’d like, but went through my own journey, and returned to the Lord in 1990. I was raised in a Christian home, but kind of fell away in high school and returned to him in 1990 and just reconnected with the Holy Spirit, had some incredibly powerful supernatural experiences with him, and just immersed myself in healing, healing my mind and just everything that comes with that.
And after I’d gotten so far, I decided to go back to school and get my graduate degree because my kids were getting older and got a job in a psychiatric hospital. And to kind of circle back to your question, getting off more on my bio, one of the reasons that got me into this whole person healing was I was heavily involved in healing prayer, inner healing and deliverance from about 1990 to about 1998. And I just saw a lot of things in there as well that I really needed for my own healing. But I also saw some things happen with people that didn’t make sense to me, meaning we would pray and pray and pray for people and including myself. And there were just areas of my life that I couldn’t change. So that was kind of prompted me to go back and get more school, go to the other side and learn more of the brain science. And it led me into a profession in the early 2020s of this has been a rollercoaster ride, it’s been a fire hose, and I’ve loved every minute of it. I think I’ll stop there and you can throw another question at me.
That’s amazing. Thank you for sharing that. The reason it’s really important for me when I interview someone to share a little bit about themselves is because I want the audience to see the real human aspect in you. You’re not just a title, you’re not just a counselor. You’re a person behind that. That’s just a role that you play in your life, but you’re a real person that’s had experiences. And I love that you said that you realize that you had to go through that healing journey yourself, right? That’s the whole intention of this podcast physician heal thyself. We need to take the initiative of healing ourselves first in any profession before we start to work with other people. It’ll start to reveal things in us. So that’s amazing. I have some questions, but you touched on a little bit about you wanted to learn the brain science.
So recently, maybe in the past couple of weeks, I heard, I’m not going to say names with a very well-known pastor say that some of these mental health issues that they’re not a brain problem. It’s a mind problem. And I have a problem with that because we know the science, we know what stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline over a long period of time, especially someone as a child who experiences constant trauma every day, they’re walking into unhealthy environments, what those chemicals, those stress hormones can do to the brain. Can you speak a little bit about that from the counselor’s perspective
As far as the cortisol levels and just trauma sitting in the body?
Yes.
Yeah. So I learned on my own self. I learned that my own cortisol levels were flatlined, and I learned that all this healing that I had, I wasn’t paying attention to what was happening inside of my body, and my body was crashing, and I was really cut off, meaning I was renewing my mind. I was changing my beliefs. I was changing how I thought about myself and my past and who I am in Christ and all these rational processes. But I was really cut off at my neck, meaning I was so disconnected to what was going on inside of my body, and I ended up having physical health problems. Even though I had had a lot of healing in my life, I still didn’t understand the connection between renewing my mind and the physical disruption that was still sitting inside of my body, inflammation. They were trying to diagnose me with lupus, chronic fatigue, all these things.
And I ended up going to a naturopath and she did all these labs and she said, this is going on, this is going on, this is going on. And at the same time, I was working on my own health. The trauma research was starting to come out 20 years ago that oh my gosh, a lot of trauma sits in the body, and we can do all kinds of brain surgery or mind surgery like you were saying, but if we don’t start in the body and start healing the body and looking at the central nervous system and inflammation in the fight and flight system, the body won’t completely heal. You’ll be in contradiction with yourself until you can get that in line. You know what I mean? Yeah,
Absolutely. That’s what I see in the clinic is that you have to address all these areas. And being a clinician, one of the things that I continuously hear from patients is they’re not used to listening to their body or feeling there’s such a disconnect there. And I mean, I don’t know if it’s cultural, if it’s just something that society keeps passing on from one generation to the next, but numerous men and women will always say how they were not aware of what was going on in their body. So in their head, and they’re going, going, going, and they’re ignoring this body, and the body will present symptoms, states of disease, and then to a point that people are shut down and then they’re forced to go see a doctor, unfortunately, to go see a doctor and they’re looking at a particular organ system, they’re not looking at all of you, they’re not looking at the trauma, they’re not looking at the mental health aspect. So now that person is unfortunately back to in a situation, they’re not getting better because now all of these parts of who they are is just not getting addressed. So for our audience, let’s have you define it because some people are familiar with it, there’s more conversation around this term, but since you touched on it, let’s define for the audience who may not be familiar with the term, like somatic, emotional, what is that term?
Okay, so when people work with me, that’s the very first conversation that I have with people laying that foundation. What does that mean? We use the words, feelings and emotions, and we kind of sometimes combine ’em and they get misrepresented and don’t really necessarily get defined properly. So an emotion or a feeling starts physiologically. There is a somatic, which means body. There is a physiological sensation that we have for anger, a sensation that we have for fear, and sensations that we have for happiness and sadness. And each of us is unique in those sensations, but we have sensations. Then our cognitive processing, our executive functioning says we need to name that and put a word to that. So we’ll put fear, sadness, anger, happiness and contentment to it. And so when I work with people, I just had a client recently.
She was able to talk about everything in her rational brain, but I could just, as I was watching her, she was completely disconnected to her emotional self and she was completely disconnected in her body, and she was having these extreme anger outbursts just where she would almost black out. And as I was talking to her, I noticed that she had no awareness just asking her, what do you feel right now in your body? And she went blank. And I said, what kind of emotion are you feeling? And she went blank. So that was an example of how disconnected people can be. And I guess I call it automatic pilot. We’re running on automatic pilot. Things are going 110 miles and we’re just going, going, going, going, going. The first step in healing is to start slowing things down and becoming aware of what’s going on because we’re just so checked out.
I completely agree with you. And in your introduction, you talked about you had to slow down. I had to do the same thing in my experience. The Lord got ahold of me. I decided I’m going to stay home with my baby after I had my first daughter. And it was in that slowdown that I found the healing. We know through experience, we know through science, through our studies, that is very important. We need to slow down to become more self-aware to start feeling. But then having someone like you guide that individual, it’s going to expedite that healing process versus someone who doesn’t know what to do, where to go, how to process that. So that help is really important. That’s a great description. So in your bio, you mentioned somatically feeling safe in your body. What does that look like?
What is somatically safe, what does safety feel in the body? Well, I think it’s relative, and we’re going to go back to self-awareness. I’ll use myself as an example. I am so used to being dysregulated that that was my baseline, that was my normal, that I had this undercurrent of low grade, I don’t the word anxious. There was just some low-grade electrical energy tension in my body that was always just right under the surface because I was living in a fight-or-flight way all the time. So when I started connecting to my body and getting involved in mindfulness and grounding and calming exercises and meditation, I had to learn to force my body to understand what calmness felt, this calm system where I was out of this fight or flight mode all the time. And then once I was able to get there because my body is so programmed to live in fight or flight, it’s a continual practice of feeling calm and making an intentional effort to remain there because the programming in my body is like, I just go back there so quick.
So it’s a practice. If you have diabetes, I have to constantly practice being in a state of calm because of what happened to me. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s just something that I have to practice. A diabetic has to keep track of their sugar to remain healthy. I have to keep track of what’s going on inside of my body to get to that state that I didn’t know what it was. And I think a lot of us don’t know what it is. I don’t know if you could sway for you, how did you know?
Yeah, yeah. No, I definitely agree with you that you do need to be self-aware of the state of being that you’re in or that you are constantly in, which if you’re in a fight state all the time, our bodies adapt to whatever environment or situation is. It’s very adaptable, but it can get stuck in that. So once you become aware that I am always in fight mode, why? And you start healing through that, then you know, have tools. I tell people, get tools, develop, find the tools that are going to help you to maintain that state of balance and peace. So I like that you set that electrical kind of, is that what you said? Referred electrical? Yeah. So I do a lot of cranial sacral therapy. It’s a very light touch manual therapy, which I’m going to discuss in a different episode later on.
When I first assess a body, that’s exactly what I feel in their body. I feel like electricity running through their body, and I start from their feet, work my way up to their head, and I know when a person’s calm without them telling me, and I know when their nervous system is wired up, it’s like the chords to a guitar. They just feel really wiry. And so by the end of the session, they’re calm, and a lot of them, they’ll say a couple different things. Some will say, I feel very light, this weight was lifted off of me. But oftentimes they will say, I feel tired, and I tell them, no, you’re not tired. This is what it feels like to feel peace, to feel calmness. And I’ve even had children who have certain neurological conditions, like very A DH, D, even autistic. They feel tired after the session, but it’s not tired. It’s calm, their nervous system, their mind, they don’t know what calm is. So when they are regulated, they are associated with fatigue. And so it takes time for those individuals to adapt to this, oh, this is what it’s like to feel calm because we’re constantly going and going.
So I want to get into a little bit more about how your approach is in working and healing through trauma. And I always want to give our audience a little disclosure and just be sensitive to whatever we discuss from this point on. Because I do feel that sometimes we need to look at these issues and not run away from them. We go into avoidance or minimize the issue. We don’t want to look at it, but I always say, if you have to listen to this conversation and bite-size pieces that you can handle, do it. But don’t run away from the conversations from those topics that we need to learn and address because we have to look at the darkness to be able to bring light into these situations. So I know that there are probably many different things that you do, and the approach is never the same for one person because they’re all unique. But what would you say, is there something that you find consistently that helps you when it comes to healing someone or helping someone in the process of healing through trauma?
Yeah, I’ll set up when I get a client, just kind of the process of when somebody reaches out to me and they want to heal from trauma or trauma is such a big word now, and I actually don’t like even using that word anymore because it seems like as soon as we grab onto something that everything is trauma, now we use trauma here, trauma here, trauma there, we have something wrong. So I usually kind of undo that with my clients and say, I’m not going to use the T word. I’m going to say, let’s see how your nervous system, what has happened to you throughout your life and how your nervous system has responded and how your body has adapted. So I removed the word trauma even though some people feel more comfortable because they know they’ve had a specific trauma. Then we use it of course.
But so many people have so many things that happen to them that disrupt their whole person, that we have to kind of neutralize that word so that I can talk from the bottom-up approach, meaning we’re so used to the top-down approach, like what you said in the beginning, that if we change how we think, if we do the cognitive if we change our beliefs, if we start thinking about things differently, that somehow we’re going to feel better. So I start from a bottom approach, meaning a bottom-up meaning we’re going to start with your physiological system first, and we’re going to assess that, and then we’re going to look at how you interpreted what’s happened to you physiologically, it starts in the body and then it goes into the brain or the cognitive, the executive functioning to process the narrative or what’s happened to you.
So I lay the foundation of neurology of just, I’m not a doctor or anything, but I kind of educate that we need to get to know your system, we need to get to know how you function. We get to know the severity of what happened to you. And so I use tools just whether it’s an assessment, an interview, or there’s some tools that I use for the depth of the trauma, meaning when we look at it through a body-based approach, we adapt. The minute a stimulus comes in from our environment that our nervous system can’t handle, the body immediately starts adapting. I mean, God made our body so fearfully and wonderfully made that he created a way for us to adapt. And so some of the more severe types of adaptation is a full disassociation and complete compartmentalization of an event that is resting and quarantined in the body.
Then there’s other adaptations that occur over the lifespan that could be a variety of things. So I’m jumping in there and I’m looking, how did this person adapt to what happened to them? And we look at those adaptations as strengths, not weaknesses. So I do a lot of deep programming in the very beginning because people come in with shame, they feel defective. They feel that there’s something wrong with them. So I start laying this foundation is, no, this is how God made you. He gave you these things physiologically to survive. Now you’re an adult and what’s happened is your past is still coming through to your present. So we need to integrate and resolve and heal those compartmentalized memories so they can be integrated into the present so that you’re not constantly activating in the present from the past. So I lay that whole foundation down first, and then if they need like EMDR or a more shortened intensive flash technique, or if they want to just process the narrative more because there are five pieces to a memory and they can get disorganized when it’s traumatic, when we talk about a beautiful memory, something that’s happened to us that’s beautiful like our wedding or our birth of our child or a vacation, that was just amazing.
Those memories when we call them are all nice and neatly organized, and they come out nice and neat and we can remember five, there’s five pieces of the memory. It’s feelings, thoughts, behaviors, sensations and beliefs. So the memory is stored in five different ways, but a disorganized memory from our childhood is disorganized. It’s separate. So somebody might be able to do more of the narrative processing first. I had a client that after a session, we activated some material from her past, and three or four days later, she could feel tension building physiologically. But because she understood the importance of the body, she actually let out just the emotion. There wasn’t a picture, there wasn’t a belief, there wasn’t anything cognitive. She just let the emotion out and she experienced healing from her past. So I do a lot of explaining about how body-based bottom-up approach works and how the process is unique to each person. Wow, amazing. I’ll leave it at that. That was a big dump. A big dump right there.
Yeah, that’s Amazing. That’s amazing information. And you’re absolutely right. You do have to start with the body-based approach. When I assess patients, I have to look at the physiology, what’s out of balance, because say for example, if you have low thyroid, yeah, you’re going to feel depressed and low energy and a lot of cognitive issues, and you’re not going to be able to see clearly the bigger problems that are buried there. You have to address those things and then start to really go from there. Wow. Yeah, no, this is great information. I like the explanation of the five. You said the five different ways that we store memory.
Yeah.
Wow.
There are five different, I should have had it pulled up on my phone, but I use a picture of a hand and I actually copied it and stole it from the internet. But there are just five different portions of a memory and a disorganized memory will get stored in different, it can be fragmented and disorganized in the brain. So when you start reprocessing and assimilating or integrating these memories, they can be just one little piece of that five-pronged memory, like a sensation. It can be just a sensation. So when we talk about somatic, you’ll oftentimes hear people, as you probably hear, I feel this big black thing in my gut. I feel this constant something here. And so when we talk about somatic, we ask them to go towards it and give it permission to come forward. We’re taking our brain and we’re commanding our body to release and give it permission to come forward. What color is it? What does it feel like? If you could draw it, what is it saying to you? And you would be amazed at what people articulate, how clear they can articulate these places of tension in their bodies. And then just allowing that mind-body connection of you need to release and give yourself permission to release what’s being contained in your gut.
I totally agree with you. I’ve had a lot of people who have symptoms either in the gut or cardiac or in their throat, and it’s emotional. It’s always emotional stuff. And so when we process that and give them permission, that’s big. That’s really important for people. It’s like they need someone from the outside to give them permission. And ultimately, I get to a place where I say, this is your body and you are in the driver’s seat of it. Allow yourself to have permission to express and to be who you are. I mean, obviously within reason, if you’re going to be a jerk with people, don’t be that. But what you’re feeling, allow that honor yourself. Be patient and give yourself grace. Give yourself permission to heal that little child within you. I always like to address the little girl in you or the little boy in you.
What does that little boy or the little girl need inside of you for healing? Let’s start giving that person permission, because oftentimes this healing that they need, it’s because of what happened in their childhood. There are some situations that it’s a situational event. As an adult, it happened, but oftentimes I see that it is the stuff that happened in childhood. And so when we’re children, we don’t have full autonomy and authority over things. And so it’s a very vulnerable time in our life. But now that you’re 30 and 40 and 50, people need to be reminded that you have the authority to take ownership of what your nervous system is doing and start healing through this. What would you say is one of the greatest setbacks when it comes to people healing their nervous system? Now? I like that. I like that you’re healing the nervous system and not saying trauma, because you’re absolutely right. Some people, they’ll take on the label and they identify it as my PTSD, my depression, my anxiety. I am not a fan of that because now you’re making it part of who you are, and that’s not who you are. So what would you say is one of the greatest setbacks that people have when they’re processing and healing their nervous system?
Setbacks as far as, are you talking about their progress in healing or just understanding maybe
Challenging, what needs?
Yeah, maybe things where people get stuck in their healing process.
Well, the first thing that popped in my head is I think that I’ll talk about the American culture of the medical model. And I touched on it earlier about reprogramming or kind of deprogramming some of these entrenched ideas that we have. So we have this medical model that is very disease-based. Now, I’m not an anti-medical model, but there’s another way to start looking at the human body that we can work in tandem with a disease-based model. But also, one thing I learned from the Arizona Trauma Institute that I absolutely loved, and I grabbed onto it as soon as I heard about it, is this, it’s called the salutogenic approach, meaning that we all have the capacity, the innate capacity to heal within ourselves. It’s a strengths-based perspective that we can take ownership of, and we can take responsibility. Instead of going to a doctor and saying, please give me a pill, go to the doctor, please give me a pill.
Tell me what’s wrong with me. It’s on the other side of the spectrum that says, no, everything in you that is required to heal. And when we bring in the Christian belief system, you and I know that we have the capacity to heal that power, that supernatural power was given to us. So I think it’s changing these entrenched beliefs inside of the person to get them to start bringing in some really contradictory information that they have the power or the resources or the capacity inside of themselves to be healed instead of an external force coming in, that we can do it ourselves, and we don’t need to have A, B, C, D, E to be able to do that. Do you know what I mean? We all can heal, even if we’re limited on our resources. There are so many resources out there that we don’t even need to see a therapist. We really don’t. If you’ve got internet and a phone, there’s this great opportunities out there to tap into some of this stuff. So I’m just going to land on just reorganizing what some of your entrenched beliefs are. I have to really work on that first to get them to be motivated to see that they have the capacity to heal.
Great answer. Yeah. I would say that as a naturopath, part of our philosophy is I tell my patients, I don’t want you to come see me every month for the rest of your life. That’s not the way nature paths work. We want you to know that you have that innate ability to heal through a higher power through the things that God has created in this world for us to use. So it’s really, I tell all the time, patients, I want you on the driver’s seat of your healthcare. Not me. I’m just the GPS. I am just guiding you through this process, but you’re the one doing the healing. When a person does overcome, whether it’s cancer or autoimmune conditions or diabetes or whatever their issues are, it’s because of their efforts, not because of mine. Because at the end of the day, they have to go home and implement everything that I’ve guided them to do.
They have to change their diet. They have to start moving their body, start sleeping. Well manage their stress, give them tools on how to do that, how to keep their nervous system well balanced, and then the other things that each individual might have to do, but they’re the ones who have to go home and do the work. I’m not doing it for them. I’m not cooking for them. I’m not getting them to do the exercises and do the other things. It’s their work. So it’s really empowering the person to know that they have that ability and the authority to take ownership of their health. I just had this conversation with my 14-year-old daughter this week. She was asking me some questions. She said, what happens if someone dies in their home? Who takes care of what? And so I started to explain, well, some people might call 9 1 1.
I said, but really, you can just call the mortuary and they’ll come and get the person. And I started to think we give too much authority to someone else when it comes to the birth of a child. People are afraid to birth at home. That was a natural process before. I mean, granted, there are some situations that need medical attention, but also when it comes to dying, we leave that in someone else’s hands. And these are two vulnerable situations in our lives that we will all go through being born and dying. And even in these two events, we give the authority to someone else to tell us what to do. And throughout our life, we do the same thing. And that has to change because the more authority people have to do these things for themselves and to heal, the less likely it is for abusive behavior to happen things that go wrong. I want to touch a little bit also on what is your experience with church hurt or spiritual abuse. I know you’ve talked about it before. I’ve heard you talk about it before, but it’s something that I hear a lot right now. And how is that something that you address for people? Is it a thing? Is it a big problem in your world?
Well, I think we have to kind of define what church hurt is, and spiritual abuse is because we can all get church and hurt. I worked in a church for 19 years. I got to see everything. I got to see the inside. I got to see the ugly. I got to see some of the most complicated, complex, ethical issues navigating in the church. And people are human leaders and pastors are human beings, and they make mistakes. And I think that when somebody comes to me for church hurt, I really have to evaluate their entire life because church hurt is real. And oftentimes it’s that person’s perception of God and their faith and how they read the word of God and their expectations of leaders, of church leaders. Now on the flip side, there’s a lot of church leaders that are being exposed for things that they’ve done in leadership that have been very hurtful.
I follow a couple of news, Christian news organizations that are pretty open about some of this. So there’s two sides to it. There’s things that are really happening, power and abuse, and then there’s people that are grabbing onto church hurt and saying, hurt me because something didn’t happen exactly how they needed it to happen. I’ve been on both sides. I was abused inside of a church, sexually abused as a high schooler by a pastor, but I’ve also been a pastor, and I’ve also been on that side, and I’ve done some really dumb things. So I think one of the things I work on is advocating for accountability in the church, one of the things that we see is church leaders not being accountable to something higher, especially more in the non-denominational, meaning that if somebody in leadership does something wrong, somehow it just gets swept under the rug.
That’s one side of it. But then the other side is I have to walk people through understanding humanity and humanness and injustices. I think injustices in the church is something that no matter what’s happened to you, we have to be willing to reconcile an injustice that we have no power and control over when we see it. So there’s kind of two ideas there. And again, everybody’s different in how they interpret what’s happening to them, but abuse and church spiritual abuse is very real. And because I work with women, I work with a lot of women that have been disenfranchised because they’ve left marriages. The list goes on.
Yeah, no, that’s a great way to define both church hurt and spiritual abuse. Thank you for that. A couple questions before we wrap up. What sets you apart from other licensed counselors?
Oh, boy. I’m going to say that because I’ve done the work, I’m pretty, I’m am able to really key in and discern what’s going on pretty quickly. Also, I pray for discernment. I want people to get healed fast. I don’t want to waste their time. I don’t want them to waste their money. So I’m looking for wisdom in discernment and to be able to key in on what they can handle coming from me and getting them into a place where they can depend on their own resources, their own connection to the Holy Spirit, to move on and do what God’s called them to do.
Amen to that.
So I Would say, yeah,
I love that. I feel like you and I and many other people, we are here to not break the shackles because Jesus did that on the cross, but to remind people like, Hey, they’re loose. You can take them off. You can free yourself from that and remind them and then just really help people. They’re doing the connection to Holy Spirit. They’re reconnecting their relationship with God, and that’s where true healing comes into play. We don’t want to waste their time. Money’s an investment into their well-being, but if they’re not going to make that connection, they’re never going to really heal. How can people reach you if they hear this and they really connect with you and they’re like, Hey, I want to work with Brenda. How can they reach and connect with you? I know I get this a lot. A lot of people ask me, do you know a Christian counselor? I’m like, I know of one. And she’s good. So how can they connect with you?
Yeah, well, they can email me or text me. My email is brenda@zoeintegratedhealth.com. That’s Z-O-E-I-N-T-E-G-R-A-T-E d.com or health.com. Or they can text me or call me at six two three two three five four six four five two three five four six four five with a 6, 2 3. And I like to connect with people very directly.
So good. I like that too. So we’re going to provide that contact information in our link so that if people want to reach out to you, they can start that process. Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this episode. Thank you, Brenda. Brenda, for this amazing conversation we had. I’m sure we can go hours talking about this. This is going to be part one of a two-part series. So folks you want to stay connected with and rest, we’re going to wrap up our conversation for now, and we’re going to go into our segment of the good, the bad, the ugly, about our sick care medical system.
So today I want to talk about how people’s concerns are not taken seriously when it comes to mental health issues or even trauma when it comes to medical doctors or even in the church system. Like I said, I think that if we do not acknowledge the trauma in a person’s life, they’re never going to heal. We’re just going to give a medication, a pill, and even a natural substance. And this natural substance might help to a degree, but it’s not going to fully heal that trauma. So I do believe that counseling is an essential part to the healing process. So I hope you all enjoy this conversation and that it brings some light to your healing process of healing your nervous system. If you have any questions, we’ll put the links to contact Brenda so that if you want to work with her, and stay tuned for our next episode because it’s going to be even more amazing, and it’s going to be with Brenda again. So as always, have an amazing day and stay blessed. Thank you for listening to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please like, share and subscribe, help this message, reach more people who may need to hear it. Leave your comments. I want to know what you think. If you’re interested in learning more about Raices, visit our website. Until next time, be blessed.