Podcast Episode 25 Transcript

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, nature pathic, 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. Welcome to Physician Heal Self, the podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Alara. Today I have a guest who’s going to be joining me and we’re going to be talking about the importance of nutrition in healing, trauma and addiction. Christina Lombardo is a certified holistic nutritionist and evox practitioner. She’s been a nutritionist since 2018 and specializes in trauma and substance use recovery. So help me welcome Christina. Hi, Christina. 

Hello.

How are you? 

Good. 

Thank you for joining me on this podcast. When I first met you and I asked you what did you do, I was really blown away by the unique approach that you have with nutrition. So why don’t you share a little bit with our audience, how do you integrate nutrition into the work that you do? But before you do that, tell us a little bit about yourself and what led you to become a nutritionist.

Yeah, so my journey, I’m sure like so many others, is long and condensing it down can be a little bit difficult, but I really was introduced to the idea that food shifted not just our body but our mental state. When I was 12 years old, I had insomnia and so I used to stay up really late and watch infomercials there was a woman, Susan Powders, and I call her the Stop the Insanity lady because she would always be yelling on stage about how we need to stop the insanity. And she walked through food labels like I had never seen anybody do before, and she was like, these things are not healthy. Here’s how you read a food label. And the thing that really blew me away was everything that she was showing as an example of what was not healthy was everything in my fridge.

And I realized at 12 I have zero control over what’s purchased and brought into my house. But at that point, I decided I was going to stop eating meat. She was not an advocate of that. I just decided I’m going to stop eating meat. And began this journey of digging into natural practices, holistic practices, homeopathy, what I can do to fix and heal myself, really using myself as a Guinea pig. And then, when I got into my twenties and into my thirties, my body began to fail completely. Cholesterol was super high. Blood pressure would go really high, really low. I was having anxiety, panic attacks, and struggling with depression. I had actually been on suicide watch twice. The doctors were really not offering anything to help. And so I began researching like mad; what is going on with me? I ended up seeing a naturopath and of course, that was my last resort.

I was like, I’ve tried everything. So, I see the natural path as my last resort. And within six weeks, my hormones began to balance out. My cholesterol dropped from two 20 to 1 65, and I began this journey of healing and I’m like, there really is something more to this. So I know that we will get more into the nitty gritty of certain things, but really seeing that nutrition can take you so far, supplements can take you so far, but if your nervous system is not balanced, and it was eventually diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and complex post-traumatic stress and nothing was working anymore. The nutrition, the supplements, nothing. So I had to delve into nervous system health just for myself. And then really began to, I’m like, I have done enough research in enough studying, I should really get some certifications in this. So I went back to school, became certified and decided the easy thing to do is help people lose weight. But I was very unsatisfied with that. And so after a few years of doing that, I closed that business down, took a year hiatus, and went and worked for somebody else and then came back to the drawing board and was like, I genuinely feel called to work in trauma and substance use. I know what it’s like to struggle and suffer and have no answers. And to look up on Google and they’re like, you can take medications. And I am not. I actually tried medications, and I was allergic to everything,

So, everything gave me migraines or serious side effects. So I was like, okay, that’s not an option for me. So, finding supplements, finding and discovering nervous system health practices and really working on healing the body from the inside out and then using that to help others. And then I was like, you know what? I should do this for work, not just me. There are definitely more people who need this.

Yeah, it’s unfortunate that it’s more often than not that I hear people say, my last option, my endpoint, was seeing a naturopathic doctor where I truly believe, I mean, I’m going to be a little biased now because of what I know, but that should be the starting point. If you have a chronic disease, if you’re having difficulty with mental health, whatever it is, working with a naturopathic doctor to begin even preventative-wise before you end up with issues is really the way to start. And I really try to be cautious, Christina, about not bashing the conventional medical system because there’s a time and place for that. However, I personally don’t want to be an experiment or go by trials to see when I can find the right doctor to help me. I’d rather go straight to the right doctor to help me. I personally went through 10 different doctors before I got to the naturopathic doctor who helped me 10 doctors. And my understanding was this person was not hearing me. They’re not giving me the solutions that I need to get to, so I’m going to fire them and I’m going to move on to the next doctor that is going to help me. It shouldn’t take a person that many times to find help. These are intelligent people who should understand how the body works. But the key thing that I continuously see that is lacking in the brains of these doctors is the understanding of the importance of what food does in our body for all people of all conditions, healthy or not. 

I work with cancer patients; I might have shared this with you, and sometimes they’ll tell me on their own. They’ll tell me, I asked my doctor, what should I eat? What should I not eat? And they say, oh, you kidding, anything. And I know your brain is like firecrackers are going off. I feel the same way. I’m like, you have cancer. There’s tons of inflammation in your body. There’s a reaction that’s happening. And so what I love about what you do is that you’re looking at this demographic of individuals that are oftentimes the professionals they come across, they’re neglecting this area that’s important, which is the nutrition part. Whether the trauma is physical trauma to the brain, whether it’s psychological trauma that they’ve had, whether it’s substance abuse, trauma that they have, that the nervous system needs to heal and recover, and what we eat makes a difference. Huge difference. I’ve had previous episodes where I talk about the foundations of health and the importance of nutrition as one of the pillars. One of the main pillars that food as we understand it is it’s the building blocks to everything of who we are physically.

But what I like that you pointed out is that there is sometimes a point that you realize as a practitioner and even as an individual that we realize healthy eating, exercising, the herbs, all of these supplements have taken me this far, and there’s still like a roadblock. There’s still something else that is going on, and that’s when we have to look at trauma. We have to unpack that and heal through that to help the nervous system to restore itself. So when you work with, I want to talk about, let’s discuss a little bit about how important food is, how food impacts the brain and the nervous system function. So let’s talk a little bit about that. What’s your take on that?

Yeah, so food is one of the main ways that we cause inflammation in our bodies. And there are several foods that cause inflammatory reactions. So dairy, for example, can be one of ’em. If you have problems with dairy, then you should probably not consume it. A lot of people don’t realize that they have an allergy to dairy until they remove it from their diet.

So, I genuinely didn’t know I had a dairy allergy until I went and saw a practitioner. She did some scans on me, and she said, did you know you’re just as allergic to dairy, even more so allergic to dairy than you are to wheat? I was like, I really, so I thought, let me just cut it out of my diet for a month and see how I feel. And, of course, over a month, I didn’t really notice too much. And then I thought, okay, I’m going to have a dairy fest, and I’m going to have one day where I consume dairy with every single meal, and then I’ll see how I feel I could barely move the next day.

A lot of people don’t realize they have that sensitivity to dairy and other foods. It’s very common when I tell my patients I want you to remove these top five foods from your diet. They’re like, oh, but I don’t have a problem with dairy. No, you don’t. You don’t know you have a problem with dairy. You might not have digestive symptoms that you notice, but when you remove something from the body, the body has detoxed itself from that substance just like a drug. And then you haven’t had exposure, say, for a month to that food. Then, when we’ve introduced the food, boom, if you have a problem with it, it’s going to show up.

Oh my gosh. Yeah.

I know what ways it shows up. How do you tell your patients these are the ways that it can show up as a sensitivity?

Yes. So I actually had one client contact me, and they said, I’m having symptoms of acid reflux. I’m not quite sure what I’m eating, but I mean, it’s really awful, acid reflux and heartburn. And I said, well, go back to keep a food diary. Go back to the last meal that you ate, break it down by ingredients, and then consume those ingredients individually until you find whatever’s giving you heartburn, which they did. And it ended up being cumin. They said, so what do I do? Do I go buy an acid? And I said, well, no, your body is telling you something. Your body doesn’t like it.

Don’t eat it.

Don’t eat it.

Just don’t eat it. Don’t eat it. That is very difficult, and I know that food is such an emotional conversation with almost all people.

I’m good at telling people what not to eat. Well, and then coming up with suggestions of what to eat.

Everyone is so individualized, and I can tell people, here’s a great meal plan: eat this. But they’re like, I don’t like this, I don’t like that. I don’t like this. And so now that’s where it needs to be customized, and working with someone like you would be a much better option.

Yes. Well, and I ask my clients as well, do you prefer recipes or do you prefer foods to focus on? So, I would say around 50 or 60 curated recipes that I’ve created that have removed a ton of inflammatory foods, or at the bottom of the recipe, it says, here’s all the swaps that you can make so they can customize it to what they like. So I have different recipes that I can cut and paste and send to my clients that are very specific for dietary needs, or if they say, I just want foods to focus on, I don’t really want to, I’m not going to follow recipes, and the recipe is not going to help me. If I’m going out to eat, I don’t know what to order. So I have lists, okay, well if you don’t want to eat this, then eat all these foods, try these foods. Telling my clients as well that allergies and sensitivities show up in different ways. It can be a skin issue, it can be logical.

Yeah, it can be a rash. It can be I ate this, and all of a sudden, I’m confused and I have brain fog. A lot of times, it’s sinus issues or minor sore throats or a little bit of stomach pain and indigestion and learning to listen to our body and slow down enough to notice what it’s doing when we’re eating is huge.

And that’s key. What you said is learning how to slow down. I mean, this is a conversation I have with every new client and even people that I continue to see slow down, slow down, and especially when it comes time to eat, our digestive system is really dependent on our nervous system being calm to eat, to digest properly, because otherwise your body, if you’re under a lot of stress and you’re eating it, thinks it’s fighting a bear. We know that the blood gets shunted to all the extremities because it thinks it needs to go fight or run instead of the blood flow going into the digestive system to start the digestive process. People don’t get that. This is why they get upset. Stomachs when they have an argument with someone and they go eat something, it’s counterproductive. I know my mom in my house would say, don’t get mad when you’re eating because it’s going to be bad for you.

I like that.

In many cultures, they knew that. They didn’t understand the science behind why, but they knew that you don’t eat when you’re angry or upset because it’s going to upset your stomach.

Yeah, I heard somewhere somebody said that being stuck in a fight or flight and trying to eat is trying to eat a sandwich while running from a bear, and I don’t remember who I got that from. But you can’t do brilliant both at the same time. Even if you just go running, you can’t eat and run at the same time. 

No, it’s very messy.

So, if you guys are sitting in your car in traffic eating, just think about what that’s doing to you. Might as well not eat. You might as well just pull over and then eat.

Well, and there are, so I’ve had some clients that are single parents that is a different animal altogether.

Finding time to rest and slow down is extremely hard. And so getting into the swing of things where there’s meal prep happening and I’ll walk with people and say, Hey, the first time that you do it, the first time I did it took me eight and a half hours to meal prep, and then I got to the point where it took me two and a half, but I had five lunches, five dinners. If I needed to make more, if there were more people in my house that I was prepping for, then I could do that and it would take two and a half hours. Then you have healthy meals for you, for your children, but it’s a rhythm and a lifestyle change. 

It is a lifestyle to get into.

And I think that’s really key right there is that people, I’ve said this in previous episodes, I’ll say it again. People need to just come to the decision of making this a lifestyle change, not a diet that I’m going to do for the next month or two so I can lose weight. Right. So, let’s talk a little bit more about the foods that are highly inflammatory. So I always tell my patients sugar, anything with a lot of sugar, do you distinguish? So I’ll distinguish, I’ll say, refined sugar. Refined sugar depends on the person. Cancer patients, even fruits. I caution them with what fruits. I want them to do the low glycemic fruits that are going to be low in sugar and high in antioxidants and vitamins and minerals, so we will limit that to an amount. 

For people with diabetes, I also limit them to that amount, and then that’s the high-starchy foods as well.

Oh, absolutely. We don’t do starches.

They are super popular in the American diet diets. We have to distinguish, I think, nutrition between someone with chronic disease and even mental health. I’ll throw that in there. And even addiction, if someone’s recovering from just someone wanting to lose weight or someone who’s healthy, I often do get asked, why do you reduce so much of these things in someone with cancer? Because these foods feed the cancer, it creates a lot of inflammation, and the body’s already super inflamed.

We need to quiet that noise. We need to quiet the inflammation. So that’s why reducing the refined sugars, but even the sugars and some starchy foods. So maybe no rice, definitely no potatoes and corn. I’ll run down the five or seven foods that I tend to tell my, not that I do tend to, I tell my patients, don’t eat this. 

I’m the same way. I’ll tell you. And then I want to hear if that’s where you’re at or if there’s something different. So sugar’s the devil that’s out, whether it’s in a drink or in a food. I talk about reducing that. And if they’re going to have fruit, they have to do local glycemic fruits and minimal, not a lot. The next one is dairy. I agree with you. Dairy, as nature passes, we’re taught how inflammatory it is, how mucus-producing it is. So that’s the second one. The third one is wheat, things with gluten in there. And the reason for gluten is many reasons. They’re in everything. All processed foods have tons of gluten, and so people have developed sensitivities. It’s also heavily sprayed with pesticides, so we don’t want to have those exposures. So if you’re going to get certain types of wheat that’s organic or certain breads that, but you’re still minimizing how much, especially in cancer, metabolic conditions. 

I don’t want them eating bread. I just don’t. I want them to really stick with a vegetable and a protein source. Grains here and there, maybe So yeah, so no sugar, no dairy, no gluten products. Corn and soy are fourth and fifth. Corn and soy are also 80, 90% of the corn and soy in this country is genetically and genetically modified organisms are going to affect the way our body works because anytime we interfere with the laws of nature, it’s going to affect the way our bodies function. So those foods, they’re also corn and soy interesting there and everything processed, not just the foods that we eat, but even in beauty products, things we were putting on our skin. So, in sauces and everything, they’re just hidden in so many foods that people have also developed a sensitivity to those foods. The other food category that I discourage is anything with MSG.

It has such a neurotoxic effect on the nervous system that I tell people not to consume foods that have SG in them. And once again, it’s like dairy. Oh, but I don’t ever have a reaction to it. Yeah, because constantly in your body, the moment you remove it, boom, it shows up that the effects of it in your body. I know if I have it, I am knocked out for the day. I’ll have a migraine, and I will be so lethargic I have to fall asleep. And then when I do wake up from that sleep, it is I’m moody and grumpy and irritable. Who wants that? No thanks. So if I ever come across it, it’s by accident and it’s when I eat out. And even if you ask a restaurant like, do you guys use MSG? They’ll say, no, but your body’s going to snitch them out that it did have it. The other food category, and then I’ll let you share yours. 

So not everyone has to do this, but if someone comes in with autoimmune conditions, a lot of chronic disease, a lot of pain, joint pain, I’ll tell them, let’s remove NIS shade foods to tomatoes, eggplants beans, peppers, things like that. Because they have lectins and lectins, we know that they cause an agglutination of the red blood cells. And what that means is that your red blood cells will get sticky and come together. And so then if your red blood cells are sticking, they’re not going, your blood is not going to flow the way it should. It’s not going to carry inflammation from one part of the body to the other. And that creates inflammation. That creates pain. And Christina, when people remove these foods, they feel better; swelling, joint pain and swelling is gone, and then we will test it. Let’s introduce tomatoes and see what happens. And then we know for sure, yep, tomatoes do it to me or no, I can eat tomatoes in moderation and I’m okay, but when I eat lentils, Lord Jesus, take the wheel. That’s how you find out. There’s a lot of food sensitivity testing out there. I’m not a big fan of it, unlike some of my colleagues.

I’ve done them enough to see that A, they can be expensive and sometimes they don’t give me enough information. I’d rather do the traditional food elimination diet. Let’s eliminate all these things and introduce one food at a time for three days and see what happens.

Yeah.

So, what are the foods you tell your patients?

So first things, and again, as you said as well, it depends upon what they have, what they’re coming in for, and then goals. And I try not to scare them off too quickly. And because I run through a number of different categories when I sit down with a patient, not a patient, when I sit down with one of my clients, I discuss sleep, stress management, physical activity, nutrition and supplements. And so I really want a whole picture of where they’re at. And so somebody, if we’re able to jump right into the nutrition portion from the get-go, sometimes it’s something else. Sometimes, it’s okay; we can shift some things here dietarily, but we need to focus on some nervous system practices first. But it is almost the same exact list. It is dairy, wheat, which nobody wants to hear, but it is in everything. And I learned that when I stopped eating it, I couldn’t even eat soy sauce anymore, which is horrible. I love Chinese food, dairy, wheat, it’s soy corn and refined sugar, and then distinguishing, if I say just sugar, then people kind of freak out. So it’s that distinguishing factor of we want to remove the refined sugar.

That also is in everything, but it shows up in corn syrup. The one I saw the other day, what is it? It’s like a barley something. It has some name to it, but it’s liquid sugar. And looking at just, I’m looking at granola bars and stuff for hiking.

It’s hard to eat healthy.

Literally, there will be 11 different sugars in something. How important is it that you feel better? Because if you’re so miserable, you’re going to just go back to eating the basics. How our ancestors eat before modern life even happened? Before we had refrigeration, before we had stores, people were growing their food. And when we can go back to the roots, I do believe it’s realistic. I did it and other people have done it, and it’s so difficult to be reading labels all the time.

It’s exhausting.

And then to know what it is, then all the time it’s like, you know what, I’ll just get the broccoli. I know what’s in there, vitamins and minerals, so I’m just going to get that and I’ll get some chicken, some organic chicken. I know what it’s, and I’m good. And be careful with the sauces that you use in the seasonings.

That’s the thing our world here has just become so difficult to just eat simple food.

And I’m a sauce junkie. I have a fridge filled with sauces, but now I make sure what is low to no sugar but does not contain stevia and all of these other fake sugars. I put stevia in the fake sugar, even though a lot of people disagree with me. Say they say they’re going to make some barbecue chicken. Well, the chicken’s fine, but it’s the barbecue sauce that has all the sugar and all the other chemicals in there.

Unless you’re making it yourself, but even then, you’re still using sugar. I know we make it ourselves. There are healthy options. I always say start somewhere and then we’ll refine it from there. 

So let’s touch a little bit about when you work with people because working with a very unique demographic.

If you’re having someone who’s recovering from an addiction or trauma, how do you work with them differently versus someone who wants to lose weight?

So typically someone, and I’m going to make broad sweeping strokes here. Absolutely. Typically somebody who is recovering, they have some similar things in common. There can be disassociative behavior that happens. So working on nervous system health and helping them learn to meditate slow down. Everybody wants to jump right into the gym, and I’m like, that’s fantastic. I lift weights. I love the gym. Learning to slow down is really key. So teaching meditation practices, some breath work practices, slow flow yoga, really, how can I get back into this physical space that I’m in to slow down enough to listen to my own body? And then if they want to go ham it out in the gym, fantastic. Some people are in a position where they’re physically ready for that. A lot of times, the nervous system is way too amped up or too slowed down. If somebody is in FA or frozen and they’re stuck, then going into the gym can be extremely overwhelming. And then they leave not doing a whole lot and they feel like they’ve failed, which creates more shame. So getting individuals into the nervous system practices to slow down, getting minerals into their system, A lot of it, and the length of time it takes to heal is mineral deficiencies, gut health, A lot of individuals crave copious amounts of sugar.

Absolutely.

And so reducing refined sugar. So I do a pendulum swing, so it’s okay, let’s get you off refined sugar. Let’s get that out of your diet. And if that means that you need to eat fruit to compensate until you are off the refined sugar, fantastic. And so it’s taken in chunks, okay, you’re no longer eating refined sugar, but you’re consuming way too much food sugar. But we have to do it. It’s a journey.

And that’s a good place to start with someone who has that problem. I’d rather you eat the fruit than eat just candy. That is a very common thing that we see in people who are recovering from a drug addiction is that the sugar stimulates the same part of the brain that the drug does. And so this is why food addiction is the most; food is the most abused drug that we justify it because we have to eat to live. But when we are eating a lot of sugar and processed foods and we become reliant on it like a drug addict that is a drug to us and the sugar is addictive. The MSG is addictive. MSG is terrible; they have umami that they have curated and put in food. That’s why McDonald’s french fries are the perfect palate-pleasing food because they’re scientifically engineered. 

I once told the sales rep that I forgot the name of the, but he sold these things that they add in foods and restaurants, and he said, I won’t eat at restaurants. I’m like, why? He said this stuff is super addicting. It should be illegal. I’m like, and you’re selling it.

So I was in the restaurant industry for 17 years, hospitality between restaurants and hotels for 17 years. So I got to see in the back kitchens what they do for food. High-end restaurants are some of the worst, sorry. They are because they soak the McDonald’s french fries. It is a solution of 50% salt and 50% sugar. They make a bath of it and they soak the vegetables in it prior to cooking them so that they’re more palatable.

So people are like, this is so amazing.

It’s interesting.

And I can tell immediately because I react to refined sugar where my skin breaks out, it either tastes too sweet or too salty to me.

You have to request I would like these vegetables specifically, but please make sure that they’re fresh from the fridge and not in the salt bag.

Don’t bathe my vegetables in death.

I ask them, do you use real butter? And they’ll say yes. And I say, no, no, no. Like actual real butter because I know a lot of restaurants, high-end or not, have a five-gallon fat of liquefied butter flavor back there. I’m allergic to it.

You just named the top three things that make food addicting. Do you know that fat, salt, and sugar?

Exactly.

That’s what people crave, and that’s where people are stuck. And if we can pull away slowly at a time, I mean, there are two types of people out there. There’s people like me, they’re like, Nope, all or nothing, I just need to get out. I’ll go through the detox. And then there are people that gradually need to get there. So you need to know what kind of person you are to either gradually remove these things from your diet or just go all in or nothing. You go all in and just get rid of them and then you can later on know what your limits are. I don’t joke around when I say how serious food addiction is because I caught myself in my late twenties, maybe early thirties, realizing I have a food addiction because every time I get stressed, I want to go eat something salty or sweet, usually sweet. And when I was in my early thirties, when I did my first detox, I am going to change my diet. But it was a mindset. It was, I’m going to change my lifestyle of how I eat. I went through a two-week period of detoxing.

I felt like I’ve never done drugs, by the way, never. I don’t even drink alcohol and don’t have an affinity for it, which is rare. I get it. But I felt like a drug addict. I felt like I was being pulled away from my drug. The sugar.

It’s interesting that you say that. I have detoxed from drugs and I’ve detoxed from alcohol, and when I stopped eating wheat, I detoxed off of wheat and it was worse. And for some people, this may be true, for some it may not. For me, it was true detoxing off wheat was worse than detoxing off drugs or alcohol.

Wow.

I was just, I’m done. I got a migraine that lasted two weeks. Nothing I took would even touch the pain. I ended up taking so many NSAIDs that I ended up in the hospital because I had the lining in my stomach inflamed. I couldn’t fit the rings on my fingers because they were so swollen. I couldn’t wear shoes because my feet were so swollen. And in order to just kill the pain enough that I could marginally make it through the day, I would eat a half a piece of bread and then it would subside just a little bit. And then I would go a few more days. Blinding migraine, I mean, not even anything that eating it.

By not eating it, by not having something with wheat, you would have that effect whereas if I had something with wheat, I would have that effect.

So now, after that two-week period was awful, and then it took about a full six months for the inflammation to really calm down in my body. And now if I eat something with wheat in it, it’s immediate, immediate inflammation. My whole back, neck, and shoulders completely spasm and I get a migraine.

I know there’s a lot of a connection with people with addiction. There’s always, almost always, I’ve not seen one person not have the underlying cause have a route to childhood trauma. Something traumatic happened that they’re numbing, they want to numb the pain of feeling that they don’t want to feel that pain. So they turn to a substance. It could be food, it could be alcohol, it could be a drug, it could be many things. But is that what you see with the people that you’re working with? Do you get that far of working in, I mean, I know you’re not a mental health person, but you naturally are a good counselor. So do people get to share that with you? This is where it’s coming from.

They do. And a lot of times I let them know, thank you for sharing. If you would like, I can recommend you to a therapist to help you walk through this. And then giving, which I think is where a lot of the disassociative behavior comes from, that, Hey, here’s some things that we can do to get you back into your body while you’re processing and facing these things. And a lot of times, people will say, well, I don’t want to face it. I’m like, but you can’t. You’re in the storm right now and you can stick your head in the sand, but it’s not going to help. Eventually that storm is going to beat you down and you’re going to have to pull your head out of the sand and face it. And I tell them the same things, the same pep talks. I had to give myself that. The only way through the storm is to walk into it, into it. And we have to face those things that are haunting us. And it’s super scary and it’s very hard. And that, shining light on those dark areas is exactly what takes away their power.

And I think this is where it’s really important: getting help, getting someone to help you walk through that storm.

Pulling you out of the darkness because doing it alone doesn’t work. But I feel like that’s what the devil’s been putting in their mind. Like no one’s there. You got to tough it out on yourself, just run away from it. And it doesn’t work when you’re doing it by yourself. I love the analogy of the water buffalo. Have you heard the analogy? I haven’t. So water buffalo, they say that they don’t like water, interestingly. And so when they see a storm coming, they see the storm coming. What they do is the herd will run towards the storm so they can get through the storm faster instead of running in the opposite direction or just staying stationary.

They just run towards the storm to get through the water faster. And it’s like, wow, what power in that humans, sometimes we don’t do that. We run away from the storm or we get stuck in the storm instead of saying, Hey, I’m just going to run through this because it’s coming at me and I’m running towards it and I’m just going to get through it faster. That’s a healthy person. But when someone’s had constant trauma that you were stuck in the storm through childhood and now you’re an adult, you do need the help. I cannot emphasize enough the importance that the people need to reach out to, whether it’s a nutritionist or a counselor or a doctor that works holistically.

A pastor that can help you through that. Whoever it is a friend, it could just start with a friend, a good friend that can listen to you and can pull you out because you’re not going to get out of it alone. There’s a lot of shame, a lot of guilt, a lot of anger, a lot of emotions that people are carrying in those states that it polarizes them. They cannot see the light and it’s very daunting. So there’s a lot, obviously, we can talk about brain recovery. So once you remove the inflammatory foods, give them the nutrients, the things that they need, the tools to slow down. When you are working with people, what do you see in terms of progress for them say in three, six months a year? Because we know it’s a process.

Absolutely. And in an intake, I emphasize continuously. And that as working with my clients, I continually bring up, remember this is a journey. I tell them all the time, and as I tell myself, a healthy lifestyle is a lifelong journey. It is not a destination that we will ever reach and quit. It’s not an option. So there will be ups and there will be downs, and we will quote fail, which I don’t believe failure is even a thing. It’s just a construct and we just get back up and we start again. So I have seen clients, depending upon their goals, within three to six months, some will lose weight. Some are just healthier and more active. I have had clients whose goal was to be able to eat and not get sick to their stomach and work on nervous system practices to the point where they are slowed down enough that they can eat a meal and not get sick.

I have had clients who wanted to get pregnant, and so I’ve had two that I’ve worked with and they were told, you can’t get pregnant. Or Here you have these underlying health issues. And to work with them and have them get pregnant within three months is fantastic. It’s definitely not an area that I specialize in, but it’s really a joy to say, Hey, let’s get these inflammatory foods out of your diet. Let’s get some supplements going. I can see some things happening in your body that may not have come up on tests. I’m doing the sign of the cross with my face. But I think you do the same thing as well where you look at the face and there are some things that show up on the face that let you know, Hey, here’s what’s happening in the body. And then I have worked with clients. I tell them the whole reason that I’m working with you is so that you don’t have to work with me anymore. If you want to see me for the rest of your life and pay me fantastic, but my goal is to get you to a sustainable, healthy lifestyle.

Absolutely.

It has to be sustainable. 

It has to be sustainable otherwise, it doesn’t really matter. 

Then yeah, what am I doing? I’m just selling you something that you’re going to go, once you do it, you see results, you’re going to not do it, and then you’re going to go find somebody else.

Just healthy and sustainable. And that shifts as well. So a lot of what I’m doing with my clients is, okay, let’s help you to reach your goals now. And we choose two to four goals to focus on for 30 days, and then those can shift. I’ll check in, how are you doing? What’s going on? Working with that shame aspect as well. I did a video on social media talking about shame that trauma is other people handing you their shame and guilt and telling you that you need to bear it. And that I personally felt like as I was healing, I was taking off these wet wool blankets of other people’s guilt and other people’s shame. And I’m like, why am I dragging this around? And there’s freedom in that. There’s so much freedom. And then getting to the place where your body is healing, your soul is healing.

You can listen to yourself enough that you don’t need me. Awesome.

It’s hard for a person to get to that point if they have an inflamed brain.

If they have an inflamed body. So as we wrap here up, I want our audience to really understand that what we eat is going to either give us life or it’s going to take life away from us. So we either make decisions to today to eat the foods that will maybe not be so enjoyable in the moment at first because it’s a change for you. But eating those healthy foods will make you feel better in the long run. It’ll make you feel better throughout the day where when you eat something that’s too sugary, too much, it’s fried, it’s processed, you feel good in the moment eating that food, but unfortunately, later on you’re going to feel bad for eating it. Not just bad psychologically feeling bad for your choices, but physically, your body’s going to feel lethargic. You’re not going to be able to focus and concentrate.

Your mood is highly affected by the foods you eat. So if you have an inflamed brain, you’re not going to be able to heal to see those areas of trauma that you need to get help. If you or someone has been dealing with struggles of substance drug abuse, then they got to get the nutrition part in there. Obviously, getting them off the substance is really important, but addressing what they’re eating is the next step in recovery. There’s so much that we can really dissect into this conversation and we are going to do a second part where we’re going to talk about more of the mental health neurotransmitters and food and how that helps us overall. But I hope you guys have enjoyed this conversation with Christina. And stay tuned for next week’s episode as we discuss the importance of nutrition exercise in seasonal depression disorder. Until then, be 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.

The post EP25: Nutrition in Healing Trauma & Addiction w/ Christina Lombardo appeared first on Raíces Naturopathic Medical Center.

Podcast Episode 20 Transcript

Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole-person approach to your wellbeing, spirit, soul, and body. Join me your host, Dr. Alara, natureopathic, 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. Welcome back to Physician Heal By Self, the podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Ana Lara, and joining me again for this episode is Jacinda Garner with Sole Prompt. So we’re going to continue our conversation from last week where we’re talking about emotions and we’re going to get into the practical side of it. So welcome back. Thank you. We’re continuing this conversation like we never left because we did it, but this conversation can go on for hours. Hours. I know, I know. That’s the hard part of this, right?

So maybe we should do a three-hour podcast. It’ll be very interesting. So let’s continue our conversation. The last time I left off, we cut off at my little scenario of how I explain the soul, the body, the emotions and the physical body, the mind, the emotions and the soul and being in control. So where do you start with your clients? What are some key things that people can take away to start addressing and facing the emotions? One of the things that I always explain to my patients is if you have a particular emotion, just sit with it and feel it. It’ll go away. It’ll go away. But when we have so many unhealed wounds, it’s harder to do that. So once you start processing your emotions, now if you feel anger or sadness, whatever it is, if you just sit with it, give it time, you do some of that inner process work, it’ll dissipate and go away. But when we do not feel the emotion, then it just gets bigger and bigger and it just becomes this big ugly monster and it stays stuck in our body. It does. Emotions stay stuck in our bodies. I don’t think people really understand that. And being a person, a practitioner that does a lot of body work, body therapies on people, I see when people just out of nowhere immediately have an emotional release, there’s no memory connected to that emotion. 

It’s true most of the time say, I don’t know why I feel like crying, or I feel pain here, or I feel anger or sadness, or I feel a void. And I just guide him through releasing that physically. And what I tell them is that our brain, in our brain, we’re able to have conscious thoughts, unconscious thoughts. That’s the stuff that’s filed back there that you’re holding on. But the body has consciousness too. The thing is it only has unconscious.

That’s right.

So that means we don’t understand why I feel anger.

It’s true.

I can go into a person’s quad Jacinda and start doing some release work in there, and I know anger tends to get trapped there, anger and frustration. And I’ll start just even, it’s not even a lot of pressure, start releasing stuff in the tissues. And I’m like, are you angry? Have you been feeling frustrated? 

They’ll start to be like, yeah, how do you know? I know because I know the patterns of where emotions tend to want to stay stuck in interesting points. Then I’ll let you talk. You’ve got a lot of good stuff to share. There’s a point right under the clavicle by the shoulder, it’s a lung meridian point. People who tend to hold emotions of sadness and grief. When I push on that, it hurts. Like I’m stabbing them. And most of the time they’ll do this because it hurts. And so if I ask them, is there anything you’re sad or that you’re grieving? And 10 out of 10, it’s always a yes.

Right at the center of our chest, there’s another acupuncture point, and this point binds the chest. So if a person’s been holding a lot of emotions, just kind of harnessing it in their heart, in their spiritual heart, if I push there, it’s very painful.

Sometimes the pressure isn’t even much and they’ll react like I am stabbing them. And I’ll tell them, you’re holding on to too many emotions you haven’t released.

Come on.

When people start to connect that their mind, and now they’re able to process that in their mind, that this pain that I just identified just by going straight there and pushing and they feel pain, and I say, it’s emotional pain you haven’t released, it blows your mind. So there is a connection, a huge connection. 

And it comes with a huge price. If you don’t feel you will not heal. That’s right. You just won’t. You won’t because your body will store it and it will develop disease, a lot of disease, a lot of imbalance. And honestly, that’s where people need the start addressing the emotional wounds you have. So let’s dive in. Let’s dive in. I want to hear what you have to say as you’re talking. 

I just feel this sense of people feel like if they do start feeling they’re going to drown, they’re going to drown. That’s what I’m sensing right now. And so there’s a fear to feel and lean into it because maybe they do have years and years and years and that could feel scary.

Very scary.

And so that’s what at Soul Prompt, we want to help you walk through that process, encourage you through that process, help you do that work and move through and learn how to process your emotions. But I just sense that, and I want to say that you’re not going to drown because when you invite the Lord into the process, he is the lifter of your head. He will not let you drown, but you have to open up for him to come in and do that deep work. We have to invite him to that space. And when you gave that analogy about the soul and what we feed right? If we feed our physical body and we let it lead, it’ll go off into addiction and other ways that we try to self-soothe or deal with our stuff, sometimes over exercising could be it. It might not even be a bad thing that it is anything that makes itself an idol or exalts itself and puts itself in the throne of our heart where God is supposed to be in that seat is not a good thing.

We have to put it back into balance. And so we’re always with the soul bottom line, minimally, always feeding it the word of God, always feeding the soul the word of God because that is the truth. That is the foundation. That is we won’t make it because the word of God is living in powerful. And that is what brings the healing. That’s how God changes us from the inside out. How we’re transformed. There are not enough I am statements that we could say that’s going to change us. It’s the power and the presence of God. It is the word of God. So that’s the first thing. But I love the Book of Psalms.

I wanted to talk about this. I wanted to read Psalm chapter 42, the whole chapter, if you’re okay, it’s ahead about 12 verses, and it’s David speaking and it says, As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants, my soul for you, oh God, my soul, thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God? My tears have become my food day and night. While they say to me all day long, where is your God? These things I remember as I pour out my soul, how I would go with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude-keeping festival. David asks himself again, why are you cast down? Oh my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God. I’ll stop there for a minute. So when we look at this, scripture, David is saying, I’m in pain.

I’m in pain.

My tears are flowing. I can’t even eat. That’s how much pain and grief I’m feeling. My tears have become my food. Where are you God? And then he goes on and he says, I remember all these things as I pour out my soul. And one of the things I tell folks to practically do is to pour out what they’re thinking in their mind, what they’re feeling in their emotions and what they’re wanting, like what they’re frustrated, what’s not happening, their will, right? So whether that’s pouring out, what does that look like? That could be pouring out in a prayer time with the Lord, that could be pouring out through worship, that could be pouring out, writing everything down. You feel I do that. I’m a journalist. I just write it all out. Or I’m crying it out to the Lord on my bed just weeping or angry. Maybe it’s not tears, but I’m pouring that out. And what is that doing that is making? I’m saying, okay, these are the emotions I’m feeling. I’m releasing them. I’m surrendering them. I am helping find a way to these tools crying, praying all those things to help those things move through my body. And what does that create? It creates an opening for the Lord, then his Holy Spirit, because the Bible says when we call on his name, he is there.

So then his presence comes and he begins to fill us up. And we begin to remember what David was saying here. He was saying, as I poured out my soul, I began to remember how we used to lead in procession in space or in front of their enemies. What God did. They would praise and shout and he was remembering. So he poured out his soul. Then he remembered what God did, and then he realized that this is just temporary because I’m going to hope. I’m going to praise again. Don’t worry, this feeling is temporary. I’m going to praise again even though, I didn’t read the whole chapter, but when you read this scripture and you meditate on it, you realize when I pour out, I remember. And then I, I’m losing my train of thought and then I recognize that this is going to be a temporary situation.

We say that so quickly because it’s in 12 verses, but this happens over time and over and over again, happens over process. When I wanted to stop yelling and do something different because I had all those emotions, I had to remind myself, I had to pour out and remember over and over and over in one day, in one hour in a matter of minutes. And that’s why the Bible tells us to take the cap of our thoughts. We can have tons of thoughts that come into our brains, tons all day, but we get to steward and choose which ones we’re going to grab and believe. And so when we’re going through this process, we are exchanging our old beliefs for his belief, which is the truth. And that is a process. And when we see our thoughts begin to change and our beliefs begin to change, then our emotions are going to begin to change. And the way we look at things are going to begin to change and our perspective is going to begin to change. And then we’re going to know that we know that we know not just through. I’m confessing and naming and claiming and doing the right Christian thing. I’m going to know inside my inward parts are going to know who God is through that process.

Oh, beautiful, beautiful, and powerful. Where do people start to help? Yeah, I was going to say, you can’t do that alone. And this is the thing, and we talked about this a little bit the last time, but I think we could dive in a little bit more.

And when we talk about surrender, because sometimes it’s easier, sometimes when we go through a season of pain, it starts getting really familiar and we would rather be in the familiar than let it go and surrender to experience true freedom. And sometimes we don’t even have that level of awareness. It’s not like we’re sitting there going, I just want to be in pain right now. I mean, it’s just this sense of I’m here, it’s my life. It is what it is. It’s always going to be this way. And we live in this comfort zone. Sometimes we don’t want to give it up. We don’t want to release the pain or release or forgive or whatever it is because I’m justified. I deserve it, I’m justified in the way that I’m feeling because the other person did me wrong. So I’m going to stay here because I don’t see justice happening.

So until justice happens, I’m going to stay here with this attitude, with this bitterness and with this anger. Sometimes it could just be I’m emotionally tired and I just can’t. I just can’t. But what I know to be true, is I was sitting on my bed, I’ve told this before, and I was crying because the Lord had given me instructions on what to do and I couldn’t see the benefit of what he told me to do. Nothing good. No good thing was happening. He told me to do something nice and I wasn’t getting niceness back. And I remember thinking, well, this is no, why am I doing this? And he’s like because I’m asking you to. And what he was doing was I look back now, he was changing my heart.

But in the middle of it, that’s not what I wanted as a result. But I look back now saying, oh, you’re doing this because you’re trying to help me heal with a soft heart and not with a bitter one with hardness in it. And I remember being on my bed and I could physically feel this in my body. The Lord invited me. He said, surrender this to me. Surrender this to me. I did not want to let it go. And I was crying, even saying with my words, I don’t want to let this go and I could feel my body not trying to hold on, but I could also feel the love of God and his compassion to say, let it go. I promise you I’ve got you. And I made that shift. I let it go. And I don’t know how to explain it to you.

I had let go of practice multiple times. Remember we talked about process and practicing and practicing and doing it over and over. I had done that multiple times. But in that act of stewarding that right, doing the right thing, even if I’m not feeling it, doing the right thing, I got to this milestone where it was so real that when I really released it, I thought I had surrendered it all the way me doing it over and over and over. I got to this milestone and all of a sudden it was like the grace of God showed up in a way that I had never experienced before. And it was like grace, meaning his strength to do the thing I thought I could not do. And that was to love someone that did not love me back.

To do the thing, to forgive the person who hurt me. It’s not just I love how practical God is and how he gives us the tools. It’s not just I give you grace so that way you can receive me and then you can go to heaven. It’s giving you grace here on earth, the strength to be able to do the hard thing, the thing that you feel like you cannot do, whatever that is, it emboldened me. I knew he was with me and I was able to take the next step because I felt so emotionally exhausted and tired. And I felt like when people, I was around people, I was just draining them. You know what I mean? Because I was just a walking mess is how I felt. So that’s what I’m trying to say. When we surrender, we invite him to give us the grace we exchange. An exchange happens. I let go. He comes in and then enables me by the Holy Spirit to do what we said with our mouths, we can’t do, I can’t heal. I’ll never get over this. You will when you surrender.

Amen. You explain exactly. I think everyone who goes through that healing goes through that because that’s exactly a very similar way to how I felt. You go through this process maybe some years down the road and you feel like I should have been able to let that go. And you do get to that point of frustration. Emotional exhaustion is a great mental exhaustion, physical, whatever. You get to a point, where you’re tired, you’ve been doing the work, maybe you’re seeing a counselor, you’re doing your inner work, some support people guiding you through the healing process and you feel like I should have let that go. That’s how I felt when it came to me. I had a lot of trauma around people dying in my life and my reaction to people dying. So I thought about my brother’s death, which we talked about in episode 18 with Casey, I mentioned how I suppressed all the emotions of grief and sadness and just indulgent in overworking. 

My escape was overworking and doing a lot. I was running away. That was my way of suppressing it. And it took me about seven years to realize I had a problem. I need to fix that. I need to work on that. And when I did, I thought, okay, I had a couple of sessions of this and that. I feel good. And then in medical school, here I am many years later and I’m like, why is this coming up? I am in my first year I mentioned my brother’s name and I’m just sobbing, uncontrollably. And I am thinking, I thought I already healed through this. I thought I already worked through this. But realizing that there are layers like an onion. You peel back one layer and then there’s another. I came up with a better analogy in doing some of my therapy sessions with a naturopath that I worked with and realized dealing with these emotions, is like that yarn that has many different colors. You get through the red and then there’s the blue and then there’s orange or whatever color and say red is anger. Okay, I’ve dealt with my anger. I think I’m done with a year of working on anger. And then no, something happens that brings it up and you’re healing.

Deeper and deeper. And so you have a ball of yarn of all these colors, of all these emotions. You’re unraveling and going through nodding. There are knots in there. So you’re just undoing it to find some organization back in your life. So I remember feeling very frustrated and angry sometimes about why haven’t I healed. But it wasn’t until I had that encounter that I fully surrendered and let God surrender this to God, let him in and just clean the path more, clean my heart, let him in, and take over. I remember there was a session you mentioned about feeling like you’re overwhelmed like you’re drowning. I remember there was a session I did a lot of EMDR. I’m a fan of EMDR. If you work with a good therapist, it can really be helpful. Helpful. And there’s a lot of, even I had Brenda Cochran, who she’s a Christian counselor. She does that with a Christian perspective, amazing work. But I remember this is all through medical school. God was really healing me through medical school. He was like, you need to heal you before you go be a doctor. But in one of the sessions of doing EMDR, I felt so many emotions. I remember I verbally said, I feel like I’m going to drown my tears. I feel like this room could be filled with my tears and they’ll just come up to the surface and I’ll just drown in them.

And it was powerful for me to say that I even feel it now because I remember how it felt. And my tears right now are tears of joy to have overcome that and to now be able to help other people go through that. When I see people I can see and feel now their emotions because I’m comfortable with feeling mine.

That’s right.

I feel safe and comfortable feeling them. And when I feel them in other people, I want to help them. I want to help them feel liberated by that and have that relationship with God. Ultimately. That’s really the goal because this physical body is going to die. It’s going to die. But where does the soul, where does your spirit go? What will it do? And so for me, the root cause, the end result is I want people’s souls to be restored so they can go back home.

That’s right.

This is temporary. All of this stuff is temporary, it doesn’t matter. And so I’ve learned to not attach myself to the hurt, the trauma, even my emotions.

That’s right. Just let it go.

That’s right.

But I had to get to a point, and most people do from my clinical experience, what I see in practice is that when people are coming in, they’re tired, they’re sick and tired. I can spiritually see they’re crawling into my office. And that’s why I don’t just work with anyone. I want to help those people. Those are my people. Those are our people to help. It is. Yep, absolutely. Because I love your story. Thank you for sharing. Because when you said, when I feel now, I don’t judge it, but I learned to release it quicker.

And that’s what healthy people do. Healthy people can say, okay, this is what’s going on. Let me dig deeper. Let me see where that comes from. Get curious. Right? The Bible talks about here, why so downcast on my soul? The Bible tells us we can get curious about our emotions. We can say, God, what’s going on on the inside of me. But then when we get healthy, we practice like anything. We practice surrendering. We practice eating the right foods, we practice getting help. And then it becomes second nature that you’re able to surrender quicker and easier. And you know what I mean? You’re lighter because you’ve built this muscle to say God, regardless of what’s happening. I know you have me. I stand on the theology that you are a good God.

Yes.

So regardless of what’s going on, regardless of how I’m feeling, I know you’re not going to let me drown. I know you’re not going to let this count against me because I’m feeling, I know you’re not going to say, well, you’re doubting, so you can’t get the answer because you’re not having faith. You’re going to let me have this moment where faith and feelings can be together. And God can say, let’s move through those feelings. And ultimately we let what God says be supreme. We let what God says be supreme. So when we process our emotions, we’re not saying processes, process them and let them lead. We’re saying process to them so that way when you release them, you are ultimately letting Jesus be, I’m serving you. I’m surrendering to you whatever behavior I need to do, that’s the right behavior. Releasing my emotions. I’m doing that because I love you. And sometimes I do that behavior even when I don’t feel like it. But I’m saying, I am choosing to follow you, Jesus. I am not choosing to follow my emotions. There are moments like that.

In the end, I know you’re going to help me process it, Lord, where I’ll be fully free of feeling this, but I’m going to trust you by obeying you because I have a relationship with you and I have a relationship with you because I understand that you’re a good God and you only have good for me. So even if it hurts, even if I go through the process and I feel like I’m dying when we get healthy, sometimes we have to die more before we see the good thing happening. Sometimes it hurts in the process, but if I can anchor that God is good and he’s for me in that process, then I can hold on. And if I have the right accountability around me, and if I have the right people around me to influence and encourage and coach and love, then I don’t have to do this thing alone. And that’s what keeps people trapped. When they don’t process their emotions and they keep the wall up, the very gift God wants to give to you, which is relationship and connection to help you move through those things, you say, Nope, I’m going to do it alone.

When we do it alone, we stay stuck.

That is really key right there. And we can speak from experience that when you close off yourself to feeling those emotions, you close off yourself to having genuine relationships. And I might’ve mentioned this in other episodes before, but when we shut down those icky emotions like anger and grief and sadness, our brain, it’s the amygdala that processes emotion and pain. It’ll shut down every emotion. So if you’re having grief because you lost a loved one and it hurts a lot and you’re suppressing that emotion of sadness, ultimately what happens is that the brain’s going to shut down and it’s going to stop feeling even love, joy, and all of that. So the brain is not able to select just some emotions so that you don’t feel it. And then the others, you’re not genuinely living. When you do not process and you continue to suppress emotions, you’re mask in your life, you’re masking.

You’re masking, you’re playing a charade. Everyone’s walking with the mask and thinking and thinking, oh, they’re such a great Christian, or they’re doing everything. No, if you hide that and mask that stuff, you’re not being real. And God can only transform when we’re real,

When we’re real. And that is really, why I want to say this because it’s really in my heart to say it doesn’t matter what everyone else sees or thinks of you. Exactly. And whether you’re expressing it or not, God sees it anyway.

So we might as well come and be honest, be real like God, you already know what I’m thinking. You know what? I feel that’s right.

The good and the bad things that I think and I feel that’s right.

So you might as well just be honest with yourself. I mean, just be honest with yourself. You can’t lie to God. You can’t hide from him.

Since I was a little girl, I understood that God sees everything and feels everything I see, everything I hear, everything I feel He knows it. So you cannot mask from the one that created you. But it’s similar. If we see this through the lens of parenting, we know our children, we’ve seen what they’re like, and now they’re like 15 and they’re interacting with their teenage friends. And we’re like, that’s not like, why are you changing? Why do you act with your friends that way? But you do not like to sit at home.

That’s right.

That’s how God feels like Jacinda. Why are you acting like that? That is not how I created you to be. Exactly. Don’t water yourself down because someone’s going to get hurt. Their feeling are going to get hurt.

Exactly.

Or don’t hide your emotions. You’re feeling for a reason. Feel it. But let’s learn how to manage it healthily because there are unhealthy ways and then there are healthy ways of managing that. I could feel angry. Look, anytime that I hear anything, any crimes against children, sex, crimes, et cetera, I am like a fireball. I am ready to, who do I need to go kick beat up? Yeah. There’s an angry energy there that’s passion and love together. That’s an energy that pushes me and propels me to do what I do throughout my life. However, if I’m in a constant state of anger and I’m not balanced

Balancing it and directing that energy in the right direction, not toward my family and being angry at them and yelling all the time like I did.

But if I can direct that energy to the right place, powerful things happen from that. Powerful things happen.

That’s right.

And even sadness, beautiful things can come through sadness too if we learn to balance that off. But it’s like a scale. We can’t let the scale go in one direction and say Suck. You cannot stay stuck in sadness. You cannot get stuck in anger. You can feel your sadness. I mean a lot of people know my audience by now know that my father passed away on Father’s Day. And you know what I get from people? I’m so sorry. They want to hug me. And I understand. It’s like they want me to cry and they don’t understand the peace that I have, that stillness that I have. Now, do I have moments where I miss them and cry?

Of course.

Absolutely. But you know what I do? I allow myself to cry.

That’s right.

It doesn’t matter if I’m driving. If I’m in front of a patient and it comes up, I feel it. I give it the attention, I feel it, and then it just dissipates and it goes instead of it staying in me physically. But that feeling, those emotions allow me moments to feel God’s peace and his joy.

So good. And when we are in faith about something, we’re asking God to do something. We’re in the process. We are frustrated. All those things. I believe God wants us to nurture our souls through that process. He wants to nurture our souls. He wants to nurture it with his presence, and his word through others. But there are so many ways that we can discover how we can nurture our soul. So have faith. I’m not saying not half faith, half faith, believe God, all the faith, but feel it. But at the same time, when we’re walking through long seasons of faith and in faith, we need to nurture our souls so that we can keep going so that we can keep being strong in our faith. So those two things go together. It’s not one or the other.

There is no, in terms of living a good Christian life, it’s not perfect. Right. Jesus didn’t come to save perfect people.

That’s right.

He knows us. 

And he’s not afraid of our humanity.

No, he’s not. And we don’t have to be some sort of model Christian for him to help us. 

No. I’ll be honest with you, lately, God has me in a space of resting and I stopped listening to things and I’m in a state of rest and I like it there. And sometimes I’m in church and I just want to sit there. I might look upset to everyone else. I don’t really care. I don’t really care. I know what I feel inside. If people could feel what I feel in here, it’s like my mouth can’t keep up with what my heart is feeling. And so I have a stoic look. Sometimes I do. It’s genetic. It comes through my ancestors. I am not mad. I’m not sad, I’m just still, but that stillness looks different to other people who might think, oh, she’s really grieving. I’m not. You might be surprised how much peace I have in me.

Well, I love it because we talked about this earlier, be still and know that I’m God, so you’re not going to drown because we’re going to know how powerful our God is. So when we’re still and we get to begin to feel, we can know how powerful and mighty he is in that moment. And he will not let us drown.

He will not. And the price, I always tell people, you either feel now and pay the price now or you pay it later and it’ll be accumulated interest with that. It’ll be a lot harder. So I always tell people losing family is never easy. Losing loved ones is never easy because people die in different ways, sudden deaths. There’s no time to talk. Say what you want to say, but you don’t have to wait until those situations. You can start expressing your love for people right

Now. That’s right.

And that’s what I found really hard Jacinda in my life I had a hard time telling other people, I love you mean a lot to me. It felt so hard for me to express that. But when you heal, you’re able to say it and it’s genuine. So what are some, because I know you got a lot of goodies. What are some things that I know you were talking about where to start with for people, get someone to help you, especially if this is a lot of accumulation, get someone to help you. I will second that motion too because it’s very difficult for you to do it alone.

As you were talking earlier, I was thinking that when we are walking this process, in order to receive from the Lord, we also have to let go and let the walls down. And so when we talk about nurturing our souls and letting go, sometimes we block what God’s trying to give to us and download to us because we have a wall up. And so we can’t say, I don’t have a wall up over here, but I have a wall up over here. If you have a wall up, you have a wall up, which means you’re not getting all that God has for you. So when we say feel, that’s another way of saying, letting go, surrendering, letting ourselves feel. But in that, we may feel that rush of whatever that emotion is, but we’re also allowing room for the Lord. I just feel like I’m supposed to the Lord. You’re like, I don’t feel you, God, I don’t see you. And sometimes it’s like, okay, Lord, help me. I might not even be aware that I have a wall because we have to be able to let go to even receive from him.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that’s another way of surrender.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so when we do this work, the first step, as I said before, is to feel and to pour out. Let’s identify what’s going on. Let’s get curious. Let’s invite the Holy Spirit to help us become aware of, because there are things that I do that I have no awareness of. But when I read his word, the Holy Spirit be like, oh, that’s you. Oh, you do that. Oh, that’s the wrong motive. I didn’t know I’m living my best life, but it’s being in his word. And so ground level, it’s reading a scripture every day, even if it’s one, just to keep the word, keep the truth alive in your life, even if you don’t believe it, even if it frustrates, you always keep the truth alive because that’s what grounds us. And I remember when I was going through hard times, my friend would send me scriptures and I would roll my eyes, but I read them and I knew that God was using them because the word is living.

And so I knew God was using that. So it’s like keeping the word of life and then begin to just, I actually have a worksheet. If you go to soul prompt.co, there’s this worksheet you can use that I have created to help you begin to identify your feelings and process them and write them down. And I ask certain questions to help you sort of think through. And that is a good starting point. It’s to kind of begin to process what you’re feeling and then receive other resources to sort of help you keep going. But part of that too is nurturing your soul. So just process what you’re going through, nurture your soul and invite the Lord into the process.

We’ll make sure to include that link in our description of this video so that people can have access to that and find a place to start.

That’s a good place to start. It’s really easy. It’s not hard. It’s not tough. It’s just making kind of sit and be still and kind of figure out what’s going on in inside. 

It’s really important for our audience to know that when you’re now, you’re desiring, right? You have to have the desire to want to heal and start going through this, even if you are afraid is that you start being mindful of what are you watching. What are you listening to? Because these are the windows to the soul. They start to influence your mind and how you behave how you feel and so forth. 

Hence the word. I love that you said that. And that’s why I said have the word. And because it is so easily influenced when your defenses are down when you’re tired.

And I’ll tell you, and here’s the difference between listening to motivational things or seeing motivational clips versus the word of God is that there’s an emptiness in those motivational lines. In those messages, there’s an emptiness. There’s a truth in it. There’s a truth, but it’s not the word because it doesn’t have the spirit in there. And so when you read God’s word, it’s hard maybe at first, but it will start speaking to your soul and it’ll start working from the inside out.

And if your heart is hard, it’ll begin to soften your heart. Heart. It’ll begin to soften.

Because the word of God is living. Yes. You got to toil the soil, the sometimes it up. And I could have, I mean there are parts of my heart that are hard. But that’s why I keep the word of God in there because I want him to change. I want to be transformed. And there is no other way, and I do want to say this, if you want healing, it really does come down to a choice. It is a choice. I mean, at the end of the day. And it’s a choice that we have to continue to make over and over and over again.

It’s a choice. And you’re making decisions daily throughout the day. And that’s the choice where you’re making, what am I watching? What am I listening to?

What am I thinking?

What am I thinking?

What am I choosing to believe? Who are my friends? What are the things that I am immersing myself daily? And then from there, you need to want to have the desire in choosing to develop your self-awareness being self. What is that? We can have a whole talk on a whole nother thing in another episode, but you need to develop that self-awareness. And that’s the ability to stop. Slow down and look at yourself, not out here. Don’t be judging and worrying about what everyone else is doing. Ownership in here, right here. What am I doing? How am I reacting? How am I thinking? How am I feeling? What’s my behavior? What do I like, what I don’t like? How do I change? 

That’s right.

And if you need people to help you get the help.

There’s so many people that can help.

You and not let people judge where you are in the journey as long as you’re moving. Because our emotions can either take us closer to Jesus or away from Jesus. So as long as you’re moving closer to Jesus, as long as you’re not getting stuck by holding on, then it doesn’t matter what it looks like to the outside world, how long it matters taking you to matter. 

And sometimes, and oftentimes, if not, when you are going through healing, it’s not something you’re really communicating. You have to keep yourself the masses. 

Yes. Be mindful.

Be mindful of who you’re sharing what you’re sharing and who you let speak into your life.

Yes.

Who’s speaking into your life? Get good people. I always tell my patients, to pray that God sends them good friends and that God sends you good support. There’s nothing wrong with you praying and asking for those things. You should be praying because look, I have a good friend. I pray.

I love it. I love

That we were friends. So I love the friendship, the relationship that we have. And I know that there’s something God is going to use as to help more people out there to be comfortable with being in tune with their emotional side.

I want to share this thing before we wrap several things before we wrap up. In 2020, during Covid, I got sick with Covid for the first time. It was around end of June, and I had so much revelation from God during this time, I remember him sharing a message with me, and I knew the message wasn’t just for me, it was for humanity, and it made sense and it didn’t make sense to me then. And that was that I needed to strengthen myself spiritually, physically, mentally and emotionally. And immediately I knew where my weaknesses were in that moment. He downloaded that into my spirit. And I said, okay. It was like my sergeant giving me orders. And I said, okay, I’m going to do that. And I started. Once I got better, I started to immediately work on those things. I need to read the word of God daily because I wasn’t doing it every day. I need to make sure I’m praying daily. I wasn’t doing that. I was meditating, but not praying. I started to work out. I’m like, once I get a little bit more physical strength, I start hiking from there. I started hitting the gym, started kickboxing, having left that, but then I knew emotionally I could still do more work. I can still get myself together and mentally as well. And it’s an ongoing, those are the four things. I love it. I consistently make sure that I’m doing something for all of those parts of me so good.

And that’s what I encourage people to do. What are you feeding yourself spiritually? If you don’t have spiritual food, good luck. You’re going to die and you’re going to struggle in this world. So spiritual food is the word of God. It is living. It is our bread of life, and the living waters is the Holy Spirit. So that’s what we eat and that’s what we drink to nourish ourselves spiritually.

So good.

There’s nothing that can replace that. I’m sorry. It just doesn’t work. It’s true. I’ve done it. Yoga doesn’t work. It’s going to take you down a path of darkness and destruction. And then physically, are you eating while? Are you resting? Are you managing your stress? Are you working out? What are you doing for your mind? Are you filling your mind with good information? Are you making sure you’re using the brain it needs to be used? Or if you don’t use your brain cells, you’ll lose them. And then emotionally, how are you addressing? What are you feeding into your emotional side? How are you stewarding that? How are you stewarding? That worshiping can be something we feel emotions when we worship. So that could be feeding ourselves in many ways and not just one way. So you have to address, what are the things that I want to feed into these four areas of my life That very important to do that. 

I have one last quote. It’s so good. It goes with what you said. I heard Dr. Crae say once, don’t be so holy that you forget about being whole. Whole. Oh, I like that. Don’t be so holy that you forget about being whole. And that’s your body, your spirit, and your soul.

Amen. I love this conversation. I’m so grateful that you’re joining us on this. I know you’re going to be back. Thank you for having me. We’ll see the feedback that we get from people and what because I know there are other topics that people want to learn more about this. And this is just kind of like an introducer, really, because the audience will see, I really want to know more about this, and I’ve been getting some good feedback from people. So we’ll invite you back so we can have more conversations on real topics, real practical things that we need to address. And so everyone, I want to thank you for joining us and enjoying the amazing information that Jacinda shared with us in these last two episodes. I hope you take a lot of great value with this. Don’t take your emotions for granted. They’re telling you something.

And remember, it’s part of who we are. We just have to learn to balance and navigate them in our life. And so as always, I share this video with someone you think would really benefit from learning this information. Make sure you’re subscribing to the channel, liking and sharing so that more people can have access to this free information that is so life-changing and transformation and transformative for themselves. So as always, everyone, I thank you and be 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, and 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.

The post EP20: Unmasking to Get to the Real YOU, So You Can Heal Part 2 appeared first on Raíces Naturopathic Medical Center.

Episode 19 Transcript

Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole person approach to your wellbeing, spirit, soul, and body. Join me your host, Dr. Ana Lara, 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, welcome back to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Alara, and today I have a very special guest. She’s a friend, a sister in Christ, and we’re going to talk about an amazing conversation on emotions on emotional health. So help me welcome Jacinda Gardner. She is the founder and creator of Soul Prompt. Welcome.

Thank you, Dr. Ana, for having me here. It’s like being with a friend. We talk on the phone all the time.

Yeah, that’s exactly what I want this to be. I want this to be a conversation just like all of my guests I bring on. We always have good conversations away from a mic and a camera. No different than that, right?

That’s right. That’s right.

So we have been talking for quite a bit about having a conversation and what did you want to really share with our audience? This podcast is dedicated to addressing not just the physical health of a person, but the mental health, the emotional health, and the spiritual health. We are all of these things. We don’t work in isolation. Right?

That’s right.

So share a little bit about yourself and what led you to start Soul Prompt.

So Soul Prompt. So let me start. I am a middle-aged mom of two teenage boys. I have a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old and maybe eight or nine years ago I went through a divorce and that experience really taught me a lot. The Lord spoke to me in so many ways. I grew up in a Christian home. My mom and dad are parents, and I knew the benefit of being spiritually mature, feed my spirit, feed my spirit, read the Bible. But I didn’t understand until I went through that experience that my soul mattered just as much as my spirit. And it kind of goes back to me my college days at Oral Roberts University. We always talked about the whole person and then when we talk, you’re always talking about that whole person that even in your practice, you’re not just treating the body, you’re also keeping in mind the mind and the spirit as well. So going through that experience, I had a lot of feelings. There was a lot of grieving going on and I didn’t know how to process those emotions. In fact, I would judge myself for having emotions because if I had those emotions it meant I wasn’t living in faith. And what I realized was that faith and feelings can coexist as long as I know where to put the feelings in their proper place.

And having both the spirit being mature and growing and nurturing and also nurturing my soul, I started seeing true transformation happen in my life. Whereas prior, yes, I would see change, but the two of those things working together, I really sort of wasn’t masking anymore and I was truly becoming a different person.

Wow, amazing. Amazing, powerful. I hope our audience is really catching all of this. What do you think, everyone’s story is going to be different, and unique, yes. But what do you think it was that made you not be okay with feeling your emotions or expressing your emotions?

Maybe I don’t know if I was taught or I just kind of picked up growing up that I have to push those emotions down to live in faith that God, they were bad. And I don’t think anyone told me your emotions are bad. I just sort of picked up from teaching that I need to speak the word of God and the word of God’s truth, and I need to push down and ignore my emotions and be a person of great faith. And a person of great faith doesn’t bow and give in to their emotions.

So if you’re angry, it’s not godly.

Exactly.

I mean obviously, there’s a balance in that, right? And we’re going to talk about that.

Why these emotions are there and there’s a balance to that. There’s a reason why you’re feeling it. And sometimes these behaviors that we acquire, like you said, no one verbally said it to you, but it’s implied through behavior and the interactions that people have. It’s you just pick it up. It’s a subtle way. And that subtle information that we pick up, that’s how we become programmed to think this is the way it is. But there’s never dialogue around that specific conversation of emotions. It just doesn’t happen.

It’s true. And it’s interesting because I believe that when I started getting really real about my emotions and not trying to hide them from God and not judging the emotions that come up and just say, okay, God, I am feeling X, y, z, I’m feeling jealous, I’m feeling sad, I’m feeling anxious, or whatever it is, and just leaned into it. Even if I was scared to lean into that pain or grief or whatever the feeling or emotion was, it’s when that mass came off and I was just dramatically just real about it, then that allowed God to really come to my rescue and help me. So we can look inside my heart to determine where is that coming from.

And so instead of judging the emotion, I started learning to be curious about it and asking about it like, God, why is this happening? I don’t want to feel like this. I don’t want this. This is not something great, but I’m trusting I need your help. How do I process this? How do I manage it in a way that I’m not masking it and trying to pretend to be a good Christian by pretending that that emotion is not there by stuffing it down? If I stuff down the emotion, then that means I’m a good Christian because I’m not feeling it. Instead of saying, you know what, Lord, I am feeling this. This is so real. Help me dig in my heart. Holy Spirit, help me to see, and bring me awareness through your word of what’s going on on the inside of me. And then that’s when he can help uproot that thing from your life.

Powerful. Powerful.

Yeah.

This is exactly what and what I love about what you’re saying is you’re really bringing in that relationship with God in our emotions.

Yes.

And I know I mentioned to you before, that if we do not allow ourselves to feel those emotions, how can you feel the presence of God in your life?

That’s right.

As you shut those emotions off from other people in the world, you’re going to shut them off completely.

That’s right.

And so it amazes me, and it doesn’t even matter whether you bring in religion or not or what religion. It’s everywhere. I’ve seen it across the board, men, women, different upbringings, the constant suppression of emotions. It’s like seeing as something unhealthy. We’re going to keep this conversation, but I want you to talk about soul prop. Oh, I forgot. See, I know this is why we just keep going and going, but I want you to touch on that so that we can’t continue to dive deeper into and lead that.

So what was happening was friends and family in my life, you have a relationship and they started talking about things that were going on, people losing, maybe it’s death, losing family members. Maybe it’s losing relationships like I had through divorce or friendships or losing the sense of grief around I thought my life was going to look a certain way and it doesn’t. I’m old and my life isn’t what I thought or wanted it to be. So all that brought these feelings of grief. And then what I started seeing was that people would get angry and frustrated, which is okay, that’s a process of grief. But what sometimes happened was they would get stuck in emotion. And when we judge something, we get stuck. And then when we feel like we’re justified in something, we get stuck. And I saw one of two things happen. Either people would move through the emotion and let themselves feel it and get really real about it and let it pass through them or they would hold onto it, feel justified in it, get stuck and become ugly on the inside. And when I was healing and going through counseling and coaching, I really had to fight to heal with a tender heart.

I didn’t want to be the type of person who said I was healed just because time passed. I wanted to heal and still have a soul, mind will and emotions that were open, that was compassionate, that wasn’t judgmental. And to have that, you have to be able to surrender that feeling.

That’s the word. And so I started realizing kind of going back through my own sort of testimony, how did we go through that process? Which by the way took a long time. This was not like, okay, I prayed and God touched me and I healed my heart. No, this was like God having to root things out of me using a situation where I allowed him in. And so one of the things I realized people would get stuck in, I feel justified I need justice. It’s not fair what I’m going through. So therefore I am going to hold onto my feelings and act in a way that’s not beneficial to me or the foundation of knowing who I am in faith or who I am as a person. And so we start trying to blame or whatever it might be. And I believe that in the word of God, the Bible says that God is the God of justice.

So having to let go of the justice that needs to happen to the other person or to God or whomever you might have those big feelings about was a process for me to surrender. So that is why I started Soul Prompt because I felt like there are people who really want to heal but aren’t sure how to get real with their feelings because they’re scared that if they do get real with their feelings, the feelings might overpower them and they may get lost in them forever and never recover. Or they feel like they’re living in doubt and they’re not being a good Christian by not being in faith because they’re feeling. And I just want to squash those lies. God gave us feelings. He’s asked us to be curious about it. We can even see this in Psalms, we can talk about that later. And when we do that, I think when we open ourselves up, like I said before and get really real, I saw God do something amazing in my heart and I am not the same person that I was before.

Amen. I love that. You mentioned a lot of great things in everything you said, but the key thing is two things that I want to extract from that is you have to come to a place where you’re willing to surrender.

Yep.

Because the bottom line is no human on this earth has figured out. So we have to be willing to surrender and feel those feelings and go through the second part, which is the process. Healing is a process. I don’t know why. We live in a culture where we want instant gratification. We want it now. We want it yesterday, a month ago I needed to go right away. And that’s not the way healing happens on any level unless it’s a miracle. That’s what a miracle is. It just happens. You didn’t have to do anything but have faith. And it happens. Not everyone gets a miracle. That’s an instant miracle.

It’s true.

But they get a miracle. That requires a process for you to go through the ugliness because the reality is that you’ve gone through your healing, which is another thing I want to extract from what you said is you did the work, you had to do the work before you went out there to help other people, to guide other people in their healing. If you don’t do it first, how can you lead someone to do it? And you can hear in your expression and how you articulate yourself, how you express yourself, even feeling the emotions coming through the excitement. You can tell that you have done your own healing. It’s messy. 

It’s messy. It’s hard. It sure is hard, hard. There’s nobody, nobody’s back there applauding for you. No one is cheering you on.

You know what? It is literally a choice.

I told you this the other day when we talked about this. I said, there’s a lot of people that will post on social media their healing journey, and they’re crying and whatever they’re doing in the background, no way. Anyone who’s done true healing work, you do not want a camera.

Yeah.

Oh no. In your face. No. You are not willing to post it on Facebook or Instagram or none of that.

It’s true.

That’s the lot. You’re not even thinking of anyone outside of yourself. You are just in this cocoon trying to heal.

You just want to get rid of the pain. It’s icky and some of us to certain things to get rid of the pain. We can say all the vices, everybody knows the vices. But what the Lord is saying, come to me. Come to me. Come to me.

Not always an instant gratification, but come to me and it is like I’ll deepen your trust in your faith in me as you walk through this process. And the beauty of the process is you can sustain the victory that you receive, the healing that you receive, you can sustain it and it’s harder for something or someone to take it away from you.

Absolutely.

Because you walk this thing step by step, even if you’re crawling, even if you feel like someone’s dragging you, it’s harder for me. I will fight for the healing that I know that God has given me because I went through that process. It’s easier to give up something when you haven’t paid when there’s no cost.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I’m not willing to give up what I worked for getting through medical school and healing and starting a clinic, starting the podcast. I am not going to give it up. I worked hard for this and I know that there’s a purpose and intention for this. It’s beyond me. Now when you heal that healing, you want to share it with the world.

And that’s the beauty of healing through your own hurt and trauma and so forth, is that it just opens up a whole different world. And I see it with my patients all the time. They heal physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, and they go through the transformation and now they have this divine connection that they’re like they’re making a career change or they’re doing something new that they never saw themselves doing because they want to pay it forward. And I believe that’s why the enemy consistently attacks us on emotions and from different perspectives. So let’s talk about why we have a culture. And it doesn’t matter what race, your background, so many people raise children to not feel their own emotions. I really believe that’s where most of the problem starts. I mentioned this to you the other day in Hispanic families and other cultures too. Now as adults, we joke around when we were kids and if a child cried, the parent would, if it was like you’re crying for nothing, just something petty. And the parent would say, stop crying. I’ll give you a reason to cry. And we laugh about it. Now, I

Might’ve said that, Dr. Adam. I know I might’ve said that before.

And the problem with that is that it’s sending a message to the child that it’s not okay to feel. And we’re not all parents, but some parents might not even be taking the time to understand why their child crying. What’s going on? Because there’s one of two things that could happen. Yes, they really are crying for no reason. But we need to be able to speak to that child and say, honey, it’s okay to feel emotions. It’s okay to cry sometimes. You’re going to want to cry for these reasons, and that’s okay, but we can’t cry because it’s time to go to bed. Why are you crying? You still want to stay up and have fun. I understand that, but we got to go to sleep.

What you’re saying is instead of saying don’t have the emotion, what you’re saying is let’s teach our children how to lead and steward the emotion. So how do I lead myself when I’m having a big emotional reaction? Right? Because feelings matter, but they’re not reliable. They matter. They’re important. 

They can be tricky, but they’re not reliable.

They can take you down a dark alley. 

Yes, they can. So instead of saying, don’t, let’s manage them, let’s, let me teach you then how to steward them and teach children how to regulate their emotions. Now we’re talking about a conscious parent, conscious parenting. The parent has to know this in order to teach it. So that means that the parent hasn’t done their own healing, dealing with their own emotions, learning how to self-regulate themselves emotionally, maybe dealing with their own trauma. You cannot teach it to your child if you don’t know it. If you haven’t done it, it’s if you’re not doing it.

It’s true because healing is always ongoing. This is like, I’m healed and yay, I’m done. That’s the other thing our audience should know. Our audience should know that in the process of healing, there’s not a hard cut-off day end day as you heal on this day and that’s it. It’s an ongoing process. But the beauty of it is, that what I have found is that the more you endure and go through the process, you look forward to it because you know what happens at the end of that journey, and you become better. You become clear. There’s more peace in you when you do feel that emotion. Now you can go into your mind and say, Hey, mind, where’s this emotion coming from? Hey God, where’s this emotion? Why am I feeling like this in this situation? Maybe take some deep breaths, maybe step away for a little bit. But you start going in inner to identify, is this me, or is this something I’m picking up from my environment?

I always talk about this example. I am a yeller of recovering yeller, I’ll say. And when I was going through my divorce, I yelled more because my emotions were everywhere, up and down every day. Grieving, sad, mad, didn’t matter, nothing could soothe. I’d spend time with Jesus and I’d had to increase my time and my relationship and my prayer time. I just was all over the place and I was taking it out on my kids. And there was no one else in the home to hold me accountable. There’s nobody to say stop it except for the Holy Spirit. And literally, I remember yelling at one of ’em, I don’t remember. And the Holy Spirit spoke to me and said, you’re crushing his spirit.

I mean, my heart tears weld in my eyes and I said, Lord, I need your help. Instead of me being like, okay, well I’m just going to confess. I’m going to name it and claim it. I’m going to give I am statements. I’m going to speak the word, which none of those things are wrong. Those are amazing tools. But before we do any of that, we have to say, Lord, forgive me. Help me in this moment. And I invited my kids on the process. I apologized to them and I said, I should not be yelling at you this much. And I know that it’s wrong. And the Lord’s sort of speaking to me about it. So I am asking for your grace. As I walk this process, I know it’s going to be a process my go-to, it’s what I do. And we all have different things that we cope with, we go to, that’s what we do.

And so I would catch myself in the act, I’d yell at them about something that maybe they even deserved, but there was this extra oomph to it because of my own anxiety or the emotions I was feeling on the inside. And I would stop in the middle. I would count to 10 and I would be like, I just do it. And they would just be staring at me like You’re crazy in the middle. But then, in that process, of doing those things, I started changing the way that I showed up for my kids. And so now I don’t yell. You could ask either of them. I feel very confident. But that took a year of practicing. That took a year of me leaning into it and being intentional. And what I’m saying is through that process, I don’t yell as much. And now I catch myself having that awareness much quicker than I did on day one. So the process matters is the point that I’m

Absolutely. From your perspective and experience, what have you seen in people when they don’t take the time to heal and feel, heal and feel?

I like that. It makes me sad because I know that emotions can be so big. They can be so loud and can feel overwhelming that like you said prior, people want that instant healing. And if it’s not happening fast enough and God’s not working fast enough, they’re just, okay, I’ll take matters into my own hands. But what ends up happening is they have to eventually reroute back to the starting point where they were before because they’re not dealing with what’s going on on the inside of them. And so I feel like they preempt what they’re really looking for and praying for. And I think it extends the process of healing because you’re not willing. I remember I was sitting in my room and I was fasting, I was praying. I had people praying for my marriage, all the things I was doing, all the things to try to get God to move and change my situation. I wanted a rescue and I wanted a rescue quick.

And it had been like I don’t know how many months. And I remember the Lord saying to me, relax, buckle up, and let me take you through this process. In other words, it was like, you can fast every single day this week. This is not going to go any further or faster because there are things I’m trying to do inside of you. I’m trying to use this moment to do something amazing what I have for you, my gifts that I have for you. I’m trying to give them to you and put them inside of you, but you have to relax and stop doing and just be with me and walk with me through the process. Dr. Anna, that wasn’t the most fun thing to hear in the moment at all. But it was the best thing. And did I get impatient along the way? Heck yeah. But I had to go back and remember, okay, it’s okay. I can’t manipulate God to do something faster. That was my motive. So yes, fasting is good. Prayer is good, but my motive was if I did these things, then God would move faster and rescue me from this situation. It was as if it was to do things on your checklistlist. Yes, I need him. I need to show myself approved to God so he can move on my behalf. I’m looking for that miracle you were talking

About. Here’s the thing as uncomfortable as it is, well, God, there’s just so many things you said. I just want to dissect it all. So there’s a lot. There’s to say that there’s a huge importance when people slow down. I always tell my patients, you cannot heal if you don’t slow down. I’m not saying to stop completely, but you have to slow down. You’re going 200 miles an hour. Your body does not want that. Our nervous system wants balance.

So the physical structures of the body, the brain, and the nervous system wants to be in a parasympathetic state. It wants to be relaxed. Even God will tell us, slow down, be still and know that I am God. I am God. That’s good. If you are not still and genuine in the moment, not just like, okay, there’s a checklist. I did my prayer and my meditation. I’m checking things off. You’re not doing it from the heart. It’s true. You got to feel. You have to feel that desire to do that. And these emotions are a huge driving force. It’s part of us. Yo, they’re not going anywhere. We’re born with emotion. That’s right. And we even die with emotions. We will never be able to get rid of them. And what’s the first thing that psychiatrists and counselors do when they get a patient with anxiety or PTSD? They medicate them and what are they going to do? Suppress it. We’re going to further suppress what your body has already been flagging you and telling you there’s something wrong. So we need to teach people. When you feel these things in your body, it’s giving you a sign. Yes. And don’t judge it. And don’t judge it. Not judge it.

Yes.

If I start to feel a little anxious or nervous, my body is saying, my nervous system is saying, we don’t feel safe here. Something’s off. Maybe I didn’t eat. That could be it. Yes,

Yes.

Maybe I need to eat and my glucose is too low, so I’m feeling jittery. It might be that simple, very true. But unfortunately, it’s sometimes a lot more than that when there’s a history of suppressing emotion, suppressing trauma, not wanting to look back, and not wanting to heal through that because you already passed that situation. You feel like you’re done and over with. Why is that thing from 30 years, 40 years ago, bothering me now it can’t be. And it is because you never faced the emotions. You were feelings. And granted, when we’re children, it’s a very vulnerable time. We don’t have a lot of power and authority and say the right decision-making power is not there most of the time. But when we become adults, we have the power and authority. And so I tell people, you become an adult when you take responsibility of yourself physically and mentally, emotionally and spiritually. That’s maturity.

When you say, that whatever happened to me in the past is no longer going to have power over me now and in the future, and I want to heal through that. And so everyone reaches that maturity at a different age. It’s not 18.

It’s true.

It’s not. I am 45. I’ve done a lot of work in the last 15, 20 years. I’m still in the process of maturing.

Me too. Me too.

And one of the things that I’m sure you can agree on is that if anything, going through this journey of healing that deep is that you really humble yourself. You slow down and you humble yourself. And you’re okay with not being okay.

It’s true. It’s true.

And then you’re gentle with yourself and all the grace and compassion you give to others, you learn to give it to the little you. 

It’s really good. Yes.

I always say heal that inner child in you, heal the little Jacinda in you. I had to heal little Anna in me and give her permission to feel when I was a little girl, I realized I was full of emotions. I felt everything, and I couldn’t necessarily express it all. So I grew up in a culture, obviously in a home where, yeah, I was loving and kind, but it was like be tough. And so I always grew with this mindset that I am emotionally weak. Someone will say something, it’ll hurt my feelings. Or if I go into a place and I feel like everyone’s so abrasive, I feel hurt. And so I remember as a child in grade school thinking the world was so mean. And I would ask God, God, why are people so mean? I felt like I didn’t belong here. But as I grew older, I learned, that I adapted to the harsh environment of the community I grew up in. Obviously, you grew up around gang members and violence and crime, and tough people who teach you to toughen up. And it’s not a bad thing to survive.

I learned later on Jacinda that God needed to strengthen me mentally and emotionally so that I could not just survive that environment but deal with the heart situations later on as an adult.

That’s right. That’s so good. It toughened me up, but it closed off my heart. So through so many situations, I closed off my heart and did not feel I suppressed my emotions. And I did a great job, a plus plus. I was a badie. No one was going to mess with me. But that wasn’t good for me because that wasn’t the original design that God made me to be. That wasn’t me.

It’s not. And what’s interesting is that I thought because I was honest, I was vulnerable. But I found out through my friendships and good people in my life that I had walls all the way up all around. And they said to me, it took forever to get through your walls. I’m like, no, I’m walls. I’m like, I’m so honest. And I realized when we cut that part of us, we cut out. The very gift that God has given us is given us. 

Absolutely.

With him and with each other.

Absolutely.

And when we’re strong spiritually, and we could be spiritual giants, that’s amazing. But we also have to be strong mentally, emotionally, and physically because the enemy wants to keep us from each other and have a connection. So I could be a spiritual giant, but get offended really quick or be easy to get to anger or whatever it may be. And the Lord’s saying, I feel like even in these times, yes, be spiritually mature, but your resilience in your soul and your mind and your emotions need to be just as strong because the enemy is looking for any way to get to our heart. Absolutely. He wants to get to our heart. And how does the enemy get in through our senses, through our emotions? And the heart is in the middle of us, and we have to protect our heart at all costs. So it matters that our soul is strong and that we have the armor of God on not just for our spiritual strength, but for our mental strength, for our emotional strength. It’s just as important. I am passionate about that because it’s like I don’t want to be spiritually strong, but emotionally weak.

That is a door for the enemy. And I also think on the flip side of that is we had walls, but there are other people who feel so much and give in and sort of live according to all of those feelings, that they don’t allow the word of God, God’s character and his nature to be the king of their heart instead their emotion.

And I think that was for me, that was the reason why I had to strengthen myself emotionally as a child because I did feel everything. I am a feeler now. And because I’ve gone through the process of healing and understanding what he was doing in my life, I realized that’s what makes me a good doctor. That’s what helps me to be compassionate, to go into a space and feel what that person is feeling. And it’s not me. 

I saw that this was a gift that I needed to learn to steward well, to learn how to manage it so that I wasn’t letting my feelings and emotions just run wild. Had I now gone through those experiences, I would have been that I would’ve let my emotions run wild. So I explained this analogy to my patients. I feel like when we give people a visual, it’s easier for them understand to understand. So as we get ready to wrap up here, I want to share this. And then this is going to be part one of two. We’re going to continue this conversation into the next episode, but I want to end with this analogy of how I depict the body and the soul, the mind, the emotions, all of that. So I tell people that imagine you have three horses, and each horse represents the physical body. The other represents the mind, and the other represents emotions.

Now, the soul is sitting on this chariot in control of these three. But what controls the soul is the spirit of God. Come on. So God is controlling the soul that’s on here and that’s balance. Now, when the physical body is, if the soul is not in control of the reins of these horses and say the physical body is running wild, that’s addiction. That’s everything fleshy of the world. It’s going to want to run. The physical body wants to run, that horse wants to take off, and it’s going to pull you in that direction if you give it the power if you let it lead.

That’s right.

Same thing with the mind. The mind. You can start thinking about something, then it gets the emotions involved, and then it starts becoming into an action. But the emotions are the same thing. If we feel something and now we allow our mind to fester on that emotion and then let our bodies consume that feeling, it’s going to start running wild. And unfortunately, we live in a world where the physical body, the mind and the emotions, are running the show.

It’s true.

The soul is not in control of this and definitely not the spirit. And this amazing pastor, once I heard him talk and he shared, he was talking about this and he said, the spirit is untouchable. The spirit is one thing that no one can hurt because that belongs to God. They can hurt you physically. People can hurt you mentally and emotionally, but they cannot touch the spirit because that comes from God. And so with that, we’re going to wrap this part up and we’re going to continue this conversation. We want to talk to you about how do you start leaning into your emotions and allowing yourself, what’s the balance. How to get help, right? Sometimes you do need someone who will lead you and can understand this in a holistic perspective and in the spiritual perspective to lead you to start feeling your emotions, to navigate through that sea of emotions.

How do you utilize your emotions to help guide you in your life instead of suppressing them? And when you suppress emotions, they will end up being physical manifestations of illness in your body. And we’re going to talk about that in the next episode. So you do not want to miss the next episode of this series. Until then, be 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, and 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.

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Complications of Suppressing Grief Transcript

Welcome to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast empowering you to take a whole person approach to your wellbeing, 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. Welcome back to Physician Heal Self, the podcast. I’m Dr. Alara. And today we’re going to have a conversation about a topic that not many people like to have, and that’s discussing grief. So as this episode airs in early October, we’re coming into months where people will start experiencing hard times as they have had loss in their life. It’s inevitable, and so people sometimes have a really hard time going through the holidays. So joining me, I have my guest, Casey Nichols from Valley Fitness Kickboxing. The reason that we are having this conversation is that one day after we were done with kickboxing, you were checking in on me how I was doing with my dad’s loss. This led to a very awesome conversation that we started to have about grief and how we both interestingly process grief in a very unhealthy way at one point in our lives.

So I think it’s very important that we have a platform to talk about these things and to share our knowledge and wisdom with other people who might be younger because no one really teaches us how we process loss. How do we process grief?

Yeah, like we were saying in that conversation, it’s kind of funny how when you’re brought up your parents and everyone that’s guiding you in life, teaches you all these things, but they kind of don’t teach you. One of the most important things is when grief strikes and it will strike, what do you do? And we’re all different people from different genders, cultures, whatever, but it’s happened to you and there’s not a one size fits all, but you’re going to have to find your way of dealing with whatever is happening to you and you can ignore it.

It’s going to happen to all of us, right?

We’re going to experience the loss of a loved one, of a friend, or family member, loss of a job. Anything that we lose brings grief into our lives. So we’re going to talk, we’re going to really in-depth here and talk about some of the things that we found that we had in common and how we process grief unhealthy at one point in our lives. So share a little bit about your story. 

So this past Monday, which was August 26th, I celebrated five years of sobriety. So that means that for six years I was not sober, going all the way back to 2013 when I was 33 years old. My older brother passed away, and it was a very tragic thing. We didn’t expect it. Unfortunately, he took his own life. So it was extremely horrible and tragic, and no one saw it coming. It’s not like we were dealing with this illness. It was horrible. And at that point, I was 33 years old. I lived in Southern California. I had a good job. I had a girlfriend, I had a bunch of friends. I had a really good life. And I mean, I had gone out drinking with friends and stuff. We went out, but I didn’t use anything on a consistent basis. I should say that I didn’t use drugs at all, really.

I might smoke some weed or anything, but when that happened, I was beside myself with grief. I remember literally feeling like I got hit by a truck. It affected not only me emotionally, but physically, it was I can’t even express to somebody how horrible and the weight that you feel on you. It’s unbelievable. And so when I came back to Arizona for his service, a girl that I went to high school with gave me a Percocet at his service, a painkiller. And I remember being at his service and then the after party of the wake afterward, and I didn’t feel that bad. I remember I saw old friends, it wasn’t fun, but I didn’t feel that horrible weight of depression. And so I thought, well, I should get some more of those Percocets. And so that started a very long, very dark, very horrible self-medicating process.

And eventually, that turned into a dependency and it turned into more of a chemical dependency than an emotional thing. But long story short, I didn’t deal with the grief in the right way. I didn’t go to a grief counselor, and my group of friends didn’t know what to do with me. It was such a horrible thing. And it happened out of the blue. And all of my guy friends, I literally remember they all said the same thing. They said I don’t know what to say to you. And they were being genuine, and I felt bad for them. And I know they felt horrible for me, but it’s such a strange thing, and guys don’t know how to deal with that stuff. No one’s ever told us what to do. And I remember a couple of friends invited me over for dinner and we had these awkward dinners and conversations. They were trying to do something. They knew they needed to do something, but they didn’t know what to do. And some friends tried not to bring it up and that didn’t work. And I remember I had one or two friends, we’re just going to get you drunk. We’re just going to keep getting you drunk.

And that didn’t work. And I just went through this very slow, very long process of pulling away from everyone. They felt weird. I felt weird. And then my usage tripled. Quadrupled. And fast forward, probably in 2015, so two years after that, my life was obliterated. My job was gone, my girlfriends were gone, my girlfriend was gone. It’s okay. My girlfriend was gone, my job was gone, my friends were gone. My money was gone. At one point, my freedom was gone. Everything was demolished. I burned my life to the ground, all because I couldn’t go to therapy or I couldn’t find an outlet for that. Now, my mother went through the same thing I did, and probably even worse, she lost her son.

My mom has every reason in the world to be a bitter person and to be mean and to just hate life and hate God and everything. My mom is the kindest, sweetest, nicest person on the face of the earth. And she said horrible things happen to her. She lost her son. She lost her own brother when she was in her twenties, but she loves life and she’s the kindest person ever. When my brother died in 2013, her best friend came to the house every day, got her out, took her to coffee, took her for walks, and they talked about it and they talked about him and they talked about all the fond memories. And she didn’t bottle it down. She didn’t ignore it. She had someone with her that she could just talk to. And she didn’t actually go to grief therapy, but she had a grief therapist built-in with her best friend Marcy.

And my mom got through it pretty well. I did not. I’m supposed to be the big, strong, tough guy, and fast forward two years and I’m still a mess. And not only now, I created a much bigger problem because I had a dependency and I still never dealt with my brother’s death. So even when I got clean and sober, then I had to go through the grieving process all over again. So as a guy, it was extremely hard not only to see it and to be like, okay, I have to deal with this. I can’t avoid it, but then what do you do? Do I go to counseling? It’s such a strange, horrible thing, but if you don’t deal with it, strange, horrible things are going to happen to you. And I am proof that if you don’t deal with the problem, it’s going to become much, much, much bigger.

Yeah. Wow. Thank you for sharing all that. I mean, I know that this is getting recorded, but I’m just sitting here listening to everything that you’re saying. If the cameras are not there, and I just want to say thank you for being willing to be vulnerable and share all that detail because this is why I tell people, any person, any good person can go down any of these behavioral patterns and end up in chaos. It doesn’t mean that you’re a bad person. And it comes from not dealing with grief in a healthy way. And this is a great example of what I mean. There are so many great points that you share with your friends, they care, and they care about you.

They loved me.

They didn’t know what to do, but they didn’t know how. And that is the honest truth of society in our world and our friends. And sometimes people, don’t know how to show up.

And guys especially, we are the heavyweight champions of not dealing with our emotions and ignoring our emotions. And when something happens to someone you care about and it’s so powerful, it affects you. You don’t know how to deal with them. You’re supposed to do something, but you don’t know what to say to ’em. And we need as a society, but men, we need to figure out, and we should have older role models teaching us, okay, when life punches you in the face, you do this and this and this, and it’s okay to have feelings. It’s okay to talk about it. It’s okay to express this stuff and to get it out and not let it bundle up and build up. And it’s like an emotional cancer.

Great analogy. It is an emotional cancer. And you’re right, we have a society that we live in and in many different small social circles that they’ve given the term emotions or feelings and negative connotation, but it’s not. God gave us these feelings and emotions for a reason, but we do need to learn. How do we balance that? How do we navigate them? How do we use them? And then what do we listen to or not?

I think more people are becoming aware of that and they’re trying to learn that. But emotional regulation is really important. Especially I can see in men too, culture that I just heard many people in my family when a little boy is crying, stop crying when girls cry. I mean, that’s the wrong message to send because when you do lose your brother from suicide, that’s what you want to do. Do you want to cry?

Yeah. I was raised under a very strong and silent type. Boys don’t cry in a very John Wayne household. If people know what that means, and when feelings hit me over the head like a ton of brick, I did not know how to deal with them. And so I didn’t. I self-medicated and self-medicated through a tragedy like that. Even a minor tragedy, self-medicating is the wrong thing to do. Like dumping gasoline on a fire, you’re taking a problem and you’re making it 10 times worse. It literally ruined my entire life.

I always tell people, Casey, we can deal with the emotions or the situation right now and pay the price now and do it, or we can do it later, but it’s going to come with accumulated interest and it’ll be harder. You made such great points, like you said, yeah, you got over the addiction, but you still haven’t.

I had to go through it.

You still had to go through the grief process.

It’s like you go through the grief process early on or you do it later on and it’s going to hit you at one point, but no one tells you that when you’re 33 or 20 years old.

And I realize in this whole process, and I’m actually a very emotional person, and I’m more in touch with them now, and I think I know how to deal with them now a little bit better than I did. But trying to ignore that they even exist is just foolish.

It’s ludicrous.

It’s stupid.

It’s the dumbest thing to think you’re a human being.

You’re going to have emotions because that is what makes us human. Rocks don’t have emotions.

It’s part of the good part of it being human. Yeah.

And here’s the one thing I learned through my journey, and I’ll share my story because we both made unhealthy choices.

I went in one direction.

There’s no one better than the other one. I always said it was just a matter of time that I would probably go down the rabbit hole in one way or another. But is that, so one thing that I learned in my healing process, and then I’ll share my story, is that when we suppress one emotion, like a bad emotion, we don’t want to feel grief really. We don’t want to feel the sadness. It sucks to feel sad. We don’t want to feel it. We want to avoid it. And by suppressing the sadness, we also suppress all the other emotions. So our brain has a part that I should have brought my brain prop today. 

But there’s the limbic system. And in that limbic system is the amygdala and this part of the brain, the amygdala, is the center of the brain where we feel emotions, the good and the bad ones. We also perceive pain there. Isn’t that interesting that the same part of the brain where we perceive pain is also the emotional center. 

Very connected.

So emotions can be painful.

Oh God, yeah.

And pain can cause you to be emotional. I’ve worked with a lot of people with chronic pain who have had tragic accidents, and what do they do? They feel emotional men who all of a sudden feel very emotional. And sometimes those emotions come out as anger. Emotions are not bad. It’s what we do with them, how we react to life around us. So an emotion could be love and joy and happiness, laughter, those are your emotions are good, but so is sadness and anger and rage and frustration, loneliness and sadness. All of those are emotions.

Yeah, it’s a yin or yang. And I think one of, if there’s a point I could get across to the viewers out there is that if you’re a guy or a female, having emotions is not a bad thing.

You’re going to have emotions. You want to have emotions. You want to.

You just need to know how to deal with the bad ones and the good ones when they come up. Have an outlet for them.

You can use a sports analogy, you need to have a playbook when something really, really bad happens.

And that’s it. You got to have a playbook.

We have to have some tools and things too.

That’s a great way.

So that when you do feel that you have an outlet for it or you have a way to regulate it. So if you suppress sadness, you’re going to suppress joy and happiness. Love.

That’s actually a really good point. So when I was going through the dark ages as I call ’em, I was using, which you would think would be a really fun, happy time. I don’t think I smiled for four years straight. Not only did I suppress my negative emotions, I suppressed everything, all of them.

Everyone described me as like they said, you were a very watered-down version of yourself. You had no joy. You were just like a zombie. You just were a version of yourself that was like 70% or 60% faded away. Your personality was gone. I suppressed everything.

So the interesting thing about grief is that it will hijack your brain. There’s such a thing as grief brain, and brain fog. Well, people have grief.

That makes sense. They grieve and their brain is hijacked. And that’s why you see that in other people. And obviously our stories. There were good things that came out of that because we walked that journey to know what it’s like. So my story was when I was 20, my brother who was 34 at the time, had leukemia. And he was young, he was fit. He was a lively person. In the life of our family, he had four children too. And I just thought I was super optimistic. Super optimistic. God is going to heal him. He’s going to get healed. He’s going to fight. This is in 1999, okay, medical treatments then were not what they are now. He had no fighting chance. He did maybe a couple of treatments of chemo and he decided on his own that he wasn’t going to do that. And he kind of came to accept his death. I didn’t. I was still optimistic and I was in denial. You have the four or five stages of grief. I was in denial that whole time. 

He’s not going to die. He’s going to make it.

So when it did happen, it felt like it was sudden.

I had this God moment where, a day after his birthday, I went hiking South Mountain. I ran up this trail in August. It was hot. It was early morning. And I had this encounter where when I got to the top, I said, God, take my life and give it to him. And I’m trying not to get emotional here, but I wanted to give him my life because he had four children and I didn’t. And I felt like if I could just give him my life, I remember saying to God, God, people need him. He has children. Nobody needs me. That I heard God’s voice clearly say, that’s not the way it works.

You heard it.

I heard him tell me, that’s not the way it works. His time has come. And it was something about hearing that that just kind of brought me to my knees and said, yeah, he’s leaving. He’s done. And I had, of course, that encounter kept me there where I knew that, and some people may believe this or not, it doesn’t really matter. I know what I experienced at the top of that mountain that day. I felt the encounter of God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus all in that moment on top of that mountain. I was desperate. And I heard God tell me that his son had already shed his blood on the cross for us. I was not going to church at this time, Casey.

You weren’t really at this time. I believed in God. I had, but I didn’t like going to church. I knew everything about the Bible. No, but God told me that he already shed his life for us. And that while I had a noble heart, that’s not the way it worked.

Wow. I didn’t know that part.

And not many people know that. Well, now they will. So even after that, even after you had that God moment, which you would think would be kind of cathartic, right?

But I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry. That was one of them while he was ill. That was the first time I cried. But I didn’t cry. That was the rule. I’m not going to cry around my family and my brother. I wanted to be strong for him and the family.

That makes sense in a certain context. But you’re when you’re by yourself, did you break down?

I broke down when I was by myself.

Yeah, you probably needed to.

I needed to. A month later, he died. And I remember not crying after that. Not crying for his service.

The funeral. I was just like a rock. I felt that I needed to be strong. That was a good thing. But if you remember my conversation with you when I was six years old and I experienced the death of someone, it was one of my aunts. I didn’t know we died. I didn’t understand any of that. And I had this situation where I went up to the casket and I touched her. And immediately my brain knew she was not there. She’s not there.

I had such an emotional, strong emotional response at that moment. I cried so loud. I mean, I was really not able to remember. I was six years old and obviously the adults around me were not able to help me through that. So they were yelling at him. Women, I remember women yelling, calm down, calming me down. And that was actually firing up my brain more, creating more of a trauma response for me. I remember that night going to sleep, crying. I cried and cried and cried until I fell asleep. I was not allowed to participate the next day in any of the funeral arrangements that they did. But I remember nobody talked to me about it.

I don’t remember anyone hugging me, touching me, telling me, it’s okay. You’re safe. And that’s why the little girl, me needed a hug. You’re going to be okay. Okay. And then someone to tell me this is what happened. Never had that. 

That’s really interesting. When you very first experienced it, nobody, communicated to you in a way that you needed to be strong and shut up,

Shut up.

And then the second time it happened to you, you did it unconsciously,

Unconscious, or subconsciously.

It was making up for that response. You thought, oh, this happened again. This is what I’m supposed to do.

I remember clearly after the age of six, I constantly thought about God and I would think about why God put us on this earth. Where do we come from? Why are we here? What am I supposed to do here? And when we die, where do we go? Where did my aunt go? I knew her physical body was there, but as a child, I knew she wasn’t there. So I was trying to explore the soul and the spirit at six years old, and I had no guidance from anyone, and I wasn’t talking about it to anyone. And so constant, I remember it was a constant everyday thing that I would think about and process it.

So when your brother passed, did you kind of repeat that same thing right after it happened? What was the next six months of your life? 

So from the time I was six years old to my adult life, I made it the intention that I was going to become stronger and stronger emotionally. But my perception of stronger was to not show. 

That’s a really good point. Express strong emotion. Being strong emotionally does not mean ignoring your emotions. No knowing yet. 

And I did that knowing how to deal with them.

And I remember every year I kind of mentally would check myself like, I’m getting stronger. I’m not crying. I’m not crying about this. I’m stronger and stronger, more resilient, ignoring it. And I was patting myself on the back for that. And it was unhealthy. It was an unhealthy way to look at emotions. So when my brother got sick, I was strong. Besides that one moment at the mountain when it broke down, everything else was I’m strong, strong. So when he did pass away, on September 19th is when he passed away in 1999, I remember unconsciously not realizing my actions, I went into complete avoidance, not thinking about it. It wasn’t something I planned. I went into autopilot. And then I know this now because I have unpacked all that and done a lot of healing in the last 10, 15 years of my life. But what I realized was that I felt this immense pain of seeing my brother, a strong young man dying slowly before me and thinking, this hurts a lot. It hurts a lot to see someone die. And so then I thought, I never want to feel this again. Forget this. And unconsciously realizing that the closer someone is to me, it’s going to hurt me.

So you keep people at bay, right? 

So I started putting up, I said I put up walls around me, around friendships and family kept, if I don’t have connections, I can’t get up. I can’t. If I don’t have a connection, it’s not going to hurt me.

That’s such a horrible way to, I can just run away from, it’s such a man thing to do.

Yeah, it’s very true.

So this is why I think this conversation is important because a lot of people think that only men do this. But no, a lot of women run away from the pain too. And it could be a cultural family upbringing thing, whatever. But I went into avoidance. So what I did is I overworked myself. I was in college, I was working. I was part of all these different nonprofit organizations. Anything I can volunteer myself to, I signed myself up too. As long as I didn’t get to see my family, I was good.

So you avoided all your family members? I avoided everyone. I remember shortly after my brother passed away if I was in my mom’s presence and she started to cry and reminisce about him, I would peace out a mouth.

I was so cold. I wasn’t rude to her, but I would find a way to, I need to peel myself away from this. I don’t want to sit in your pain and discomfort because guess what? I don’t want to sit in my pain and discomfort. And I did a whole conversation a couple of episodes back on the Art of Compassion. And I said on there, I know these things because I have walked through them. I was doing these things. And I know that when someone can’t sit with your pain, they don’t have compassion. It’s because they don’t want to feel your pain. They don’t want to feel their pain. They can’t go through it themselves.

They can’t go through it.

I remember a couple of months after it happened, my mom talked about him all the time, and I had a lot of that feeling of trying to avoid the conversation or trying to change the subject. And then I heard someone else a long time later talking about, if you do that, you’re robbing yourself of the memories of that person. So if you get so closed off to a point that you’re not able to talk about how wonderful they were and how amazing they were and all these good times that you had together, not only are they gone, but now all those memories are gone. But if you deal with it in a healthy way, then you’re able, and now I can talk to my mom. We reminisce about ’em all the time and it’s great, and it feels good to talk about all that fun stuff. But if both of us didn’t get to a place where we could, then neither one of us would be able to talk about those emotions. So if you don’t deal with it, you’re going to rob yourself of all these beautiful, amazing memories of that person. And that’s wrong.

I didn’t go through my healing process until I think my body caught up to me eventually.

Yeah. When did it hit you? 

I was like 26, 27 years old. I remember it was 2006. That’s when I was like, I physically cannot function. My brain was not there. And I went to the doctor and they’re like, oh, you have hypothyroid. You have this, you have that. But Casey, I just knew in my heart that it was all that grief that never dealt with all the emotions that were just piling up inside of me that I never dealt with. And I walked away from that doctor’s visit asking myself, what did I do? What did I do that contributed to me being here? And immediately my mind went to my brother’s laws. And I was almost angry. I was angry like, damnit, why is this still showing up? It’s been eight years ago, seven years ago. Why?

In a way, you said to yourself, I’ve already dealt with this, but you never did.

I never dealt with it.

I was avoiding it. So there are ways that we deal with trauma, and one of them is avoiding it,

We just avoid it. We don’t look at it. It’s just easier to keep moving. And I would not recommend to anyone to do that because that will make it worse.

It’ll eventually turn up.

It’ll either come out in a different area of your life or it’ll come out as stress or something. Anger will find, yeah, that’s a horrible one. And then you take it out on people around you.

Absolutely. It’s a horrible way to do it. You either take it out on other people or you take it out on yourself. You feel guilty for whatever.

Exactly. And the other way that, I mean, there’s many ways, but the other way that people sometimes will deal with trauma is to minimize the problem. So you have this big situation that happened, experience, but you make it small so you can handle this little problem instead of this big situation that happened. I realized through my process of dealing with grief and all of that, that unpacking the trauma was that I was an expert at avoidance and minimizing.

I grew up in the hood. No big deal. 

So what? Drive by shooting?

Yeah, it happens. No big deal. It wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t see it as a big deal. And I became an expert at doing that in my life. So now I had to unpack that and say, no, we face the issues that come at us in the moment that we’re in. And it was a process. I remember I probably started my healing journey definitely from 2007 and on. And even through medical school. I always say medical school was a hospital for me. It really was. I had many great doctors and colleagues who helped me through the process. And I knew that God needed me to heal through that before I became a doctor.

That makes a lot of sense.

And that’s why you it has to be fixed before you can fix others.

And that’s why this podcast is called Physician Heal Myself. Because I have to go through that process of healing myself to be comfortable working with other people. Can you imagine in my office, people are sharing their trauma, their pain, their hurt, grief, and you’re like, can’t talk about this. I could never have been the doctor that I am today had I not given myself that time to heal and process the trauma and just unpack it all and now allow myself to feel. And I realize, Casey, that feeling those emotions is actually my superpower because being in tune with my emotions makes me feel other people’s emotions. And that’s what makes me a good doctor, is that I can feel their pain and I can understand what compassion, where they’re coming from. I can have empathy for them and guide them.

Someone told me a long time ago that your feelings are there for a reason and we’re connected to each other and to this plan and into life and to reality. And you don’t want to disconnect any of those little feelers. You need to know how to deal with them and how much attention to pay to ’em. But you don’t want to disconnect from anything. 

You need to be a part of this whole thing, and you need to be a part of the culture and the people around you. And so if you’re disconnecting, then that’s a horrible, horrible way to go. Absolutely. So even if you have negative emotions, those negative emotions are there for a reason. All our emotions are there for a reason. So you need to figure out why and figure out what you can do with it versus disconnecting.

And I’ll even go further to say that. Absolutely. I feel, I’ve always said that our emotions are little antennas in our body, in our nervous system, that it’s our feelers that we feel the environment is safe or not. And our nervous system is really quick. It’ll let us know whether this environment is safe or not. That’s really what our nervous system is there for. Are you safe or not? And the moment you don’t feel safe, that’s when we start doing the dumb, unhealthy things, whatever it is. But the emotions are there and it is a network of, that’s why you can go into an environment and it’s fun. It’s safe. Or you’re like, Hey, there’s something really here going on. I got to get out.

You got to gut. Yeah, you have to trust your gut. So what’s one thing that you wished you would’ve done when you got off that mountain when your brother passed within those first couple of weeks?

Oh, what a great question, Casey. I wish I would have been more expressive to my brother to just really tell him how much he meant to me. And I know that that whole experience brought me closer to God. It really did. And I wish I would’ve understood what I know now that I understood then. And that was when I knew where his soul was going to go, because this experience around with my dad was different when he passed

Away. Yeah, that’s a good point. There are different types.

Yeah, that’s what we were talking about So that’s what I would’ve done. That’s what I would’ve done, is I would’ve been more expressive to him of my love, because my brother was kind of like a rough guy. But if there’s one thing I’ll tell you of everyone in our family, he was the most expressive emotionally. He hugged us and loved us. And that’s what was missed was that that’s what he represented to me in our family, that he was comfortable expressing himself. I wasn’t.

So he was a rough, manly man and in touch with his emotions.

He was the kind of guy who, if someone started trouble with him, would have no problem fighting. But at the same, actually, he was the one who started teaching me how to fight when I was young. Yeah. He was like, you’re going to need to know how to fight.

You’re going to need to know.

Someone’s going to mess with you. You need to fight back.

Yeah. That’s actually a pretty good analogy. If you’re a human being walking on this face of the earth, grief is going to happen.

It is.

So you need to learn how to fight it.

I felt very unfair. Why him? He’s healthy. He’s young.

He’s vibrant.

Why I’ve asked that question? I’ve screamed at heaven so many times and see with my dad, I didn’t ask that. It’s a different type.

It’s a different type. So we talked about when we were at the gym, we were talking about how, and some people might disagree with this, it doesn’t really matter. You’re entitled to your opinion. But I do believe that grief is different based on each experience.

Because you could have two brothers that pass away. Suicide is very gnarly. There are so many unanswered questions. Its closure. Makes it difficult. 

Yeah. There really is.

It’s horrible. There’s all these questions you have.

It’s horrible. Almost on every scale. It was almost so bad. It was overwhelming. And I remember feeling like in a day’s for those first couple of weeks or days, it just, what? And then all these questions that you’re never going to get answered.

Never.

And you have to figure out a way to come to terms with that.

Yeah. I’ve had friends who’ve committed suicide, and I can’t imagine what the family felt.

Oh my God.

But I know as a friend, I’m like, why did you do that? Why?

And then you get angry and it’s like, could I have prevented it? Why didn’t I see it?

Yeah. I blamed myself. I blamed others. I blamed God.

Right. Everyone.

I don’t know. Hopefully one day I’ll get to ask him.

You will. You’ll get your answer. Sometimes people’s pain is so much they cannot handle it. It was overwhelming.

It’s overwhelming to him.

It was overwhelming. I felt like I was falling off a cliff.

Yeah. So it’s like, can you imagine, what was your brother experiencing in his life that he was led to Just end it there.

Yeah. Pretty horrible. If I were going to, I kind of ask myself the same question. I think I was so overwhelmed and I was surrounded. I was in, I am a guy’s guy, early thirties. I needed professional help. I mean, it would’ve been great if I had a buddy that I could have talked to an outlet, but I was so far gone that I should have sought grief counseling right away. And just to deal with all of those questions, all of the what ifs, all of the anger, all of the confusion, frustration to just talk about all that stuff and just get it out with someone that knows how to help you navigate all of that. That would’ve been extremely helpful. And it’s kind of funny to think where my life would’ve gone if that point in my life. I hadn’t taken a sharp left. But if I just would’ve either not ignored my emotions or just heavily medicated them, if I just would’ve dealt with them as they came up, if a thought came up or something happened, just talk about it and just deal with it and get it out. I let the river flow through you and don’t dam it up, river.

I love that. I love that. I think that’s a great point. I definitely think that talking about it there is healing. Because it wasn’t until I started talking about it that it brought me healing. But at that point, I did EMDR.

Did you really?

Yeah. I had to do EMDR through some of that just to help remove it. Got to the point in my life that anytime I even would think of his name or think of him or his name would come up or anything like that, I would just cry. It was like had no intelligence in, I couldn’t express myself.

Yeah, it takes your body over.

EMDR was very helpful to me, and that’s where I found healing at the physical level as well, once I dealt with the emotional stuff. But I’ve realized that after that, now this is many years ago, right? I could talk about things, sorry, I had to clear my throat. I could talk about things that I wasn’t able to talk about before without letting the emotions control me anymore.

And I think that’s really, you’re either going to have control of your emotions or your emotions are going to have control of you eventually, and it’s going to lead you down this path of destruction. So if anything, I want our audience to just know that we’re real people who had hurt. We love losing someone we love and we took this unnecessary turn,

Did the wrong thing.

But we learned a lot in that process, and even if it took us many years we can teach others. And I would really love for young people to be wiser than we were and to learn ways of coping with loss early on versus not doing it. And we don’t know when these things happen, but just to know that there are experts out there, there are professionals out there that you can talk to. If your friends and your family are not good outlets for you to talk to, then get someone who’s neutral and have that conversation. 

Someone who can guide you through dealing with those emotions and can help give you the healthy tools to do it. There is no easy way.

No, there isn’t. And I think that’s a good point. I think we can all agree that something bad is going to happen and there isn’t a one size fits all. Take this pill and it’ll cure everything. Whatever your situation is, whatever your context is, your solution might be different than somebody else’s, but there is a solution to it, and you’re just going to have to go and try a couple of things until you find the right thing. But bottling it up is not going to work.

It’s not going to help.

And I wish that our guy culture wasn’t so strong silent type. There are some good points to that, but I think if you’re not, you’re ignoring that you even have emotions, and you’re going to get bit in the butt pretty quickly.

I hope that over the generations, our culture evolves a little bit and guys get a little more in touch with how to deal with their emotions. And I wish guys would be better fosters or role models for younger men. I didn’t have too many guys. I didn’t have a good dad. That’s a whole different episode. But I wish there was an older guy, I wish I had a brother that could teach me, no, don’t do that, do this. Or, Hey, I see you going down that path. Do this.

The importance of older men in a young man’s life, learning from others. I think that’s really important that men are mentoring other younger men. 

Yeah. That’s a whole other issue that I think men are because women do that.

Yeah, they do this a lot.

If you see a girl crying, all of her friends will huddle around and go, oh my God. If you see a guy crying, his buddies will either hand him a beer or go make fun of him. It’s interesting with your situation how they’re like, Hey, let’s just get you more drunk. 

And that’s literally, I remember I could picture his face, we’re just going to get you drunk until you feel better. And I was like, I don’t think that’s the right thing to do. But yeah, women are so good at, I feel like girls at such a young age deal with their emotions way better than guys do. And some guys are stunted emotionally at five and six years old, and some at 13 years old. But you’ll see girls huddle around each other and take care of each other better than guys do. So when those horrible things happen to us guys, we need to be proactive to find an outlet or figure it out. Because dude, you’re going to wind up in a dark, dark place.

And even one of the things that you said that I see in my clinic is that younger men are more interested in taking care of themselves, their mental and emotional health.

I like that.

Just young people in general. They are more open to taking care of issues early on, which I appreciate. And I encourage that because one of the things that our audience should know is that the older you get and you’re not dealing with your trauma and your emotions and all those issues, it gets harder with every decade. So in your thirties, okay, you got an opportunity in your forties, you still got the opportunity. But it is almost like consistently the 50-plus-year-olds that

come in that have never resolved the issues from their past. It’s showing up physically, it’s showing up in their behavior, and they’re like, I don’t know why I can’t handle this situation. I’ve dealt with worse in the past. It’s like, yeah, it’s because you never dealt with those issues. Then now your nervous system is just overloaded and it needs healing. 

You need to let some of that go. 

Yeah. You can almost over the years, emotionally tie yourself into knots and you need to, and there could be one master not, and little sprinkles off of it, but there might just be one knot that got tied 20 years ago that you never untie. 

You need to untie that. That’s a really great analogy. Really great analogy. I feel like this conversation can just continue in many directions. Just like our last episode on nutrition. I think it can really go down in many directions. And more than anything, I just want people to know that you have every right to feel the emotions that you feel. And here’s the interesting thing, if you just give that sadness enough time to feel it and then move on for the day, it’ll dissipate. If you need to cry, cry. If you feel angry, find an outlet. Go kickbox, pass my outlet. Go work out. Move your body. There are so many benefits to moving your body that will help with the grief. So I want to give some tips, and I’ll probably do more episodes on the process of grief because I just feel like especially going into these next months with the holidays, I know personally I just, no matter what, I just feel some sort of way. My dad just died, so I know the holidays are going to be different. 

So one of the things that grief can help is making sure that you’re resting. I know sometimes when people are grieving, it’s very difficult for them to even sleep, to eat, but try to keep a routine, a healthy routine throughout your day where you are making sure you’re eating, where you’re making sure you’re exercising, moving your body, and that you are making time to spending with others. Find a buddy just like your mom had someone to turn to that saved your life.

Find someone that you can turn to and that you can tell them, Hey, I need you to hold me accountable if you see me kind of avoiding or doing these things, I want you to do that. I did that. I did that this last time with my dad. Before when I knew, I said, Hey, I’m going to need you to hold me accountable. I’m going to need you to check in on me. I would have never in my past years,

See, that to me is emotional, I would never have reached out to someone.

That to me is emotionally strong, knowing that you need it and asking for it and that you could potentially go down that rabbit hole again.

And I told myself, I’m doing things differently this time. I’m not going to do the unhealthy behaviors that I did when my brother passedaway. If I had a guy friend say that to me, I would think, wow, that’s really emotionally strong emotionally. How mature of him to say.

Yeah. And I think that’s it. I think people in general, men and women, just need to grow emotionally, be more mature to know how to support each other and be there for each other. But yeah, build that, but make yourself a priority mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. It’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to feel like you’re falling apart. It’s okay to be vulnerable and say, damn, it hurts. This hurts. I’ll tell you this time around with my father’s passing, what’s made the biggest difference has been my relationship with God.

Yeah, it has. And I’m not saying it to be all Kumbaya or superficial since sincerely, the things that God revealed to me throughout the last months of his life and when he passed and after that brought me this just unexplainable peace.

It’s got to be comforting,

Very. And it’s still strange to me. I’m okay to say it feels strange to feel peace.

Do you think it feels strange because in some way you think you feel okay that he’s gone?

I feel peace because I know where his soul is at. If you go back to when my aunt died, I knew she wasn’t there, and I didn’t know

Where point she was going? You didn’t know where she was. That makes a lot of sense. But now I know, and there were revelations that my dad shared with me that I’m like, he never read that. He never read the Bible. He never saw that. How would he know that?

He’s just spitting out verses.

So I knew that God was putting that in him, and that brought me peace. So that’s the other thing with if you don’t have a relationship with God, find one W asap. Get to it. Pick up a Bible and read it. Go hike South Mountain.

Go hike South Mountain by yourself. Run up South Mountain or a mountain if you’re not in Arizona. But find those moments to do that, to grieve, Hey, we’re going to wrap this up. We can keep going, I’m sure, but I hope you’ve taken some value out of our conversations. A male and female perspective, and our experiences is that we dealt with grief in a very unhealthy way. And if you’ve lost someone, whether it’s recent or many years ago, I highly encourage you find the courage to just dig deep down, go get the help that you need. Hire an expert, someone who’s a professional, who can help you process the grief. If you currently have someone you’ve lost in your life, find someone to talk to. If you don’t have a friend or family member to do that, then find help. There are support groups that are for free, and there are many people that you can hire that maybe your insurance will even cover for you to do that. It’s much better for you to deal with grief upfront and give yourself time. There is no time limit.

That’s true.

There’s no time limit on when it’s just, that it doesn’t get easier. The load just gets a little bit lighter over the years. So as always, thank you for your time. Share this message, share this video with someone that you think would benefit from it. And until next time, be 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, and 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.

The post EP18: Complications of Suppressing Grief – Real Talk w/ Casey Nichols from Valley Fitness Kickboxing appeared first on Raíces Naturopathic Medical Center.

This will be a 2-part series on discussing the importance the role that fathers have in our lives and how they influence our relationship with God. I title this episode “A Father’s Gift”. Listen to how my father’s last months of life led me to be more curious about, “Who is God?” and further leaned into a relationship with Christ, His love. How close my father was walking with God, allowed many blessings to be poured into my life, and got a glimpse of Heaven.

How can men become better fathers to bring blessings and not curses to their future generations. Men can change their story of adversity into a story of triumph; through finding healing with Christ.

Joining me is my dear friend and sister in Christ, Jackie Morales. Mark 7:6 New International Version: 6 He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.

Credit to Pastor David Platt, from Washington, DC

Transcript:

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, nature pathic, 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. Welcome back to Physician Healing Self, the podcast. This is episode 16. I’m your host, Dr. Alara, and we’re continuing. This is part two with my guest Jackie Morales. Thank you again for we’re continuing the conversation. We left off kind of in the middle of something juicy.

Like a cliffhanger.

Yeah, cliffhanger. I was talking about before we ended the last episode on the importance of having a genuine relationship with God and with other people. That is something that’s so important to me and the older I get, I see why. So I want to read from the book of Mark chapter seven verse six. This is Jesus who’s speaking here. He says, he replied, Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you. Hypocrites, as it is written, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain. Their teachings are merely human rules. You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions. And he goes on to say, and he continues, you have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions. For Moses said, honor your father and mother and anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death. But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their mother, their father or mother is Corbin that is devoted to God and then you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother. Thus, you nullify the word of God by the traditions and you have handed down and you do many things like that.

Listen to me, everyone and understand this, nothing outside a person can defile them by defile them, by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them. So back to that first part of these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. And I say these things with all due respect, but the modern, church, Christian Church and churches in general.

That’s what they’re doing. I see these, we have made new traditions in church and we’re far, far removed from having really being that close to God in our hearts.

We’re saying all the right things. We’re doing all the right things, but there’s an absence there and it’s the absence of Holy Spirit.

Yeah. It’s unfortunate because for me, I love going to church. I love to worship and it’s a sense of community, but I have found myself having more of a relationship with God and being over here. I don’t know. Sometimes I feel disappointed in the church because I am like, oh, I wish I didn’t see that. Oh, because you witness it for yourself and then you feel it. You discern it. Holy Spirit will talk to you. And then you’re like, okay, well, I guess I’m going to go and try and find another church. But yeah, I completely agree with what you’re saying and I feel that because we are in the end times it’s just going to get worse.

And this is something that I wanted to bring because my father, our dads were not big shots. My dad had a fourth-grade education. He didn’t have a business. He didn’t have the titles and the money and all. He didn’t have that.

But this man had gold.

Oh yeah. He had goals. And I don’t think people see these things though.

No.

He served God in his, he had God in his heart. He had this relationship and he was so humble that he never was out here demonstrating to everyone what he’s doing, what he knows. He knew a lot, but he taught us in an indirect way about God. And he did sit down. He always used nature to explain how God works in our lives. And so I want that genuine relationship with God, that I don’t need to be in an altar. I don’t need for people to see me, that I’m on my knees praying to God that I’m desperate. I want that relationship to be genuine and sacred. 

And you’re right, I love the community, but unfortunately, people are so distracted by what truly matters right now, and it’s not the show and the lights and all of that.

Yeah, yeah. It’s very fleshy out here,

Very fleshy. I found this, and I’m going to give credit to this on the notes of this episode, I went to this website and found this writings from this pastor in Washington dc David Platt,

And I’m going to give him credit for what he wrote because as I was reading this, I really felt like this is how I feel. And so he says, father, help us to authentically worship. May we honor you both with our lips and our lives. How possible is it that in my life and your life to do all sorts of things in supposed religion, devotion, religious activity? This is so humbling just to think about it, that it’s possible for me to lead a podcast called Pray the Word and take a few minutes and do this and just be talking. And my heart is just in a totally different place. It’s possible to pray and be saying words, but my heart is not bringing glory to God. It’s possible to be singing a song in musical worship gathered with the church or at home and singing, gather on a screen.

He recorded this during the, or put this out during the pandemic, whatever it might be, but it’s possible to sing. And our heart is so totally is in a totally different place. And so we’re driven to pray even right now. And he says, mark seven, six reminds us to be authentic. God, please examine our hearts. Test our hearts, soften our hearts. Help us we pray, to glorify you with hearts that are close to you, hearts that are attuned to you, that is not just going through motions. And that’s key right there. I don’t just want to go through the motions because it becomes dead.

It’s dead works. God, keep us from monotonous, confirmatory religious motions that assume to claim to honor you with your lips. While our hearts are actually far from you. God, please grant that we would authentically worship you, that we would authentically pray, that we would authentically meditate upon your word, not just read through it, but that our hearts would be engaged in it. That when we worship with our church, that our hearts would be in tune with your spirit, that in our interactions with each other, that you would give us tender hearts towards you, that when then flow into the love we have for one another. Oh God, we pray that it would not be said of us. This people honor me with their lips, but their hearts is far from me. God, may that not be said of me. May that not be said of any person listening right now. May it be said to us that we honor you with our lips and our hearts. It’s close to you. And he says, in Jesus name we pray. Amen.

Jesus name. That’s a whole word right there. That’s a whole word.

I want what comes out of my mouth to be what’s coming out of my heart. How do we do that? How do we align that? And I’m going to tell you, and this is why I wanted to have this conversation, because the last six months of my father’s life, so we’re recording this, it’s August 10th. He passed away almost two months ago. It doesn’t even seem like it’s been two months. No. But the last six months of his life, God was showing me this man who I called Father. And I see as a teacher and I see these elements of him, and I’m like, who is this man? It made me more curious to know who is God. Amen.

That’s where it starts. Girl. Isn’t that amazing? It’s like you wake up excited because you’re like, I’m on this journey to learn more about this man, to learn more about God’s love and the mystery. It’s like a love story.

It is. And that’s when the aha moment dropped into my spirit of it’s my Father, how close he’s walking with God in his life. And in these last moments, these last months of his life, it drew me in. It made me lean in. I want to see a glimpse of heaven, but I want to see your face too, Lord, and I just want to see it. I want to learn from you and hear you, and I want to know your character. And so it made me very curious to know who God is. And I thought that’s the blessing. That is the gift of the Father. If our fathers are aligned with God’s word and they’re walking next to him, not because they’re perfect, I’ve had a lot of people say, well, no one can be perfect like Jesus. Now can He didn’t say he came for the perfect. No, quite the opposite. Yes, yes. Quite the opposite. Quite the opposite. But seeing my father through this journey, I never heard this man complain about the pain, all the medical interventions they were doing on him. I thought he would’ve been like, just let it go. I’m done.

No, he said, I want to try everything until nothing can be done and I’ll be in peace regardless. I’ll be in peace if God takes me. And he meant that I could feel and see that in him that he meant that.

Wow, it’s so crazy talking about our dads. It reminded me of a moment of no matter what they were going through like you said, and when my dad was waking up from the coma that he had been in for three months, my mom’s nickname for my dad is Sugar Club. So when he was waking up and the doctors are like Mr. Morales, they’re like, what’s your name? And he’s like, sugar club, of course. And it’s just still with everything that was going on, he still has that mindset, that peace, that pureness of what’s in his heart. And they just teach us so much. And the importance of a parent and a father in a child’s life is everything. If someone’s watching right now and they’ve been struggling as a parent, maybe not just as a father, but as a mother, just know that the impact that you have on your child’s life is going to follow them for the rest of their lives.

Absolutely.

And here we are, grown women and still talking about the impact that our parents have on our lives, especially our dads. Our dads.

Yeah. That’s the blessing. If men can align with God, have a relationship because they want the relationship, not because your wife and if someone else is making you do it, but you genuinely want to have this relationship with your heavenly Father. And I get it that some men don’t have good father figures. That doesn’t excuse you to be a poor parent either, to not be a man of God. If anything that should propel you, that should bring out the desire in you to want to be better. To say, Hey, based on how I live my life, it’s either going to bring a blessing or a curse.

Ain’t that the truth? That’s what you’re doing. And unfortunately, a lot of men are picking the curse.

Well because they become a lover of selves and it’s about them, but they’re called to lead. And you have a lot of women out here that are working both of the masculine and the feminine, and the women are leading because there’s a loss there. And we’re feeling it. We’re feeling it as wives, as children, and daughters. 

Listen, we need men to step it up, please. And this is in a kind way, in a genuine way to say, we need you to step it up because there is power in the male in a family. And yeah, you’re not going to be perfect. And so what if you do come from a family that was broken? Maybe you didn’t have your father in your life, maybe he was abusive, an alcoholic on drugs, whatever it was, that doesn’t have to be your story.

Absolutely.

You can change it. And this is why I say I don’t understand how people can live life without God. Because regardless, we’re all going to live and experience challenges and obstacles and downtimes. But I’ll tell you, there’s no way that I could have survived this whole year and beyond if God wasn’t that present in my life and in my dad’s life and my family. There’s no way I started this podcast during this whole time.

Who does that? I think it had just happened when you started the Podcast. It was like in March. I’m like, Hey, once again, I heard from God. I was at the gym. I get all these revelations when I’m working out. So the key point here is to move your body. You might get a Revelation, and you might hear from God.

You might hear from God when you’re working, it makes sense. You’re working out, you’re moving and you’re getting, you’re silencing the mind. And this made it, I heard God say, start the podcast or you’re going to regret it. And so I did. I reached out, started moving things mid-April, started recording in May, and the first episode was out the week that he passed away. So it gave me an opportunity to say, Hey, look, dad, look what I started. He’s like, I have a pretty good look.

I love that. I love that.

So that gave me this. It might seem foolish to someone, but it was nice for my dad to see one more thing that I accomplished and that I give God the credit for. And him too, because our parents have sacrificed a lot. He sacrificed a lot to be here. And that was something I was never willing to squander is the opportunities that we had in this country because of the sacrifices that our parents made, the discrimination and the poor treatment, all of that. We overcame a lot. And so going back to the blessing or the curse, we need men to build themselves up and be strong. And the only way you’re going to find that deep healing of those wounds in your heart and your mind and your soul is to lean into God.

Yeah.

That’s it. He is a great physician.

That’s it. You lean in, you lean in, and you do it for yourself first. And you build that relationship and everything else will follow.

It’ll give you the strength to get through life.

You have to soften your heart. That’s where it starts. Humble yourself, humble yourself, and be willing. Even if you have a little tiny crack of willingness, God is going to storm into that crack in your heart and bring change.

I always say that God is a gentleman.

Oh, he’s so what? 

He knows where you’re at. He knows how much you can push. He’s such a gentleman. He’s so faithful and his word is true, and it does not come back to him. Void. Void.

Amen.

And he always says that He knows the plans that he has for us to give us hope in the future and not to bring harm our way. This is a very faithful God, a man of his word. And we need for men to stick up and be men of their word and start their relationship with Christ and everything else will follow. It will. 

Wow.

It seems like it’s so easy, and I know it’s not because we’ve all gone through our, it’s not building our relationship with Christ. When you say yes to that, to walking on that narrow path, you’re saying yes. But there’s a lot that comes with it. A lot of responsibility. And it’s like that’s why we talk about it all the time, sis, when we say putting on the full armor of God. Amen. Because the minute we step out that door, it’s on.

I was praying the whole time coming here.

Yeah.

Like I said, the last four weeks have been constant attack after attack because we are walking and executing the plan. And like I said, this message is not to be harmful to men. If anything, it’s encouragement. Absolutely. And also to debunk, to break all of these perceptions of what a man should be like. It’s so interesting these times because some people get really carried away. And yes, men, we know that the Bible says wife, be submissive to your husband, but it also says men love your wives the way Christ loves the church, the way Christ loves the church. What does that love look like? So let’s talk about that because love is not bossy and demanding. Nope. It is not mean. It is not hurtful. It is not negligent. It is a lot of mindfulness, a lot of care in that relationship. And that’s where I, once again, I saw that through my father.

They were a reflection of that. It’s in Corinthians what love is. Right. And just a perfect example, when I pray for a man in my life, the first words out of my mouth are God, please send me a God-fearing man that’s going to lead. Right. That’s in my prayers. And I’m sure in a lot of other women’s prayers who may not have a significant other in their lives right now, but it’s like I don’t want to settle for anything else but that. And I remember someone had once asked me, what are you looking for in a man? And I’m like, he has to have fear in his heart for God that he has to lead and has to have a relationship with God. And I don’t want to settle for less. 

So I mean, when we go back to the book of Genesis, and God created man and woman, he made man to lead to have dominion.

Right?

Yes. Am all lead me. Lead me.

Yeah, there was sin and then it was broken. And that’s exactly it. God said, Man, what have you done, Adam? 

Where are you?

Where are you, Adam? He wasn’t asking for Eve. He’s not Eve. Why aren’t you up in here? He’s like, Adam, what have you done? Where are you, man? Where are you at? Well, get up in here. Oh, sorry. We need to talk. We need to have a word because they’re responsible. And because of that, regardless who started it, we all paid the price. We all descended from this lineage, and we all paid the price. However, when Jesus came, he came to restore that relationship with man. He came to restore that relationship with men and women. And so all we need to do is get ourselves up, dust ourselves off, remove the shackles that have already been broken and be humble to God. So to me, a real man has this humbleness. There’s this meekness in them. They know what their strengths are. They know that they’re physically and mentally able to exert themselves. They can be in masculine, but they’re going to choose this meekness of I will control this power that I have and be humble. And when the right time comes that I need to protect, there’s a time for that. Unfortunately, too many men wear their macho man shirts.

The ego, the ego. And I see it in church. I see it everywhere. And it’s like, oh God, once again, because I have a father, I have a heavenly father and an earthly father that honored and respected me differently.

Absolutely.

I was not a spoiled daughter. Mexican parents, and Mexican dads don’t do that. They don’t, is that right? Is it just me? No, I didn’t experience that. Like people say, oh, you were a daddy’s girl.

No, and then I had siblings. So there was never any favoritism. They love this all.

Amazing, and it’s the little things they do. I remember I wrote this poem when I was in eighth grade. It was love. It was about love. And it had to do with, it was just saying that I love you doesn’t mean a thing at all. For loving words are like the birds. When they hear winter’s call, love is a thing that proves itself a thousand times a day in the little things you do and the little things you say, wow, I still remember it. There’s more. 

It Is so great.

But that’s all I remember for now. Sorry guys.

No, that’s so good. But that’s so good because I always say love is in action because it’s true. You can say all day, X, Y, Z, but show me what your actions.

Show me the details. Love is in the details.

And my dad did that. He did that. I never even remember watching my parents argue.

We talked about this.

Yeah. They didn’t ever argue with us growing up. You never saw that? No, no. They kept it. They were patient and understanding, and they knew when to figure things out outside of the home, so they wouldn’t bring that inside the home. And I’m like, man, we really need to go back to those days. Yes.

And that’s something that both men and women need to have that self-control, right? It’s living in different times.

Yeah.

There’s a lot of stress, a lot of things coming at us. And we need to quiet that noise. We need to learn to say no set boundaries and make time for family. That’s what we’re not doing. And I say we, because I find myself being part of that sometimes that we’re so busy with everything and then we forget about really putting the energy at home.

Yeah. It’s like a quote from Mother Theresa that I always carry with me if you want to make a change in this world, go home and love your family. And that’s where it starts. It starts in the home.

And why she said that, tell me. We know that she helped a lot of people who were dying on the streets. I mean, she worked with the poorest of the poor, the sickest of the sickness. I mean, she shared stories of how, I won’t even share, but it’s too graphic. But the conditions that people were dying on the streets and how she would go out, her and the other people that worked with her, they would go out and feed them and help them and pray for them. And what they really needed was companionship.

Wow.

They need a relationship. And it’s interesting how we forget to do that. So in our families, it’s very easy to also do that avoidance thing. And right now, after my dad passed, I see that in my family, Hey, you still have a mom? And it’s like she’s not going to be around forever. So if you choose to not have that relationship with her, I have peace with my dad. I did everything that I could have done for him. And so I felt that I completed my assignment, my agreement with God and with him, and I’m at peace for that. Good. Now, there are moments that I am sad and I’m going to allow myself to grieve as anyone else, but I don’t have any regrets of my relationship with him. And what happened the way things happen, was ordained by God that way. 

Amen.

I respect that.

Amen. That’s so good. Yeah. That’s so good to have that peace and to gather everything that your dad taught you, even though he didn’t even know he was teaching you things. He was just living his life according to God’s will. 

Like that child. 

Yeah, he knew, but he didn’t know. He was just living life every day. How come? Being grateful, always grateful, always giving glory to God and thanking God for that.

And that just brought to me, that no matter what we’re doing, our children, no matter what age, are always looking up to us. And so whatever choices and actions we take, they’re paying attention. They could be two years old, three years old, 20 Years old, or 45 years old. And we see our parents, how they’re going through that process. I could not understand how he had still so much joy in him, and he was in a hospital bed, he couldn’t get up. I mean, it got to the point when he was out, the times that he was at home, I was helping him go to the bathroom, cleaning him, cleaning his wounds.

Very vulnerable situations. And so when you’re young, you never think you’re going to be doing these things for your father.

Wow. What a moment. Because I remember my sister had shared a story, and it was during the last days that my dad was with us, and he really couldn’t do much anymore. And she told me that he would just look at himself in the mirror because he just couldn’t be that strong man, father. He was like sick. And I can’t even imagine what he was thinking in his mind when he would look at himself in the mirror and just say, because there were so many things that he still wanted to do for us as a father, and he couldn’t, but we were just a family full of love, and we made sure that he knew that everything’s okay, but even to their last days, they still want to be that strong father to us no matter what that is. 

So Oh my God, that is so true. Yeah. Even though my dad was so humble, I was there when he took his last breaths,

And I remember witnessing this man, there was nothing weak though. He was very thin. He lost a lot of weight. And there was a point in his last week before he passed away, he’s like, look at my body. I’m nothing but bones. He’s like, it’s okay that you’re going to have a new body. But seeing him in those last hours as he was transitioning, I remember what I was witnessing was I saw a warrior on that bed. I did not see a weak, old, fragile man at all. I saw a strong warrior carrying his cross, and when he gave up his soul to God, you could see the light in him leave. And I know where he’s at. And so I remember feeling like this. I load lift off of me. I hadn’t slept for days. I didn’t eat. I was just right there with him. And I never saw weakness in this man at all. So sometimes men, I get it. I work with a lot of male patients as well. And when it comes to talking about mental health, they always say how they don’t want to be seen as weak. 

And I said, yeah, but you are showing your weaknesses by you not healing those wounds, those hurt. It’s spilling over at you now. So one thing I want to share that some people may or may not know about this, but the longer we take to heal through our trauma, so with every decade it gets harder. I always say everyone’s journey is different. As we get into our from twenties to thirties, some people start getting signs of it’s time to heal those wounds. And you know what I see with these younger generations? They’re starting in their early twenties, which thank God, they’re starting to see I have these wounds. I need to heal through them. And it’s not a victim mentality at all.

They acknowledge that there are things in their childhood they recognize. They recognize. And so if you delay that healing past your thirties, past your forties, when you get into your fifties, it gets very challenging for people to then handle the trauma because they’ve been sweeping this under the rug for so many years. Now you got a mountain and you can’t just dust that off. And so I find that when people are in their fifties and older, when they process trauma, it is very difficult for them physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. So the sooner the people can do that, the better it is. But oftentimes, men’s trauma, it shows up in them emotionally. They’re overreacting with anger. They’re closing themselves off emotionally, not communicating or distancing themselves or indulging in things that they should that are not healthy. And this is not, doesn’t make you a good man. No. It actually makes you a weak man. What they don’t want to show up.

Because yeah, you don’t want to show up as a certain way, but you are showing up. You just can’t see it yourself. Everyone else can see your wounds.

Yeah, I’ve always seen, I don’t even like to say weak. I like to say vulnerable because I think that’s very strong. When a man can show up vulnerable, I’m like, that’s strength to me because you got something to work with now.

And I always say, you’re not going to go be vulnerable to everyone.

No.

But you do need to find someone, whether it’s your partner or a therapist, but you need to find someone that you feel heard, respected, and safe and that you can trust to help guide you through that healing process.

Because then you can be a man who has self-control, who is humble, who understands the love of the Father.

Amen.

Even if your father wasn’t the ideal father. That’s the message I really want to get across today, is that even if your father was not the ideal father, when you get close to God, you learn what a father should look like and what that relationship is. And we have misconstrued the idea of what a good father is here. It’s not someone who’s harsh. No, it’s not. You can get your son, your daughter to do things without yelling and being forceful on them. It actually requires a lot more.

Skill, patience, a lot more development, a lot more character. The fruits of the spirit. I was just thinking, open up your Bible. Start reading.

Start reading.

It’s going to tell you exactly how to show up. That’s what I tell people when people are like, how do I start? I’m like, just do this. Just God, reveal to me what I need to hear from you today. Use your word that’s simple, and then just open it up wherever it’s at and read. Oh look, do not let your heart envy sinners, but be zealous of the fear of the Lord all day. And just maybe read a couple of verses or the chapter however you like, and really sit with that. What does this mean if you don’t understand it? What does this mean? God, we have the internet.

There are a lot of commentators. You could put, oh, Proverbs 2317. What does this mean? There are so many ways to learn so many ways. So that’s the first way that I tell people to start is get the Bible and read it. If you feel intimidated by stepping foot in a church, I get it. I’ve been there. Just start reading the word of God. Start praying. Start praying out of here. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It could be very simple.

It could be, thank you, Jesus.

Thank you Jesus for today. Open my eyes, clear the path for me. Be present in my life. Show me what a father is. Show me what the role of a father is. There’s a scripture that you wanted to share.

Oh, yes, you were asking me, is there any scripture? And I’m like, there’s the one that comes to mind when I think about my dad. And it’s Proverbs 22, 6, and it says, train up a child in the way he should go. And when he is old, he’ll not depart from it. And he was such a beautiful reflection of that through his actions like we were speaking, and he loved God and Jesus so much. There was times where I would walk into the room and he would just be laying peacefully in his bed praying, and I’m like, wow, you pray in your room. Shut the door. Have your moment with Jesus. And I saw that. I saw that in my dad, and I was able to apply that to my life, and now my kids can too.

Yeah, I mean, for our audience, like I said, we understand that some people do not have the ideal father, and our hearts are with him, but there is healing. The healing through that is very important and leaning into God to let God be. That’s all our Father, we are all children to him, so let him heal our hearts and show us this is the healthy way to be a father in someone’s life.

It’s like you said earlier, lean in.

Lean in, lean in. That really is lean in because nothing’s what’s been working for you at this point. If it hasn’t been helping or working out, then what do you have to lose to lean in to have a relationship with God?

Amen.

You have nothing to lose. You have everything to gain. It’s a win-win situation. You win, your family wins. People you come across will win and God will win. He wants you in His kingdom.

All glory to God. God told me at the beginning of the year, he belongs to me. He says that all about us. You belong to me.

We belong to God. And as a good father, he wants the best for us.

So I just pray that as we wrap up here, I pray that anyone who is listening to this, this is really just, we’re just scratching the surface of this conversation, but I wanted to share the perspective of two women who, because of a good father figure in our lives, we know who we are in God, in his eyes. We know that our heavenly Father is the ultimate father, and he is an example of what a good father is. It’s humility and kindness and love and patience, and it’s not this overly macho, masculine father figure that the world has very twisted. The one thing that I really, really loved about my dad is that he had this way that just by the way, he would look at me. He would tell me he loved me without ever using words. I could feel his love. And in his last day, I remember he looked down as I was next to his bedside and he just gazed down at me.

And I couldn’t help but think of how Jesus must have looked down from the cross as he was being crucified. I could see his eyes looking down at me, and I could see through just the way he gazed at me, I could feel that love that my father had for me. And so I pray that if you didn’t have that father, that you heal through those wounds because your heavenly Father loves you, he loves you, and he never intended for harm. To scar you in such a way that you really lean in to have a relationship with God, and that you find healing in your mind, in your body, and in your soul, that you are once again restored to have joy and peace. I hope you’ve enjoyed this conversation. We’ll continue many more, but I just want to say thank you. Share this message with someone who you think might really benefit from. And as always, stay blessed and we’ll see you in the next episode. 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, and 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.

The post Episode 16: “A Father’s Gift” with Jackie Morales, Part 2 of 2 appeared first on Raíces Naturopathic Medical Center.

Transcript

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. Alara, 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. Welcome back to Physician Heal Thyself, the podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Ana Lara. And this episode I want to dedicate to my father, Juan Lara, who on Father’s Day of this year, June 16th, 2024, he went on to join our Heavenly Father. Now, I know a lot of people might think how sad, how tragic he died on this day, but I have a story to share with you, a story that brought me so much peace and so much joy in the last six months of his life, how God was moving through him and in our lives.

This episode I want to dedicate to him, but also to our Heavenly Father and to all the fathers in the world. This episode is titled A Father’s Gift, and it’s going to involve discussing the importance of our fathers in our lives. So we are going to be doing this in a two-part series, and I want to introduce a guest. I have a guest that’s going to be joining me in this conversation. She is a very special friend of mine and she is a sister in Christ. Let me share a little bit of her bio. For the last 18 years, she has been gracing Arizona radio listeners with her soft, credible, yet energetic personality, and it hasn’t gone unnoticed. She goes on to share on why she feels blessed to be on the value radio. So some of you may recognize her, may recognize her voice. She says it’s the vibe and the energy of my radio family connecting to the community. And of course our listeners. Her loyalty to the community is extremely important to her. She volunteers at local elementary schools, the National Kidney Foundation, Making Strides Against Breast Cancer, Arizona Hygiene for Hope, and many more. With the calendar jam-packed, she still finds time to hike, read, dance, travel, and spend quality time with her family and close friends. Please help me welcome my dear friend Jackie Morales.

Thank you so much. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be here. I know we’ve been friends for a very long time, but to be in a that you have been talking about for years, really time. Yeah. Because this is something that you envisioned and I’m like, we’re here. So thank you so much.

Oh, I’m honored to have you here. And just so our audience knows, we’ve been planning this

Yes,

For the last four weeks. We had the schedule to record four weeks ago, and what I’m going to share, is if I had said this or thought of this 15 years ago, I would never believed it, but the spiritual warfare in our lives, the moment we decided to sit down and talk about this conversation, this topic has been on both ends.

Yeah. Very heavy.

Heavy.

And it’s incredible. I mean, just the minute that we had the conversation, it was just like boom. 

We were attacked and we did not prepare. We did not prepare. We went in with our rose-colored glasses, right?

Yes. Yes we did.

As you guys can hear, my voice is raspy and it has been like this for the last four weeks, on and off, on and off.

So I finally said, Jackie, we got to get this done because this message, I just know it’s going to impact someone out there. I don’t care if it’s just one person,

Absolutely.

But it’s meant to bring healing this message. And so we ask the Holy Spirit, we ask our Lord Jesus Christ to join us in this conversation right now and make his presence known and for him to share whatever message comes through us. We really didn’t plan this out.

No, we didn’t. 

We’re just going to go with the flow, with Holy Spirit flow. And so while the attacks have been big, I know that once we record this, the enemy will back off. So I’m very grateful for us to be here. So when I first thought of this topic for this episode, my dad had just passed away, and I was in this state where I was in awe. Obviously I was hurting, but I just had this immense, immense, indescribable peace. It was not something I could explain to people how I felt, this peace, this calmness and stillness. And I knew in the moment that that peace and stillness was coming from God. Amen. No way I could have reached into my pocket,

No.

Into my mind and come up with it.

Absolutely not.

So I was so excited. I wanted to share how important the role of a father is. One of the things that we’ve always talked is we’ve always said how lucky, how blessed we are to have fathers like the fathers that you and I had. And so I remember maybe a week or two after he passed, I reached out to you to let you know my dad passed and you called me right away. I know. Picked up the phone and you called me,

You texted me. And I was like, wait, what? And it was immediate. It was immediate because one of the things that I believe brought us really close together was our dad’s fathers because we had already known each other, but we had a conversation in the parking lot at an elementary school and we had shared how my dad was suffering with kidney failure and you had a tie in with that as well. And then we just started getting closer and sharing stories of our dads. And they were very similar in a lot of ways. Very similar. Oftentimes you would talk about your dad, and I felt like, that’s my dad. That’s my dad. 

So I definitely felt that bond from that moment immediately.

And so as I was talking to you on the phone, that’s when Holy Spirit put in my heart, have Jackie join me in this conversation. I was going to do it by myself, but then I’m like, yeah, you’re the perfect person to have this conversation. You have such incredible insight and so let’s dive in. 

Yeah, let’s do it. 

Why don’t you share a little bit about who your father was, and what did he mean to you? What was it that he taught you that was still so powerful to this day? To this day that I’m able to pass on to my children as well? Because your father passed away how many years ago?

This year will be six years. Six years. That’s what I thought. But if anyone that’s watching right now who has lost a parent know that it feels just like yesterday, right? No matter how many years passed. But my dad was, the best way I can describe it is he was the heart of our family

With my mom is the backbone of our family. And the one thing that he really passed down to me and my siblings was his childlike heart because he was always a child at heart. He never took anything really seriously. Even if we went through trials or tribulations, he was always joking. He was always laughing. He would always make light of the situation. And it made life so much easier because when you see your parents aren’t stressing out and they’re really going through life with ease, even though we’re going through a really hard time, it just really stuck out. And in the Bible it says that the child to be childlike heart and you’ll be welcomed into the gates of heaven. And that was just, my dad was a perfect example of what that was. He loved to watch cartoons, girl, even when he was older, he would buy all the Looney Tunes videos that he could. He was always watching that and just joking and laughing. So I know that my childlike heart is a reflection of my dad’s, and that’s what’s held us all of Australia and the wittiness and the joking. My children are witty and they joke. And I believe a lot of that comes from my dad.

That’s his legacy.

Yes, absolutely.

I talk about legacy, the legacy of a

Father,

Because oftentimes we think it’s money, it’s material things, and it’s not. It’s the character of who the person is, their values, their morals,

Those

Things that get passed on to you, that you carry it forward to the next generation, so forth.

That’s

The true legacy hearing. You talk about your dad, once again, it’s like me talking about my dad. It’s interesting because we live in a world where we don’t have many good dads. The family structure has been under attack, and I never wanted to talk so much about my dad to certain people. I didn’t want it to sound like I was bragging, but when you have a good father, it’s hard to not acknowledge it. I remember being eight or nine years old and looking at my, I was helping him in the garden. He always gardens. He had a green thumb. He loved to plant everything, trees and different fruit, special, all these different plants. And he always liked for his garden to look nice, his yard. And I remember helping him one time in the garden, and I remember just stopping and looking at him the way he was talking and interacting with me. I remember clearly that moment realizing, acknowledging in my mind, I have such a good dad.

Wow. I said, I wasn’t going to cry, girl.

I know, but I feel that. I feel that it’s beautiful,

Beautiful,

And I remember telling myself at that young age, I would never allow anyone, any man to disrespect me because my father always respected me. We’re going to cry today. Look at that. He respected me. He honored me. He never raised his voice.

That’s hard.

We’re moms. We are. It’s hard to not raise your voice at your children when they’re not listening. And you start out with the first time being calm. The second time you’re calm, and then the third and fourth time you lose it. Right? I know. And that was never my dad. He had this calm and stillness in him, this peace. And so he never hit us. He never called us out a name. And I get it that not many people can say that about their father. So this is not a bragging situation. It’s the opposite. It’s to show what good comes out of a child when the father has the heart of his heavenly Father,

The impact of generations to come.

Generations.

Yeah.

I have never allowed a man or a woman to disrespect me.

I know this to be true,

Right Girl. I say I’m holy with the hand of hood. Pray with me. Don’t play with me. Exactly. I do have that piece of his character of who he was. But I have my mother’s personality too. And I agree with you. My mom was the backbone of our family, but my dad was the heart.

And together, whenever people ask me about my parents, I always say that their marriage was a reflection of God’s love because I always say the enemy is always after marriages because that’s where change happens. That’s where changing generations happen. And when you have a man in the home who can lead because men are called to lead with that heart, and then to have the wife, the mother be the backbone, then the perfect way I could describe it is how we grew up. And it was growing up in a house full of love, which I think changes everything when you go out into this world. And yes, we were very blessed to experience that, but also to share our stories, to give hope because God is so good and he’s going to lead men. Even if there’s a man watching now, there’s change. You can change. God is in the miracle business. 

I like that. It’s never too late to change. If you’re 20, 30, 40, even 50 years old,

You’re living, the sun came up, and you’re breathing. It’s a day that you can make a change.

Amen.

Because if you have a daughter, this is who a daughter can be, someone who’s confident and strong, who knows who she is, who knows that she is loved and deserves to be respected and be treated with kindness. We need that. We need that. And so the offset of having a father who’s not like that, I see the repercussions through generations when a father is absent or the father is abusive, verbally, physically, they’re addicted to drugs, alcohol, or they’re very machista or they’re cheating on the wife, mistreating the mom. Maybe they don’t mistreat the children, but they’re mistreating mom.

And the children see, and daughters and sons see that.

Yeah, they do.

And it’s very interesting. I still don’t understand the psychology of how people make different choices. So for example, I know people, I’m sure people too, where they had siblings, they grew up in the same home and the father was abusive, was not a good father to them at all. And one of the members of the family decides I’m never going to be in a relationship with someone like my dad. And they completely avoid that.

They become the avoidant. 

They become the avoidant of that situation. But then there are people in that same family that become that, whether it’s the son or the daughter. The daughter may end up in an abusive relationship, just someone just like the dad, because that’s in her mind. She perceives that that’s what’s acceptable, that it’s okay. And then sometimes the sons become like the dad and some sons. So whether you’re a male or female, depending on how mom and dad are, we observe those behaviors. But it comes down to choice. But what influences that choice?

And that’s such a great question and I’m glad that you went there. I was just thinking that’s a choice. It’s a choice. I believe that some are going to have that epiphany and that moment where they’re going to wake up and say, I don’t want this for my family. I want children. I want a family. And I don’t want my children to grow up in what I grew up in. And in the other aspect, I believe that it’s a sense of comfort. It’s a sense of, well, they think that that’s the way it is. Until they step outside of that and realize that that’s not normal. That’s the comfort. That’s what’s familiar to them. That’s familiar. That’s the norm, the trauma. And I know that I’ve experienced trauma bonds I’ve experienced, and it’s very hard to get out of that. And so some people don’t make it out of that. And that’s where turning to God comes into play. Because that’s the only way, that’s the way that helped me to get out of certain situations that I needed to get out of. And I just turned to God.

Hearing you say all this and just also analyzing it. Because the same thing happens with people who have good parents. They might see the good example, the good role model of the father and a mother, and what relationships are like. And then they still end up in toxic relationships. I have.

So it does come down to choice, but what influences choice has to be the information that’s coming into our minds and how we’re digesting that information, how we’re making sense of that information and applying it. How do we internalize it? How do we respond to that?

It’s a supernatural strength, I believe, because you have to want it for one, you have to be willing to go through what you need to go through to get to the other side of just living a beautiful free life. And I just speak from my own experiences. I wanted that, but it was so hard. And that’s why I’m like, you know what, God, it’s being you. I know that you’re going to get me through it. And he did. He’s so faithful. But you’re absolutely right. Even growing up in a house full of love with great parents, you still get caught up in this world because you’re not of this world. We’re in it. And we have to use our discernment and our wisdom. And sometimes we do get caught up in toxic relationships – in situations that are not healthy for us. 

My mom was the kind of person who would say, still would say, but I didn’t raise my kids to be that way or to that, I gave a good example. And I kind of constantly have to reiterate, yeah, you did provide us a good example, but it’s not your fault. You raised us. And then as adults or even young adults, as teenagers, we are making choices. And so if you are being a good example, you’re giving good advice and that person is refusing it because it’s going to go here. We think we know more than our parents. And if you are that person,

You have a rebellious spirit. And that spirit of rebellion is going to get you in trouble because you think that you know more than your mother and your father.

Granted, there may be some situations where the child does know more, unfortunately, and very extreme cases of I know people who grew up, mom was an addict, she was in the streets, the child did know more. This child was more of an adult than the parents were. And so she had a fend for herself, raise herself, and grow up. And I truly believe that that is God’s hand over that child to protect them and separate them. They are the generational curse breakers. Like, I’m not going to do what Mom and Dad are doing, so I get it. But for those of us who have decent parents, no parent is perfect.

No,

None of us are perfect. Our dads were not perfect. No. Now we say that my dad was not perfect, but he was good.

Yeah, so good.

He was good. He had this immense patience that I still don’t understand even in. So he ended up being sick from the end of January. Actually, I was with you when I got the call.

Yeah. We were having lunch with another dear friend of ours. And immediately when you got that call, man, I felt that, because I remember getting calls like that too. And it’s like your mind just goes blank and you’re just like, I just need to get to him right now. I just need to get to him and to my family. 

I Felt like the world.

Oh girl. Yes. And the minute you stood up to leave, we just prayed and we prayed.

I felt the world was trembling.

Yeah.

And I was blessed to have that, from January till June to have that time. I remember driving to the hospital and asking, God, not yet, God, not yet. 

Hold onto him.

And when I got there, he was just very, very ill. So I dunno if you notice that, but I was like, whoa, something’s here. Praise God.

Praise God.

So I remember seeing my father in the condition he was in, and I thought, oh man. And I remember laying hands on him for an hour praying for him. I didn’t care what doctor or nurse came in, or what family member was there. I was praying for him. Not yet. Don’t take him yet.

And that’s crazy because when my dad got sick the first time, the doctors gave him a 1% chance to live. 

Oh, wow.

Of course, we weren’t prepared. We knew my dad was sick, but not to that capacity. He would get sick going to the hospital, and come back home. But that time was different. And we felt it walking out of the house. And I remember how cold it was. It was in December, and my sister walking to the car to go to the hospital. And we both stopped and we looked at each other and we said, this feels different. And next thing you know, we’re at the hospital. He’s been in a Dun coma for three months. We were already saying our goodbyes. And my sister did just that. And she prayed and she said, just leave him here with us. I’ll take care of him. And she was on her knees praying. And the doctors would look at us like we were crazy because our family was just so full of prayer and so full of faith. And that 1% turned into him. It was a miracle he was back. He was not in a vegetative state. He remembered everything. The doctors, there was so many doctors and nurses who didn’t believe in God who believed in God because of my dad.

Wow.

And so when you say that, I’m like, God answers.

And I truly believe that God will extend a person’s life just for that, because that’s what I saw with my dad.

Even if it’s for a moment,

Even if it’s for a moment. So from that point on, he was in and out of hospitals. This man was driving himself to dialysis, doing yard work, washing his truck, fixing cars on his cars, doing stuff. I caught a picture of him once he was on top of his roof. I’m like, what are you doing up there? He was like 78 years old. Kidding. What are you doing up there? But he was very physically capable and mentally capable. But you’re right, that moment in January, it felt different. And I remember I want to share this with the audience. I remember this is why it’s so important to tune into the voice of God.

Amen.

He was still in the hospital that first round. It was early February, and I was leaving the gym in the morning, and I wasn’t thinking about my dad, the situation, or any of that. He was stable at this point. So we were just waiting to take him home, transfer him home. 

Oh, I remember that too. I do.

And so I was immediately in my vehicle. I heard the voice of God, me, your father’s going to be okay, but the day that I come for him will be a day of joy because he will be with me and my kingdom. He is mine. And that did such a transformation in me. It brought so much peace and realization like, oh yeah, my dad does not belong to me. He is not mine. He belongs to God that is his son. And when he’s, God is telling me the day I come for him, you should be joyful because he’s going to be with me.

Amen.

In my kingdom, what more reassurance. And I am psychologically of sound mind. I’m not hallucinating. I’m not making this stuff up clearly. Just you speaking to me is how I heard his voice. And so it gave me a sense of peace, and it brought me down this path of exploring joy. How am I going to find joy in my dad dying? How do I materialize that here? And it’d be genuine how? But it did something that bypassed my own understanding. And it immediately downloaded this. It’s a different concept. I felt it. I mean, I read it. I’ve read this before. It’s, it wasn’t new, but this is something I was feeling. It was like downloaded into every cell of my body, into the DNA of me of understanding that deep. And so months went on. And this is where I mean, if you don’t believe in God, I feel sorry for you. That’s where I’m at with people. It brought this level of boldness and courage to me about speaking to people about how real Jesus is.

Amen.

How real God is. My father never owned a Bible. He never read a Bible. He came from a very poor town in Mexico. He knew how to read. He loved to read, but they didn’t have a church there. He didn’t like the Catholic church. He had a lot of things against it. He saw through all the manipulation.

He just wasn’t that religious person.

But he always had a relationship with God. And in those last six months of his life, he really demonstrated to me, that he started to talk to me about his prayer life. And I could see him now looking back on moments where I thought maybe he just had his head down, but he was praying.

Wow.

He never called for attention.

He just did it so humbly. And so the last week of his life, we didn’t know he was going to pass because he was so mentally present, but his body was just shutting down. But we were kind of preparing. If that did happen, it was a Friday. Me and my family were leaving. And I had told, before we left my dad, I told him, Hey dad, me and the girls were talking about this, and I just want to tell you when the day comes that you die, not that it’s going to be anytime soon.

I didn’t want to make him think he was dying. Don’t freak out. He’s like, do you know something? I don’t. Yeah. Like, oh mom. But maybe I did in the spirit that my mind didn’t fully want to grasp. Wow. But I remember telling him, me and the girls were talking about this the other night, and we wanted to tell you that when the day comes you die and you’re in heaven. If you can just show us a little glimpse of what heaven is like, if God allows you to, if you could show us. And he nodded. He said, yeah, I’ll do that. That was a Friday, Wednesday he had a procedure and we were in his room and he woke up from the anesthesia, and my daughter’s there, my oldest sister’s there, and he’s so happy to see us, Jackie, he looks at us like a little kid. He’s like, you’re not going to believe where I went.

I said, where’d you go, dad? He said, I was in God’s glory.

Wow.

He said, everything was made of gold and silver and precious stones. And there were so many people everywhere, and they all had such peace, and I had peace. I had the same peace they had, and I felt good. And he said, this man was walking next to me, showing me leading the way, showing me this place. He says, but I couldn’t see his face. And he gets his little hands and he covers his face and cries. He’s like, I couldn’t see his face because it was the face of our Lord. And he goes on to say, I saw people there that were once homeless on the streets and they were restored, and they also had the same piece.

Wow.

So one thing you should know about my dad and my mom always got upset. My dad was so avid at helping the homeless.

Really

Even it was giving $2, $5 something. It was not uncommon that I would drive down the street where he lived, and I would look and I thought, is that my dad sitting with those homeless people? Wow. Be freaking think he’s homeless. And I would just laugh because he would be sitting there at the Circle K or the 7-11 just hanging out with the other men talking.

Wow.

And later on, he would disclose to me, he said, yeah, but not only did I give them money or buy them food, he said, I talked to them about God and about turning their life around. I gave them good advice. I’m like, he’s over-evangelizing.

And this is a man who didn’t own a Bible.

He didn’t own a Bible. And I lost it here. I mean, I was happy to hear him say all of this. He says, then this man, the Lord was showing him. He walks him to this place and there’s this very long table with lots of food. He said, and the plates were made of gold and silver. Everything was made of gold and silver. And at that point, I said, Dad, do you know that everything you’re sharing with me, it’s in the Bible? That’s how it describes how heaven is. You’re describing our Lord’s table, the feast you’re describing, that all these things are made of gold and silver and precious stones. I said, God showed you your eternal home,

And he answered your prayer.

And he answered my prayer. How good is that? How good is God that He says, hold on. Not only am I going to give you your wish, your desires, your heart’s desires to see a glimpse of heaven. I’m going to let your dad see it before he leaves and share it with you here in the physical. Something happened in that moment when he was sharing his experience with us. Jackie, I wish everyone can really have that experience. I know that God transferred something to me through my Father.

Absolutely

This immense joy and peace, this reassurance. I almost felt a little bad after like, God, forgive me if I didn’t fully believe in you, because now I really believe in you. I fully believe in you. I wanted to go down the street and scream at the top of my lungs. God is real. Jesus is real. How could this man know that detail if he never read the Bible? Because God will have so much grace and mercy over it that he will show it to the person who needs to see it and know it.

Amen.

So that brings me to something that has always been something very deep in my heart, and it’s this being in genuine relationships, not just here, but I want to have a real genuine relationship with God. God knows our deficiencies. He knows what our hearts desire. He knows what we need.

Absolutely.

And I want to continue this conversation, and we’re going to hold off on here. It’s getting so good.

It’s going to get good, but we’re going to wrap here because we’re going to carry forward to episode two. Okay. So I want to let my audience know you don’t want to miss what’s next in this next episode. I hope you’re enjoying the conversation so far. But in the second episode, we’re really going to dive in and talk about the importance of a father’s role and what does a good father look like, maybe through the lens of two daughters here. That’s just our opinion. But I hope you join us in the next episode of this Conversation of Physician Heal Myself podcast. Until next time, guys, be 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, and 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.

The post Episode 15: “A Father’s Gift” with Jackie Morales, Part 1 of 2 appeared first on Raíces Naturopathic Medical Center.

Episode 10 Transcript

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.

Hi everyone. Welcome back to Physician Heal by Self, the podcast. I’m Dr. Anna Lara. And today we’re going to go over episode 10 and we’re going to continue our conversation with Christian counselor Brenda Cochran. Now if you haven’t seen episode nine, you want to go back and check that out because we talked about ways of healing through trauma. But Ms. Brenda introduced a new term to me instead of referring to trauma. It’s balancing and healing the nervous system. So I like that today’s conversation we’re going to bring on Brenda. And today’s conversation is going to be still mental health, but it’s discerning. How do we know if it’s a mental health issue, if it’s a demonic influence, oppression that’s going on. Is it generational sin, or generational curses? And I know this is probably not a topic that most naturopathic doctors are having, but we are. And here we are. Welcome back, Brenda.

Thank you so much. I’m so glad to be talking about such a fun topic

That just brings up all kinds of wonderful things,

Right? I’m going to tell you, I did not go to medical school. This is my disclosure. I did not go to medical school and God trained me for deliverance work. Not at all, but God. But God will use whoever is willing and obedient. And so I really became interested maybe two years into my practice, Brenda, I became very interested in helping people heal through their trauma or through their nervous system. Because I would come in and I always interview people and ask them questions on all areas of their life. What was your childhood like? Tell me about yourself and not just what are you eating and symptoms. I don’t want to just know the symptoms, I want to know it all. So it’s a very in-depth process that I take. But what I started to notice, Brenda, is that I started to see this big correlation, huge.

It was a big red flag. It was like God was highlighting this in every person, and that was that the symptoms they were having, the root cause of the disease was something much deeper. So I really focused, and that’s why I named my practice Raices, which means roots in Spanish, is I wanted to find the root cause of their dysfunction of disease. And so I was seeing that it all really started from that trauma, that abuse those experiences that hurt them. And so what happened is God started to really bring more and more women and men, not just women, but men who started to share about the sexual abuse they experienced when they were young or growing up. And once again, alert, this might be a sensitive topic. Don’t run away from it. Let’s have the conversation, take it in bite-size pieces of what you can handle, but listen to the whole conversation because there may be a solution or bring a piece of the puzzle to help you in your healing.

So I started to hear the stories of men and women of sexual abuse. And it was big. It was big stuff. And I kept praying and meditating to God, God help me. How do I help your people? And as time went by, I really just in the past year and a half started to see this deliverance work happen. Like I said, I didn’t learn it. It was kind of an experiential, I could feel the presence of the Holy Spirit in my sessions when I was doing cranial sacral work with people. It wasn’t just the person who wasn’t just releasing emotions now, it was something else I started to see and feel and sense and I could hear the voice of the Lord guiding me on what to do. And because I didn’t learn this, I was completely surrendered to God, use me. I don’t know what to do.

And I started to see things unfold before me and realize, oh, that was a demon. That was demonic oppression. And then the aftermath of the way the person looked now was not the same person that walked in the door. And I didn’t even know the word deliverance. It was not until I shared these stories with a good friend who does do deliverance, she said that was deliverance. So Brenda, let’s hone in on this conversation. You have experience with this. What is your experience with when it comes to the mental health part and is there a need for deliverance versus counseling?

Oh my gosh. Well, since this is a spiritual body, whole person, you and I are very like-minded, we’re still going to go through that whole person lens, right? So sometimes we say it’s either one-third or another. And it’s hard sometimes for people to look at the whole person like everything, the physical self, the mind, the spiritual world. And that’s one area that opens up a whole can of worms is the spiritual world. It has to be brought in simply because my belief, my Christian belief, is that we are a spirit that possesses a soul that lives in a body that has to navigate a fallen world where evil exists. So we are a spiritual self. When we have the Holy Spirit inside of us, we connect to God through our spirit. The Holy Spirit in us communicates in our soul. We have our mind roll and emotions, and then we have our body. So for me, I can’t think of anybody any other way than in behavioral health. We call it dual awareness, meaning we have to have an awareness about more than one thing. When we’re working with somebody, we have to tune into what we know, our experience, personal experience, how we’ve been educated, and also the spirit realm. We have to do multiple. We have to do multiple things at the same time when we’re working with somebody because we don’t want to land in just one lane because we might miss something over here.

Good, good stuff. I feel the same way. Has your experience been that it’s all organic? It’s not a cookie-cutter approach to everyone. I’ve had people first visit and Holy Spirit is showing me they need deliverance. I’m not going to worry about doing blood work and putting in on some herbs for their nervous system. I’m going to take him into my next room and we’re going to help the nervous system calm down and do deliverance. So God has used this therapy unique with me and I love it because cranial sacral therapy is not meant to do deliverance work, but what it is intended to do is to help regulate a person’s nervous system. It completely slows the nervous system to be in that parasympathetic state where they’re resting. And I think that’s what allows people to put their guard down once they feel safe. I create an environment that’s safe and comfortable, light music.

I have my essential oils running and it’s just quiet and peaceful, and I do initiate with prayer. I would initiate with prayer within my soul first, within my spirit because I am in a medical clinic. And I was like, I’m not sure if they’re going to be open to me praying out loud. So that’s how I started. And once I knew that the body was calm and they look like they were asleep, but they were not, they’re kind of in that InBetween asleep and awake state. And that’s when I would see that the physical body, there was movement in the body that was not normal and they were not self-aware that this was happening. And that’s when Holy Spirit starts to show me. There’s either I see images sometimes. Sometimes it’s not that comes sometimes it’s God’s voice. Sometimes it’s not God’s voice. Sometimes it’s what I feel.

It’s interesting. In our last conversation, we talked about the feeling, the sensations. God gave us these feelings and sensations for a reason. It works with our nervous system to let us know what’s out here. I say they’re like antennas, right? They let us know what’s going on. And so I would feel and pick up and know that they needed, there was a deliverance needed. So there was a situation where this individual was the first time in my office and Brenda, I felt like there were 20 people in this person talking to me, and it was very distracting to my mind. And I heard the voice of Holy Spirit say, God, tell me to guard my mind. And immediately what I did is I stopped listening to that person because it was too much going on and told me what to do next. I went and did the session.

And what I have seen with deliverance, because I am hands-on and praying over them at some point after initiating the cranial work, is that there’s either more than one demon or they’re moving around in the person. Because people would tell me, I feel something here, but then it would be in the abdomen and I would just move around in the body until it was released. It was not emotions. Sometimes the people were not in their character. Their voice would change. There’s a blank stare in their eyes. There were a couple of times I’ve been cursed at and I know it wasn’t the person. It was like something possessed them, it they weren’t themselves. What has been your experience with all of that that I just shared?

Okay, here we go. Let’s go. I’m going to give you some new information that I think is important when we talk about deliverance in the demonic as well as, it’s one of the reasons I went back to school to go in and get my counseling education because my first healing process was inner healing and deliverance. I could not afford therapy. I was having spiritual manifestations. I got heavily involved in the charismatic movement and everything was, it was way lopsided on one side. And I needed healing from my healing almost because I had so much happen to me that didn’t make sense, that I didn’t understand that I had to go back and get more education to figure out what was wrong with me. So I come from both schools of thought and I’m going to date myself, but I’ve been doing this a very, very long time and I’ve seen a lot of stuff.

So spiritual oppression is real. And I don’t know if we want to get into the theological debate, but I was a spirit-field Christian. I was speaking in tongues, but the previous part of my life, I got involved in the occult. And on my father’s side of the family, there’s occult history. So I had a lot of spiritual oppression that was addressed first. And the why that happened first, I don’t know, but there’s always the debate. Can a Christian have a demon can all this kind of stuff. And you can get so wrapped up in the theology of what a demon is. How does it manifest itself? Who gets ’em? Who doesn’t get ’em? I’ve learned over the years that it doesn’t matter if you are oppressed or if there’s a spiritual thing, just clean house, who cares where it comes from? Who cares? We have all authority and power over the darkness, and I think there are a lot of people out there, Christians who don’t believe that.

They believe that the demonic world is more powerful than the power that we have inside of us. And I had to learn that lesson the hard way. I got so wrapped up that the demons and my behaviors were so critical of whether I was going to get another one, that I had no power, no authority, and I almost lost my mind because of the dark world, I was taught that it was so much more powerful than me. Once I got my theology and I realized I had all the authority, God gave it to me. Satan has been defeated. Quit looking at the dark sign and get free. Then I learned about this whole other part about trauma, that the brain fractures, the brain can fracture itself off and we can adapt ourselves into different personas. That is a survival mechanism, and there are varying degrees of that.

So when I look at somebody, I keep wanting to talk about clients, but I think I’m going to refrain from that just because they’re so active and I want to really, really want to protect their privacy. But a brain can fracture into different parts of self, and inside of those fractured parts of herself can be spiritual oppression. Now, I wish that I could see in the spirit realm so I could just start sorting things out. That’s part of her trauma because people can actually, when you work on traumatic memories with a 50-year-old woman, they can actually feel like a child when that memory is being processed or reprocessed and integrated into their present. They have different aspects of themselves that come out that might sound like a different person, that might have different quirks or different characteristics, like more of a protector part of themselves.

And then we have these more exiled parts of ourselves that contain a lot of the pain. And what I learned looking back in all the inner healing and deliverance is a lot of the people that were praying didn’t know how to discern between, which was part of the psyche and which was part of spiritual oppression. So I think that is a really important piece because, for anybody listening out there, you might start feeling afraid like, oh my gosh, I did drugs. Oh my gosh, I was involved in the occult. Oh my gosh. We automatically assume that if you did drugs, you have a demon. If you were involved in the cult, you have a demon. I wish I could see in the spirit realm to know what, but we just don’t know. And I don’t know, I’m not going to say there’s, you definitely have a lot more discernment than I do as far as seeing things in the spirit realm.

But why not clean the entire house? Let’s just clean it all up and repent and restore and heal and be delivered and go to healing prayer and just get cleaned up. Doesn’t matter the why, doesn’t matter how things got there, but just keep more of a broader sweep of I want to be free. I want to be healed. I don’t care. I’m not going to overanalyze it. We tend to overanalyze it in fear. I cannot tell you how many times fear grips somebody. Whenever we talk about the demonic world, all of a sudden they’re afraid.

And Why are we afraid?

Exactly. It’s ignorance because we don’t know our power and authority in our Lord. I am not afraid of the demonic. I almost find it comical. I joke around and say, these demons are like little roaches. The moment the light, the Holy Spirit light comes into that person, they’re out. They’re cowards. They have no power and authority. And I think when people really understand that at the soul level, there is no fear to, there is no fear against this. I call them roaches because they run away from the Lord. And you call the name of Jesus and they bow down, and if you call on the blood of Jesus, they cower down, they leave. And so I think it’s important for me that people find their voice, and not just their voice for themselves, but the voice that God has put in them, that we don’t have power and authority on our own.

But when you have a relationship with Christ, your power and authority comes from the Lord and nothing, nothing will hold you back because he’s protecting us and we’re working through him. This comes through a relationship with him, not just anyone randomly saying Jesus, and this demon’s going to leave. I think there’s a lot of walking closely with him and being obedient to him. I always say that what I know is not because of what I know, it’s because of what he’s done through me. And there’s still a lot of things. I really dunno. I’m a baby in this Brenda, but the things that God has shown me and had me work with, it’s been really amazing. And that’s why I believe that God will use anyone who is willing and who’s obedient to him. Just like a soldier. If you’re willing to sign yourself up for the military and you’re going to be obedient to the command of the Lord, he will use you in any way. So yeah. That’s very interesting, man. Wow. I am at a loss of words of everything that you were saying.

I kind of threw you a curveball there. I know,

And in a good way, because I do work with a lot of Christian individuals, and you’re right, I think there are different perspectives and ideas. I don’t really care to know where it came from. Like you said, let’s clean the house. It’s free of that. Let’s let the Lord come in and clean the house and then work from there. What I do see is when there is deliverance that needed to happen, it allows for a much clearer and cleaner slate to start with because now this person is able to speak and articulate themselves much different and now heal through those other things. It is like the process is expedited because you don’t have that noise. And so, yeah, I don’t think that everyone, perfect world. In a perfect world, I don’t believe that everyone has a demon because they’ve done bad stuff. No. And I have seen people who think they have a demon.

And what I find now, it’s emotional. It’s emotional stuff. And some of it is behavioral. If you want to keep yourself as a victim, you will create every problem you have every problem in the world if you make yourself a victim. So sometimes it is mindset and behavioral, not so much demonic. Right? Not even physiology. It’s just now behavioral stuff that you’re having to work with when it comes to deliverance. I know there is not a one-way approach to that, but in your experience when you were doing deliverance, do you still do some of that or is it something you just did in the past?

I will if I have to. If I’m doing a whole person trauma group that’s Christian-based and something comes up, it gets dealt with right then, but I don’t solely do healing prayer sessions or anything like that. Okay. Yeah. But I did a lot in the nineties.

In the nineties. How do You approach it?

Well, back then, I think we know a lot more now than we did back then. The church that I was a part of, we had a healing prayer day every Wednesday and anybody could come. And we went through some training and we learned as we went and we laid hands and we started praying in the spirit, and we asked them, what do they want prayer for? And it was really just pretty much spirit-led and simple. And I know there’s a lot more training out there now and models that you can actually incorporate into churches that’s very specific where you have a team of intercessors, you have a process of how they come through, which I’m a super fan of that we should always have some kind of an intake assessment process before they come into prayer. One of my biggest, I’m going to say pets, is praying for somebody too long when they’re screaming and crying.

That was probably one of the biggest things I see, and I still hear about it today with my clients, is they’ll be going into deliverance prayer and a team will be praying over them for so long and they’ll cry for so long and they’re just exhausted. And it’s really not putting that person first. They’re forcing something to happen without a little bit more information. And then they land in my office going, oh my gosh, I’m exhausted. Nothing happened, nothing changed. And then you find out that there were parts of themselves that were so traumatized by so many people closing in on them and not being trauma-informed or trauma-sensitive, and they just have this reaction. But the people praying for them think it’s a demonic manifestation because they’re behaving in a certain way and they leave exhausted.

Yeah. That exhaustion is, it’s a real thing. And this is why I, especially if there is trauma involved, I believe that it’s, you got to help the physical body to be able to withhold that much processing. So I always explain, we work at an onion, we peel back layers, we work on the physical body, and make sure that this physical structure, it’s durable to be able to handle the emotions. One of the things that our audience should know is that our emotions deplete us, our strong emotional response, it takes up a lot of energy and it will make you feel exhausted. Emotional stress to me, it’ll deplete me energy wise. I can go work out, I can go work physically, and that gives me life and energy, but an emotional response will put me to sleep right afterward. I just need to rest. And this is true for many people.

It’s our emotions, strong emotional responses that we have will use up more energy in our physical body. And in our brains especially. We have a fun science fact here. Mitochondria are little battery cells in every organ, every system that produces energy to give those organs energy. We have hundreds in a muscle in our heart, we have thousands because the heart is always beating, so it’s always working fast. But our brain and our nervous system, there are billions of mitochondria. So just imagine how much energy the brain and the nervous system have to use when you’re processing emotional things. This is why we get depleted. And so I am glad you touched on that because yeah, how do you know this person needs deliverance and really what they need is a counselor? And just stop. This is why I don’t initiate it. Me, my brain does not say, oh, this person needs deliverance.

I truly allow Holy Spirit to dictate that to me because it’s easier. It is easier for me. I don’t have to decide. God decides it for me. And I think that’s where I have really, really honed in on telling people your relationship with God is the most important relationship that you can have and the most powerful. And when you start to hear the voice of God, he will guide you in every step of the way. There’s no petty thing that he’ll guide you if he tells you, eat that, don’t eat that. Walk away from that relationship, whatever it is, he will guide you in every step of your life. And that is the great physician right there. And I think as practitioners or people doing deliverance, they need to really pay attention to what that person needs and know when it can be uncomfortable and dangerous. I think I will say, this is just my opinion, and I could be completely wrong, but I’m not a fan of doing deliverance in public.

I know that in the Bible, Jesus did this, but that’s Jesus. That’s not me. I’m Anna, right? I’m not Jesus. And what I have witnessed through working with people is that it’s such a sacred and precious time that God is coming in to free this person and heal them, that I can’t see that happening in public and maintain the respect, honor, integrity of this person. If we really want to work with people and they feel safe, I can’t see how that can help. And even at an altered church, that’s just my opinion, and I got it. I’m like, this is why they call it deliverance. Because what God is doing in that person through that session in that time is that they’re giving birth to a new person. They’re being freed of whatever was holding them back, and they’re a new person there. And so I wouldn’t give birth in front of a church.

I wouldn’t give birth in public. Why would I do that? I wouldn’t. And I think people who’ve gone through a lot of trauma feel very unsafe about doing that publicly. Let’s face it, like you said in our last conversation, people, pastors, people in churches we’re all human, and we don’t have control of what the person next to me or the church is going to see if someone’s being delivered there. I dunno. To me, like I said, it’s very sacred. It’s a very intimate experience that God has with these individuals. I don’t care to do a show and tell. It’s really about that person being freed and having a deeper connection with God. Because some of the people that come to me already have a relationship with God, but they feel like there’s something, they’re running in circles. There’s something that’s just holding them back and they don’t know what it is.

And I never want anyone, even someone listening to this conversation, it doesn’t make you a bad person because we know that. And this is what I’ve learned, of course, I went back and I started reading books and educating myself and learning from pastors who are talking about this publicly is how do demons enter a person? How do they start influencing them? And when there are areas of weakness and hurt and pain, especially in children, they start to influence and make their way in that way. What’s been your knowledge and understanding of how a demon makes its way into a person’s life?

Well, I wished I had a lens into the spirit realm, but I don’t, I can just tell you some. My kind of caveat before, my disclaimer is I don’t think we should ever put anything in a box. This is not black and white. This is not five easy steps to freedom. If I renounce this, I will be free. If I do this, I will be free. We don’t know. I don’t know. But I know my own experience and I know what I’ve seen, and it can be generational, meaning in my family, I had generational occult stuff coming through on my father’s side, and sometimes we call ’em familiar spirits. The spirit world is outside of time. It’s outside of time. So any beings in the spirit realm can see all kinds of things, enough generational line. So if there’s a pattern of alcoholism, if there’s a pattern of adult or witchcraft or something, these demonic can just familiar spirits can just follow a family down.

So then you can just, I mean that’s like, oh my gosh, we can’t win. We, I don’t have a choice. I was getting this thing. And that’s where I like to just, let’s just stay away from that because then we start going, oh my gosh, I’m poisoned. I’m dirty. We immediately get taken out of our faith of our authority and who we are in Christ. It’s like the brain and Satan just wants to completely lie to us that you are trapped, you are helpless, you are dirty. There’s something wrong with you instead of leaning into the spiritual authority. So there’s that school of thought. And then just in my work in the psychiatric hospital, for example, methamphetamines, there’s certain drug chemicals. When people would come in and I assess them for detox or whatever, there’s something about methamphetamine when they take methamphetamines. The stories that people would tell me were the same almost every single time They were transported into the spirit realm while they were high.

And they saw demonic forces. So if I know somebody has taken methamphetamines, I’m not going to do a black and white statement like, oh, well, because you use methamphetamines, you have a demon that the danger, that’s that. Stay away from that. But I’m wondering, and I’m looking very carefully for spiritual oppression, any kind of occult thing there. Now, the biggest one I’m going to talk about, because 50% of my caseload right now are women whose husbands are addicted to pornography or they have a sexual addiction. And I will tell you that what I sense in the spirit realm is there is a strong, strong sexual spirit that is in these marriages through an open door of constantly looking at pornography, violating women. And if I ever wrote a book, the name of it would be Satan’s Rape of the Church, because the defiling of women that I believe is directly linked to Satan and destroying the church because got Christ is coming, got back for his pure spotless bride, the church and the marriages, the Christian marriages that are being destroyed by pornography and sexual perversion.

So many Christian women have completely become desensitized to all kinds of sexual things because of the internet, the media, there’s a lack of intimacy in marriages from, it’s in our younger generations, the twenties, the thirties, and up to the forties, maybe up to the fifties. But there’s just an inability to have intimacy, like a common connection between a man and a woman. Everything is in the cyber world. So I think there’s a spiritual thing around that. If I could just get every person that’s ever dabbled in spiritual sexual perversion of any kind, I would want to get them to healing prayer because there’s something that is sick and dark and evil that is so prominent in that, I don’t know. It’s an epidemic right now in Christian marriages. This is an epidemic, and I believe it’s evil and it needs deliverance. I mean, I think marriages need to be delivered from this along with other important recovery and healing and that type of thing. I’ll leave it at that and let you jump in.

Wow. No, that’s great. My, I’m just like, well write that book. You should write that book. Yeah, because I don’t know of anyone who would be a better person than to put that book together out there. And I know that a lot of, especially if you’re Christian, I mean it’s happening in the secular world, but in the Christian community, if this is happening, I can just imagine the shame and guilt that they still carry amongst other things that it brings into. And I’ve even read about cases where when someone in the family opens the door to that, how it brings in spiritual downfalls for their children that are in that same household. So we really need to think about the decisions that we make and how it’s going to influence our children and every generation. But I agree that that is a problem I continuously hear a lot about just in general, not even just in the Christian Church, it’s just in general, but we know that marriage, it is a sacred relationship, and it’s like people’s moral compass has been out the door, media has been great. However, it’s also, it’s easy access for any information, for lacks good information. I want to share, I started reading this book, I’m Not done, I’m halfway done, but it’s called The Secrets to Generational Curses. Have you heard of this by Alexander Paani? I’m going to have to get him on the show.

Oh, I Know who he is. Yeah, I follow him on social media.

Me too. And that’s how I learned about his book, the Secrets to Generational Curses. I am a real fan of how he lays everything out, and it is backed up by scripture. I’m not going to go over the whole book, but what I like is how he explains the heavenly courts and the courts on earth. And he says that when it’s a generational curse, it’s not a demonic influence. You cannot get rid of a generational curse through just prayer and doing deliverance. It has to be a different way of interceding. You have to take it to the courts of heaven. And so he says, because if it’s a generational thing, the price needs to be paid. And so we need to just like if you were to take a case to court and appeal it, you have to do that. And it’s a process, but he lays the foundation of how to and start to acknowledge it.

And I’ll tell you, I have gone through the book halfway and so far I’ve been able to identify the things in my family of being of Mexican descent. If you look at the generations, usually three, four generations back, you’re impacted. But I come from a culture where, and some people might get upset if they hear this, but it’s the truth. It’s not for me. I’m not going to justify something that’s wrong and make it good so I can be comfortable with it. But culturally, indigenous people worship idols, and that’s not what God wants for us to worship the sun or other things in the earth. And so there were a lot of ceremonial things that were done that were not godly through the European side. There were different things as well that have an influence on my life. But when I look back generationally wise, there’s a huge influence of Catholicism in Mexico as a country and just culturally.

So there’s a lot of those statues in the Virgin Mary and all of these things that people worship and they are idols, and God doesn’t want that for us. So it’s even breaking those little cultural things that are there and asking, God, take my case and forgive me and forgive my forefathers for how we have offended you. And I mean, you start to see patterns in your life. We all know the patterns in our families, whether you want to turn blind eye to it, but the patterns are there. It’s a great book. Like I said, I’m not done with it, but I know that that is a next level thing for me. It’s understanding how do you break generational curses because it’s different from deliverance, very different. What’s your take on that?

Well, when we talk again about looking at all perspectives of a curse, you and I have had conversations about epigenetics. And so now we know that there’s a gene that rests upon the DNA code that gets passed down from generation to generation. And then we also know that we can change that and create a new legacy with our DNA. Who would ever thought that you could alter DNA through this epigenetic concept? The other thing that from a mental health point of view is we call it generational curses, but then in the secular world, we call it historical trauma, especially in the African-American community. We talk about patterns that have been handed down generationally, traumatic things from Africa to the United States. And I have some African-American friends, clinicians who have really shown me clearly these generational curses that have come through the African-American line that keep this group of people oppressed in a multitude of ways.

And the book, I actually would like to read that book because I started learning about generational curses way back with my healing, and I started renouncing and really separating myself from all these influences that my forefathers carried down, so I got rid of the contamination. But then the really cool thing about when generational curses are lifted is you see all the positive things that your culture brought down with you. My grandparents that carried all this occult stuff, they were immigrants from Norway. They broke sod and they’re pioneers, and I have that same pioneer spirit on me of breaking ground in the church, of going on the outside and breaking up the ground of the old couch that needs to get out and speaking things that the church doesn’t want, like breaking new ground and building and planting new things so you can have this negative stuff come through. But then when you clean all that up and you got, oh my gosh, there’s all these incredible, I work with so many Hispanic women that have story upon story upon story of immigration and work ethic and family, and I just get chills thinking about it because there are so many strengths in this culture that generationally comes down to that we’re losing the sense of family and a strong work ethic. And you hear the stories of all these women I work with, it blows my mind, so I’ll throw that

Positive spin in there. God created us for good, and of course, the enemy’s going to come in and destroy that, and that’s what’s happened through generations. It’s destroying people. But once you heal and you truly come to forgiveness in breaking these curses generational-wise, then like you said, you start to see the strength in the family lineage. You start to see the good qualities come through, and only God can do that in her life. As much as I like my natural medicine that will never touch the spiritual realm. And that’s what I want people to take away from our conversations is that there is a time and place for everything. Certain things need to happen for physical healing. There’s certain things that need to happen for the mental healing, emotional healing, and then the spiritual part. We can’t leave that out. So I’m excited to partner up with individuals like yourself who see that that whole person, because we are spirit, soul, and body, and until we need to take the owner, I truly believe, Brenda, that there’s a group of people on Earth, right?

A large group of people right now, they’re in their thirties, sorry, maybe their thirties, but forties and fifties, that they are the generational curse breakers in their family lineage. And I just want to say, if this speaks to you, start leaning in and start letting God guide you. Get the resources and tools because you are not just breaking that bondage for yourself and your family line, but the children of your future generation that you will never get to meet, but you’re doing it for them because we are tired of being slaves and being in bondage, whether it’s spiritual or your mind, and I think this is where God is like, get it done now. Don’t wait. Get it done now. The healing needs to happen. Be empowered. Get rid of the shame. Get rid of the fear and the guilt and all of that, and start finding the help that you need.

If you feel you can’t do it on your own, then find someone who can guide you through it, but get the help. Hey, we’re going to wrap up this episode. I feel like we can speak for hours, Brenda, maybe in the future I’ll bring you back again. But I just want to say thank you so much for making time out of your busy schedule to host these two episodes. I love you and appreciate everything you’re doing, and I pray that God will bless you tenfold for the work that you’re doing, because what you’re doing is you’re freeing people so they can be in his kingdom and bringing peace on earth as well. So thank you so much, my dear friend. Stay blessed. You’re welcome. Thank you. Hey, everyone, I am grateful that you guys are listening into this episode. If you really need help in this area, feel free to reach out to Brenda.

We’re going to provide those links for you or information for you to access today. We’re going to skip out on our segment, but stay tuned for our next episode because we’re going to start talking about some disease states and how you can cure yourself naturally. I have a couple of great naturopathic doctors who will be joining me. So as always, everyone 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.

The post Episode 10: Generational sin/Demonic influence & oppression w/ Christian Counselor Brenda Cochran appeared first on Raíces Naturopathic Medical Center.

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.

The post Episode 9: A whole person approach to healing trauma w/ Christian Counselor Brenda Cochran appeared first on Raíces Naturopathic Medical Center.

Podcast 8 Transcript

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 Lay Self, the podcast. I’m Dr. Laura. I hope you’ve been enjoying these episodes so far. Today I want to talk about something that I have always witnessed, but lately, it’s been more so in my forefront. I want to start off by saying that currently as I’m recording this message, there’s a lot going on in my personal life my father has been in the hospital in and out for the last several months this year, and I couldn’t help but to witness something that I see all the time in our world in general, and that is the lack of compassion. So I want to start off by sharing a story of a couple of weeks ago. It was a late night. I was at the hospital visiting my father and there were some family members there. Now, my father was very sensitive that day, not feeling well.

And so that you know when people are sick, really ill, or they have cancer, they’re in a hospital, they just have surgery or they’re in their last moments of life. They’re very sensitive, their nervous system is very sensitive. So sounds and noises, conversations in their physical body, it’s like nails on a chalkboard. And how I know this has been my own sensitivity to listening and paying attention to other people being observant, I can tell and I can feel that that person is irritable. So I noticed that he was very sensitive and irritable and just witnessed the conversation, and the behavior in the room that night. And I couldn’t help but to think the lack of compassion that the individuals in that room had. It’s not that they don’t love him. I know they love him, but their level of awareness just wasn’t there. So today I want to talk about the art of compassion.

The art of compassion. What is it? I want to start off with some definitions. I’m going to give you the dictionary verse of the definition and then I’m going to give you the Christian perspective definition of that term. And the first word I want to start off is with defining empathy. So empathy, the definition of that is yourself in someone else’s position and feeling what they are feeling. Now, let’s stop right there because you’re feeling what other people are feeling. Do you realize that most people don’t even want to feel their own feelings much less? Are they going to want to feel someone else’s feelings as well, or emotions understanding their suffering? How many people truly understand someone else’s suffering?

Envisioning yourself going through the same experience and feeling what they are going through is really key. There. Does it mean you have to go through it to understand? But if you put yourself in their shoes, you may just get a little glimpse of it because you’re not going to get the full experience. It’s not the same. The Christian perspective of empathy, is entering into another person’s world. Wow, entering into another person’s world and feeling what they feel rather than feeling sorry for him or her. There is a difference. It’s not me feeling sorry for someone. It’s entering into their world and feeling what they’re feeling in that moment. That’s a skill. The apostle Paul in Galatians 6:2, states bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. That’s the new King James version in the NIV, the word bear, is used carry.

They use carry. So you can carry, you can lift, you can bear one another’s burdens. Do you think that in our culture and our society, people are doing this? Absolutely not enough. We’re going to keep going because there’s more to tie into this later on. Now, the definition of compassion, the meaning of compassion is to suffer together with, and it’s derived from the Latin term, from the Latin language. The Christian definition is going to be a little bit more in-depth. It’s having or showing or having mercy, sympathy, empathy, or pity, recognizing the suffering of others and then taking action to help. And that’s the key thing with compassion is there is an action part to it. It’s a form of love and compassion, compassionate attitude means that we will not just choose ourselves, but we will choose others in their humanity in that moment that you will make it about them and not about you.

I will not make it about me. Like I said, I will make it more about that person. And this is an act of selflessness that some people are just not enough. In Matthew 9 36 where Jesus shows compassion to the crowd, it says, but in verse nine, in verse 36, he says, but when he saw the multitude, he was moved with compassion for them because they were weary, scattered like sheep, having no shepherd. And the key word there is he was moved with compassion. So there’s an action behind compassion and empathy. We can feel we can be in the presence of that person and feel what they’re feeling, but compassion actually requires an action and that action, you might be surprised. It’s not this big requirement, it’s the small subtle things that we do. Even if it’s reaching out and touching someone’s hand, putting your hand on their back, letting them know that you’re there, feeling their pain, that you’re there to support that person.

Jesus is a great example of compassion. I came up with different ways to the nature of Jesus’s compassion. He fed the hungry, he healed the sick. He forgave people’s sins, he restored people’s lives. He taught he freed the people from demonic possession. He showed empathy. These are the actions that he took to show his compassion to people. Now, I know some people feel like, well, I can’t go and save the world. No, you can’t. And I’m not saying that you should go try to save the world, but there are people in your small world, in your small circle of influence, your family that you can’t show compassion. And sometimes those are the circles that are hardest to see that compassion coming through. So there’s three facets that are required for a person to have compassion, and to exercise that, and that is noticing, feeling, and responding.

You have to be able to notice that there’s a need, need to be able to feel that there’s a need, and respond. There’s an action that is associated with compassion. So I want to talk about ways to develop compassion and why people struggle with compassion. Once again, I see that there’s such a disconnect between humans and each other that they’re not paying attention, they’re not being mindful of what other people are going through and experiencing. Through working with my patients, I hear it all the time, their families don’t see their medical condition as being a problem. So why are they behaving or acting a certain way? And it’s hard when you have mental health issues and people don’t take you seriously. And I get it, some people might abuse of these situations. I’m not referring to those. I’m referring to people who really are suffering, who are struggling, whether it’s physical, mental, or emotional, maybe they’re grieving the loss of a loved one which can be a very lonely state, and not oftentimes, many people show compassion.

They think that after the person’s been buried, it’s time to move along and it doesn’t work that way. It is a process and everyone’s process is different on a different timeline and compassion is sitting with them, sitting with people in their pain, in their time of need and that doesn’t mean that you’re taking on their problem, making it your problem, absolutely not. But there is a level of awareness that we need. So I want to talk about how you develop compassion and it has to start with self-awareness. You have to be self-aware of how you come across to other people, and how you are in your mind, and if you are recognizing these things about you that you lack compassion for other people, start making these next steps part of your life for you to show genuine compassion. One of the things that I find is that people do not know how to quiet their minds.

If you learn to quiet your mind, it’s going to bring clarity to the unseen things. And here’s what I mean, going back to my story at the beginning of my dad at the hospital, family members there, they’re talking, they’re on their phone, there’s all these noises. He’s not doing well. I could tell that he was very irritable. He’s very calm and peaceful. So from the outside, he looks fine. He looks like he’s asleep. But see, I went up to him and I put my hand on his forehead and on his chest, and I could tell that his nervous system was not happy. And every time there was a noise or something was going on in the room, there was a change in his physical body. Now I know I’m a little different. I feel I work with these therapies that make me more sensitive to that, to people in these situations.

However, I had to get here somewhere, and that came through being observant. So having a quiet mind, means I’m not thinking in my own mind about what I need to do or what I’m feeling. I’m quieting my mind and I’m completely directing my time, my attention, my energy, my attention, my focus on that person and observing what is not physically visible, picking up on those subtle cues from them because people give you cues on how they’re feeling. And so when you do that, you’ll be more sensitive to observing things that you don’t see with your physical eyes. The third component of this is the guy’s active listening. And when I mean active listening, I’m talking about actively listening with all your senses. Listen with your eyes, listen with your ears, listen with your heart, listen with your whole body. We have receptors that we feel we pick up things in our environment.

So listen with all your senses, what is that person feeling or going through? You can feel it. The problem is that people don’t want to feel and they don’t want to listen. They just want to quickly go on their way. And once again, it goes back to step two, which is to learn to quiet the mind. People do not want to quiet their minds. They’re busy on their phones, they’re busy in their life, and they’re not willing to slow down to listen to others. So actively listening to people, will develop this skill of compassion, right? The fourth piece is once you listen, you’re going to be able to recognize the suffering in others. You’re going to develop to be sensitive to what’s going on with that person. Even things that they’re not telling you, you’re going to pick it up. Something’s wrong. What’s going on?

Tell me. My friends always say, how did you know? I’m like because I’ve practiced this so much without even consciously thinking about it, that it’s autopilot for me. I can tell when something is off with my family, with my children or patients, or out in public. I can tell when something is off. Now, if I’m really busy and I’m stuck in my own thoughts, guess what? That compassion, that sensory, it turns off. So I know it has a lot to do with what’s going on in my mind. Is it peaceful? Is it calm? Do I have clarity or is it busy? The fifth piece is understanding the universality of suffering in the human experience in America, a lot of people are very selfish. They just don’t want to worry about someone else. It’s me, me, me, I, and me, me. That is it. And I pray for those people because there’s going to be a time when you will want someone to show you empathy and compassion.

And so we don’t do these things so that we can receive it later. We do these things because we love those people and we want to be mindful and we want to be there for them, truly be there for that person. The sixth part is feeling, feeling for the person, suffering and emotionally connecting with their distress. And really there doesn’t have to be a whole lot of conversation. It might be just listening to that person speak, and sometimes it’s just a matter of holding space for them and just physically being there with them, even if there’s no conversation going on.

The seventh point is to tolerate any uncomfortable feelings aroused. This is where it gets difficult for people. So you’re tolerating this uncomfortable feeling you have that you’re sensing from this person and it’s this person’s fear. It’s this person’s distress. Maybe it’s their anger, maybe it’s their sadness, maybe it’s physical pain, maybe it’s emotional, mental pain, the discomfort that they’re having, whatever the emotions are that you’re willing to sit in this uncomfortable state with them. And I think this is where I lose most people, like why would I do that? Well, if this is your father, if this is your mother, your child, your husband, your wife, a good friend of yours, and you see them in pain, are you okay with just saying, oh, let them sit in their pain by themselves? I’m out of here. That doesn’t show love, that’s not loving, that says is I’m willing to sit with you during the good times and during the bad times, peace out.

I’m out. I’m out of here. Call me when you’re feeling better. That is not a relationship, that is not a good relationship. And like I said, there’s going to be a time that we’re going to need to have that compassion, understanding and so forth. The eighth part is to be motivated to take action to alleviate the suffering. These actions don’t have to mean like, oh, I’m going to go buy this person a brand new purse or shoes or take them to eat. It might not even be that. It might just be taking the action to go and sit with them. Now, if you’re in the same room, be with them. Look at them, put your phone away, and be with them across from them. Ask them what they need. If they don’t need anything, just sit with them. Have conversation. And this is an art. Many people don’t want to do that.

And even in our families, they don’t want to do that. It’s painful, I get it. But this is what makes relationships deeper and feel safer and loving, right? It’s this kind of art. So why do some people struggle to be compassionate? You, I talked about it before. The busyness of our minds is going to really keep us away from making the time to sit and actively listen. So people are often, another thing is people are often making assumptions or judgments on people the way they look. They fail to look past the external experience to see what really is going on in the person. So if you’re really busy, you can see someone who maybe they’re running their business, they look healthy, they look happy, they’re fine, they look like they’re fine. But if you’re not making time to sit with them and have a relationship with him and see these things there might be something else going on that they’re not talking about.

If you made time to sit with them, you would see that there might be other things going on. And this is what always, trips me when I see these celebrities really famous people that commit suicide and everyone is like, Hey, I don’t know. I never saw that coming. They’re such a happy person and they’re successful and they’re beautiful. We never saw it coming. Well, you never saw it coming because you weren’t paying attention. You were not paying attention to those unseen subtle cues that people have. And if you were close to that person, you would have seen those subtle cues of what’s going on with them. That’s why the pretty successful people that commit suicide, are giving signs, but people are so caught up in the image of what they’re projecting that they think they’re fine. So take a look at people in your life that they seem like they have it together.

They seem like they have it going on great, but some things are going on in their life. Some people might see me like, Hey, she has her business. She’s a doctor, she has a podcast, and she has her family. She’s juggling everything just fine. And I am, but it doesn’t mean that I am fine. I also need help. And I get the help and I have those close relationships that do listen and are there to help and guide me. And I really encourage people to develop those. Even if it’s one or two people, all you need is one person you can have this healthy balance. You cannot abuse these relationships either when you’re in need. So you need that balance of people to go to. Don’t always get caught up in the appearance of a person. They look healthy. They might not be healthy.

They might be dealing with cancer or an autoimmune condition that you don’t even know. They might be dealing with a mental health issue that you don’t even know. They might have been dealing with trauma, that they’re healing through continuously, and they seem okay on the outside, but they’re working on it. So compassion really is an art. And I think that a lot of people struggle because they’re too busy and they’re judging based on and making assumptions about the way a person appears. The other part is poor listening skills. I can tell when I’m being heard and when I’m not being heard, and I can tell by the way their eyes look. And there are just so many other components of a person that tell you if they’re really engaged with you or not. I remember as a kid being able to witness family members having a conversation, and I was just quietly observing them, have a conversation, and I realized no one is listening to them, they’re not listening to each other because they’re arguing the same points.

They’re just saying it differently, but they’re arguing the same thing. And so this is hilarious. If people just were to be quiet here, but quiet up here and just listen with the intention to understand the other person, then to be understood, right? I love the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey. I read it in my early twenties. It’s the best book I ever read in my life. And one of the seven lessons is that you seek to understand and then to be understood. So that means I want to understand you first before I even open my mouth and share my perspective. That is truly a skill and an art to do that. So poor listening skills are one of the reasons that people struggle to be compassionate. Then another one is, man, we have a lot of selfish, self-centered people. It’s all about themselves.

Like I said, they don’t want to stop worrying and feel about anyone else. It’s about me. I’m too busy. I have a family. I have this. I’m traveling. I’m doing all these things. Great, but what about the people who have invested in you throughout your life and have been supportive of you throughout your life? These relationships matter, and we know these relationships are really important. When we are struggling in life when we have a chronic illness, something debilitating, who are the people who show up for us? And if no one shows up for you, then you might want to reevaluate the way you are communicating and relating with other people in your life. But we have a lot of selfish and self-centered attitudes out there that it’s all about them and we ain’t got time for anybody else. I got to be successful. I got to get my money, my car and all that.

That stuff is material things. If you’ve ever experienced a loss of a loved one, you know that in those last weeks and days and moments of life, the money, the cars, the house, your degree, your career, none of that matters. None of that. The money doesn’t matter. There’s not enough money that can keep that person alive. There are no more hours of work that will keep them alive. It doesn’t matter where you travel, the people that are usually surrounded, the people that are usually surrounding the person who’s transitioning off, it’s their family. So I say, start with your family. Start loving on your family. Start listening to them. It is the hardest time. It’s the hardest people sometimes to listen to and be compassionate with, which is a great place to start showing compassion. And the fourth component of why people struggle to be compassionate, they fear.

They really fear to feel emotions. Our culture does not want to feel emotions. We will suppress them as best as we can. We’ll suppress them by being busy with work and keeping ourselves busy with anything but feeling our emotions much less are going to feel the emotions of someone else. So compassion does not require any grand gesture. It can be something simple and subtle, something simple as subtle as putting your hand on someone else’s hand when they’re expressing their pain, their grief. It could just be sitting with him in silence. I’ve heard that sometimes that could be really life-changing for someone. So the present, and it’s the energy you bring forth in that moment when you’re sitting with that person. Because if you’re sitting there agitated, anxious, angry, that person that needs compassion, they’re going to feel your emotions. And guess what? They don’t need it.

So you might as well not show up, go deal with your emotions and then come back to this person so that they can find some healing through that. It’s very important to be present with people. Now, what does that mean? What does being present mean in the life of technology where we have distractions everywhere and everything and anything is trying to get our attention right? Being present really means putting the technology away, sitting with people, looking at each other eye to eye and just being all your senses, just sitting there and making that connection. For some of us, that’s easy because we’ve practiced this maybe because of the kind of work that we do and because of life situations. And I sometimes get caught up in my world thinking that everyone can do this and they can’t. They cannot be still. And that’s a problem.

You are addicted to your technology. You’re addicted to being busy and constantly being entertained, and having a real human in front of you who’s sharing their real-life experiences, it’s not entertaining enough. It’s a heart matter. You have to check in with yourself. What kind of a human are you? Because if you cannot make the time to sit and be present and listen and make it about someone else that says a lot about the type of person that you are, and I mean, that’s not someone I want to be around. Like I said, when I am not heard, I will just walk away from the conversation because I don’t like to waste my time. I’d rather read a book. I’d rather go work out. I’d rather do something else. But to be in a conversation with someone who’s not even listening to me, why waste my time?

We ain’t got time for that. So what being present looks like is a quiet mind, no judgment, no judgment, criticizing, not making assumptions, not looking to explain either. Sometimes people just want to be heard, and it’s okay to ask that person, what do you need from me right now? Would you like me to listen to you? Or are you looking for feedback or my opinions? That way you know what you’re there for. I’m just going to listen to you. Great, and I’ll listen. You start exercising these skills. Next time you go with a friend or a family member, just listen to them. Don’t try to talk. Don’t try to interject your comments or opinions, nothing. Just listen to them and ask ’em what they need. Don’t interrupt them. When someone is talking about their situation, being interrupted really kills the moment and no longer makes them feel safe.

When they’re interrupted, it doesn’t make them feel validated and heard. If they’re constantly being interrupted and try to put yourself in their shoes, what would it feel like to be in this situation of losing your spouse or being ill with this condition? What would it feel like? How would I feel if I got the diagnosis of cancer? And try to envision what that looks like and then ask them, how can you help them? Sometimes people are able to answer that question and sometimes they’re not. And the reason is that if they’re so overwhelmed emotionally, they may not know. But if you’re around them enough, you’ll start to see that they need help. Maybe they need help cleaning their house. Let me take her out to eat or for a walk. Let me get this person out of their home because maybe that’s what they need.

So ask, we’re going to wrap up here, but I want to talk about this holding space. I get asked a lot, what is that? And that’s showing up. You’re showing up for someone and you’re fully, mentally, emotionally, physically present for them without any judgment, and you’re just going to sit with him during this difficult time. You’re just there to listen like a sponge. You’re just there to listen. So being able to make people, being able to feel their pain and emotions is really important. It doesn’t mean that you’re making it your pain and emotions. You’re not going to carry it with you when you walk away from that conversation, but you’re sitting in their bubble feeling what they’re feeling. I always envision that you have a bubble around you, and I have a bubble around me. And when we sit together and I hold space for you, our bubbles are merged, and I’m listening to you.

I’m holding space for you, whatever you need to say so that you feel safe to say it. No judgment or criticizing, not a peep. And when I walk away from that conversation, from that person, I leave what belongs to them, their emotions, their pain. I leave it with them and I take what’s mine with me This way. I’m not carrying all of their emotional pain, their physical pain with me for the rest of my day, or I’m laying in bed, right? And I’m thinking about this person’s problems. Not at all. I see people all day every day doing these things, and I rarely, rarely ever take this home with me. And if I do, I have a ritual for myself of how to release all of that. Does this not belong to me? This belongs to them. God help me to release anything that is not mine because I get it.

Boundaries and people not wanting to take on someone else’s energy. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m not saying take on someone else’s problems and emotions. That’s not healthy either. I’m not a garbage can to be dumped on either. So there are people that may do that, and you have to be able to acknowledge when that happens and set a healthy boundary there. But for most people, they just want to be heard. They just want someone to listen to them so that they can just feel better. And these relationships are very, very, very important. Allowing the person to unfold into their true essence. That’s what we want. We want to be able to find at least one person in our life that we can just be completely genuine, be real without any filters, and just share with that person how we feel. These things are very important to our health and wellness.

And the reason I wanted to talk about compassion is because it is key. Very, very important for us to show expression, to share compassion, and to receive compassion. When we are trying to heal through certain things in our lives, whether it’s physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual, we need compassion. And we have such a great teacher who taught us all about compassion, and that’s Jesus. He came to teach us to sit with each other and help each other out and not be so selfish. So in a world where there’s a lot of selfishness, I’m saying just make some time to slow down and spend that quality time with someone else just being in their presence. Because after all, if you want to spend time in the presence of the Lord, how can you do that if you can’t even spend quality time and be compassionate with the physical beings that you see here?

It blows my mind. That’s always blown my mind as a kid. If we have physical people here that we can hug and love and show love and compassion and understanding, and be kind and be empathic with them, we have them here physically, and you’re worshiping God, how does God think you’re going to show that to him and show that in heaven if you’re not doing it here on earth? So we need to exercise. This is like a training ground. Earth is a training ground for us to develop these skills and these qualities. That’s what they are. They’re qualities, and these qualities become our character, and that’s really what it is. You should become compassionate. You should become love because that’s what God is. That’s what Jesus is. He is love, and he is compassion. He is kindness. He is the living word. And I pray that more people are listening and that they’re listening with that understanding, and they’re being compassionate about people in their life, especially those that are facing illness, chronic illness, whether it’s cancer or autoimmune conditions.

Even if you’re sick with the flu or if you’re in the hospital or maybe they’re in their last moments of life, whatever that person’s going through, some mental health issues, loss, make time for those people because I can guarantee you that we all have one or two or several people in our life right now that could definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely use a serving of your compassion today. I pray that this has been a blessing for you guys today and that you guys have enjoyed this conversation. I’m not going to do this segment today on the good, the bad, and the ugly. I just really wanted to honor the topic of compassion because like I say, I see it everywhere the homeless person on the street, or sometimes I see people digging out of dumpsters. How many people pass by and see that person, and they have not shown any compassion and say, Hey, let me buy you some food.

Stop digging through there and sit with that person and talk to them. There are so many ways that we can be compassionate and loving and kind to one another. So in a world of chaos and selfishness, I want to bring something good to you and say, do something today, tomorrow, and every day of your life that exercises that muscle of compassion so that you can become a true character of who you are. So I want to thank you for tuning into this episode. I love having these kind of conversations. We’ll have some more. I want to make sure that you guys stay tuned to our next episode. I have a very, very, very special guest, and we’re going to be talking more about healing through trauma in a holistic approach. So stay tuned for that. And as always, I want to just say, I hope you have a blessed day and stay blessed until the next time. 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, and 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.

The post Episode 8: The Art of Compassion appeared first on Raíces Naturopathic Medical Center.

Podcast 7 Transcript

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.

Welcome back to Physician Heal Lay Self, the podcast. I’m Dr. Lara. And today we’re going to be talking about a topic called stages of healing. So how do we know when the root cause of disease is either physical? Is it mental, is it emotional? Is it behavioral or is a spiritual? So in medicine, we just really look at the physical body. Most doctors are just trained to look at the physical symptoms. If you’re in mental health, you look at the mental health aspect. However, the way I have started to work over the years is a little bit different. I want to start sharing some points here on what to look for, and I just want to start with I know that this message is going to be powerful for some people. I hope that it’s not triggering, but I know that it’s powerful because anytime that I’m getting ready to release a message or have an interaction with someone, my life seems to be crazy and I know that in the spiritual realm that this is the enemy trying to keep me from doing what I need to do in releasing this message.

So I pray that this message reaches those people that really need to hear this today because you’re not going to hear many medical doctors talking about this spiritual component. Typically when a person presents to a doctor with symptoms of high blood pressure or digestive issues or neurological issues, they’re just looking at the physical aspect of you, but you’re more than just the body, right? You are spirit, soul, and body, and the soul is made up of the mental and emotional part of you. So we need to understand these different elements of who we are. Now I get it. Mainstream medicine, it’s there. It’s good for a reason. It’s not all bad. It’s good for a reason. Absolutely. However, there are a lot of people that are suffering and struggling with many different symptoms and conditions, not really getting any better. So this is where I want to start to really break down these elements of who we are.

So we’re going to start with a physical aspect. How do we know if the root cause is truly physical? Because let’s face it, there are some medical conditions that will cause you a of mental and emotional imbalance. So when I look at the physical aspect, we’re talking about what is causing this physical disharmony, what’s out of balance and things that I want to look at is what’s deficient in the person? What’s excessive in the person? Is there an infectious situation that’s causing these symptoms? Is there hormone dysregulation or maybe there are some digestive issues, some neurological issues? Maybe there’s a genetic component to that person’s medical condition or symptoms that they’re having. It could be environmental toxins. We have tons of them in our food and the products that we use. And these things do cause imbalance in our physical body. So we have to look at environmental toxins like heavy metals and any other chemicals that we’re constantly being exposed to.

So an example of a physical presentation is someone could have hypothyroidism, low thyroid hormone production, and this person can present with depression. They can be very lethargic, they can have a lot of mental issues, low cognitive function. They forget things. They have a hard time speaking and articulating themselves. So this condition, which is the thyroid gland, which is in our throat, that gland out of balance can create a lot of physical signs and symptoms, but it also can cause a lot of mental and emotional dysregulation. So we need to first identify what is going on with that person. Is there truly a physical medical condition going on? Because if there is that going on, which many people do have them, we need to fix that first. We need to fix the deficiencies and anything that’s excessive and bring back the body to homeostasis, which means bringing it back to a state of balance, right?

That’s what we have to do. First, address the physical parts of you. The next part is the mental aspect. When I interview my patients and when I take in a new client, I ask about their mental health, and I ask about any trauma in the past as well. Why do I ask this? It’s very important for me to know what kind of life they’ve been brought up in, what traumatic events they’ve experienced because these things can cause a chemical imbalance in the person. Just imagine. And some of you may be in this situation, and I’m being very conscious of that, very mindful of what I’m saying because sometimes people are hearing this and that can trigger them. So I just want you to relax and just listen. These are just examples, but maybe this is your life, right? So imagine the child that grew up in a home with a father who is an alcoholic and very abusive verbally and physically.

This child’s nervous system is constantly in fight or flight, and most likely it’s going to be in flight, right? Sometimes even freeze. And fawn is another thing that people will go through and fawn, FAWN. What this means is that you take on the blame so that you alleviate yourself from some of the attacks that or the blame right from the parent. So children tend to do this a lot. In the example of the child who grew up in a home with a father who is an alcoholic and abusive, this child is walking around eggshells every day, all day when he’s home. The safest place for this child is probably school, it’s sad to say, but for children who grow up in these toxic environments, their safest place is being at school because they’re away from that abusive, toxic parent. So at home, they don’t know if any little thing they do will set off that parent and will make them upset.

So if this child is playing and drops something accidentally, that parent might lash out at this child in anger or physically abuse this child and it wasn’t even anything that major to really react that way. Now this child will kind of surrender and say, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. And these are the people that I constantly see as adults that are constantly apologizing for everything. Now, if this is you and you’re saying, wow, I am that child, then this is the place that we need to start with healing for you. Me giving you supplements and herbs and changing your diet, all will help the physical body to handle the emotional responses as you’re healing through that. But we need to give this part, this area of your life, the necessary attention in order for you to heal. Maybe your condition is high blood pressure or maybe it’s an autoimmune condition or cancer.

There are these things that we need to heal the trauma that we need to heal in order for us to get better physically. So the mental health aspect is super, super important for us to address because this way we know that this is one of the areas that there might be a root cause of this imbalance. That child’s nervous system is constantly in fight or flight, and so they’re going to produce high levels of cortisol and stress hormones that are going to create an inflammatory reaction and is going to be destructive to this child as they’re growing and developing. Your children’s brains are growing exponentially all the time because they’re growing. And so if the foundation of where they’re growing is in a stressful and toxic environment, this kind of stress on their physical body does not allow them to properly develop their brain and their nervous system.

So when they’re adults, they’re going to respond to life very differently than a child who did not grow up in this sort of environment. Like I said, this is just an example. So we want to find out what are the mental health issues and what’s causing these imbalances. If it’s genetic, is it a biochemical process? Is it trauma? So these situations like guess it can even be related to a particular just one event. It could be one situation that happens and it sets that person’s mental health off. One example that comes to mind is people who suffer from concussions, people don’t see the injury that the brain has taken. So you see this mental emotional change in those individuals and people don’t know why, and it’s because the brain has been injured. So that is a physical trauma, not just in an emotional life, social trauma, but it’s a physical trauma that we take that can also contribute to mental and emotional and physical conditions as well.

The next category that I address is the emotional health of a person. What is their behavior? We look at behavioral problems. Is there an issue with regulating their emotions? So we have to look at whether is this a behavioral thing that they’re not able to regulate their emotions. Maybe they never learn coping mechanisms, they never learn how to communicate effectively. So then we have to look at this realm too. However, physical conditions can affect your emotional response. Just look at women who go through menopause. They have a hard time regulating their emotions. Why? Because their hormones are low, their estrogen, the progesterone, which are the main hormones that women’s bodies like to have to feel good, they’re low and progesterone. So progesterone is a hormone that for women, it helps us actually to be relaxed. It helps us to sleep. It helps her brain with memory, concentration, and focus.

So if we are very deficient in progesterone, whether you’re menopause or not, you’re going to feel very emotionally unregulated and it’s going to be difficult for you to regulate your emotions. In men, what I find, is if they’re low in testosterone and they’re high in estrogen, guess what? You don’t feel good. You feel very emotional, and irritable. And that’s because those hormones are out of balance. Once again, going back, all of these things are going to connect with each other. They’re not separate from each other, they’re not isolated. We are all of this. We are hormones, we are the brain and we are spirit, and we’re emotions in our mind. All of these things make up who we are. So we need to look at why is this person emotionally unregulated and find the root cause is there. Now this next part, the next part is addressing the spiritual part.

And this is a part that as a naturopathic doctor, as much as we’ve learned mind-body medicine, it really is not talking about spirituality. And when I’m referring to spirituality, I am coming from the Christian perspective of spirituality. So I just want to be very clear. I respect everyone’s views, but I am coming from a Christian view when it comes to addressing spiritual aspects. The Bible is the oldest book in the world and the most accurate in the world, regardless of what people say about translation and things being lost in translation, the accuracy and the history, and there’s just so much evidence of these things that have been written in the Bible. There’s physical evidence now of these things, places, and things that have happened anyway, one of the things that I like to ask my patients when I see random situations where it just doesn’t make sense that this person has these physical symptoms, physical symptoms or symptoms or condition, there really isn’t anything that’s showing up in labs.

There isn’t really anything showing up in imaging. So what is it? I find myself to be in a very unique position as a naturopath. We are trained to work with people holistically and address the mind, the body sort of thing. However, this spiritual part really isn’t something that’s taught to doctors, whether it’s conventional doctors or naturopathic doctors. This is really the individual’s walk in their life with God. And so I have always had a deep connection with God as a child and always seeking the wisdom of God, knowledge of God, studying the Bible, learning from other people, and learning from older people than me have been my greatest teachers. And so these are things that I did not learn. I want to disclose. I did not learn in medical school. I was not trained by a pastor any church leader or anyone on this.

This has been my walk with God. And in my clinic, things started to show up. And I say that Jesus has been my teacher and my trainer, and that’s how I have come to be aware of these things being true. It’s not just something I read in a, it’s something I am witnessing in my own clinic. This spiritual component is very important for all of us because we have a spirit. And whether you want to believe in God or not, that is not my problem. That’s up to you. But there is a creator for everything. I’ve talked about that in previous talks. There’s a creator for our physical body in this world that we exist in. And so one of the things that I find that tends to be very, very problematic in patients as we talk about trauma, right, is there’s a deeper root to that and there’s this unforgiveness.

And unforgiveness hurts us. It hurts us. It is poison to us. And I understand. I’ve heard many, many very intense stories of people how terrible the trauma they faced, and I never want to downplay the seriousness of those traumas, however, them being resentful and hateful, whether it’s to that person. And oftentimes it’s to themselves. They haven’t forgiven. They’re blaming themselves or not forgiving themselves. They think it’s their fault, and so they hold onto this hurt and it is a thorn in their heart. It is poison in their blood and this kind of anger and resentment, it builds up over time and starts to create toxicity in the body, emotionally, toxicity in the body. So that’s one of the things that in the spiritual component is forgiveness. Who have you not forgiven? And also have you not forgiven yourself is probably the hardest. An example of this, once again, I want to be very sensitive to the things that I’m talking about, but I cannot tippy toe around those hard conversations that people need to hear because these are the areas that you need to heal.

I always tell my patients the things that you don’t want to do, the things that you don’t want to hear are the things that you need to hear. They are the things that you need to do because you’re avoiding them. Avoidance is one of the ways that we handle trauma. It’s a trauma response. We want to avoid it. We want to minimize it and make it small. It wasn’t a big deal so we can handle it, we can manage our emotions. That was okay when that happened when the trauma happened. But now that you’re older and you’re stuck in disharmony in illness, and you’re sick and you’re tired and you cannot function, we have to grow and be more mature now and acknowledge these areas that are hard to look at and to talk about it. And of course, it makes it so much easier when you have a therapist or a doctor or a counselor, someone who can properly guide you through that process and make you feel safe.

What’s very important, is that people feel safe. Going back to the unforgiveness and my example, I have worked and I work with women who have been raped, and maybe it was during childhood and maybe it was more than once. This unforgiveness that they have isn’t even towards the person who violated them. It’s towards themselves. They’re blaming themselves saying, I should have done something. I should have spoken up. It’s my fault. What could I have done differently to avoid this? So they’re making themselves, they’re revictimizing themselves and blaming themselves for what someone else did to them. So this forgiveness isn’t even about the other person. It’s forgiving themselves for the things that they would have done as an adult that they couldn’t do as a child. So these are the kinds of things that I’m talking about and it’s so hard. The other area that I see with a lot is women who’ve had abortions, whether they were okay with it at the time, and whether it was the right thing in their mind to do it at the time.

Years go by, they grow up, they mature, they learn new things, they experience new things, and now they’re stuck in guilt and in shame and living in a state of shame and guilt for so many years. It starts to really show up as an illness in the body. And so then it’s a process of helping these women go through a process of forgiving themselves. They didn’t know any better. They were 16 years old. They thought they were doing the right thing. And it’s not about casting judgment on them, it’s not about making them feel bad. It’s saying, if Jesus died on that cross for our sins, he broke the power of sin over us. Now it’s up to us to release the shame, to release that sin off of us, and to ask for forgiveness and to forgive ourselves in that process. It’s a lot easier said than done.

I get it. But it is a process, and it’s something that if you want to feel better and you want to live a happier life, these are things that you need to do. Obviously, sin, and generational curses, whether generational curses are individual or through the bloodline, through the family line, are there and they are real. And we’re going to talk about some examples a little bit later on this next topic in the category of spirituality. It’s not really popular to talk about in medicine, and I think it’s very sad. Not everyone’s meant to work with this. I get it. I definitely didn’t sign myself up to do this kind of work. But demonic influence and oppression, it is a real thing. Now, demons don’t have power. They don’t own us. They cannot possess us. But the devil’s very, very good at fooling people to influence them and make them believe that they are possessed.

So there’s a huge, huge conversation around that that can happen. We’re not going to go deep into it today, but as I said, I am going to talk about some cases, some examples of where I saw this manifest, and how when people were delivered and freed from this, we saw a huge change in their physical health. And like I said, these are topics that you’re not going to see many nature paths talking about. Definitely. You’re definitely not going to have your medical doctor talk to you about this. Some Christian counselors may talk about this, but a lot of the counseling field, they’re not talking about it. And I think that if the systems are not going to integrate these concepts, that’s fine. But the listener, you need to seek help for these things because there could be a possibility that these are the things that are setting you back from improving the next category.

So we’ve talked about the physical, the mental, the emotional, and the spiritual part. So then there’s the behavioral and the mindset. And when I talk about the cases, we’ll go a little bit into that. One of the things that I just want to share is that everyone’s healing journey is unique to them. There is no cookie-cutter approach. Well, working for that person with anxiety might be different for you. Well, working with a person who has diabetes might be different for you. So everyone’s healing journey is unique. Stop comparing yourself to what everyone else is doing, learn from what they’re doing. But you have to be experiential and do these things to find out what’s going to work for you and find the right people to help you. You don’t have to do it alone. Find the right people that you are going to feel safe.

You’re going to be heard and validated, and you’re going to get some solutions. That’s the bottom line. You want solutions. You want to resolve these issues. You need to find someone you feel safe and comfortable doing that with. So like I said, what works with one person is going to be different for another person while people are healing. It is an individual journey. It is one that can be healed. Sometimes it feels like, am I ever going to get better from this? And it seems like you can’t, but you can improve. And like I said, you got to find what’s going to work for you. It’s not the same for everyone.

So like I said, we’re made up of all these parts. We do not work in isolation. The problem with the medical system is that, and I’m going to be cautious here because I do believe that we need these specialties. We need doctors who specialize in cardiology, gastro, endocrinology, in neurology. These are experts in that area. That’s their specialty. They’re needed. However, when it comes to seeing your primary care or doctor, we need to be able to see the whole person in order to identify, I need to send you to that specialist to ensure there isn’t anything wrong there. And then let’s come back and see the whole picture. So I always tell my patients, that I am like a medical investigator or detective. I collect all these pieces of information about you. I put them together and then I find where are the missing pieces.

Let’s find the missing pieces and let’s link all this up and start somewhere. We’re not going to wait to collect them all, but what we have is enough to give us information to say, there’s hormone imbalance, there’s a thyroid problem. You have some toxins, there’s some trauma, there’s anxiety in the picture. Let’s give you these things to help the physical body just calm down so that the nervous system can calm down a little bit. And then we can see with clarity, the brain, the mind can see with clarity, and then we can move forward with better decision-making and working on those deeper roots of trauma. So the body does not work in isolation. So one organ does not work by itself. It’s dependent on other organs. So the same way that the physical body does not work isolated, the whole person does not work in isolation.

The physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of us, the mindset, we’re all one. And so we are working with all these parts of who we are. So I want to talk about a couple of cases here, and I do this therapy called cranial sacral therapy, which I’m going to devote a whole episode to in the future to really help people understand what it is. But for today’s show, it is a light manual touch therapy, and there’s many different things that can benefit people from this. One of them is it can help the nervous system to regulate. It can help with physical pain, neurological issues, and so many different issues, but it’s really a whole body treatment and starting really a lot of it with the cranium, with the head. What I find is that through my training that I’ve done extensively over the last nine years, there are emotions that get stuck in a person’s body.

And so I’ve been trained to do some mental emotional release work, and I don’t necessarily initiate that in people. It’s their body that’s saying, I am ready to release that. And because I’ve been trained and I’ve been sensitive to feeling for all these years and thousands and thousands of treatments that I’ve given, I know when emotions are getting ready to come out of a person in a certain part of their body. And I can tell if my patient is back on releasing that emotion. So I have to guide them and they release that. Sometimes there’s no crying, sometimes there is crying. But the bottom line is they always feel better. Every single patient always says I feel so much lighter after that therapy. I feel like this weight of the world lifted off of me. Yeah, it’s all those emotions that you’ve been holding onto for years that were stuck in the body and now they’ve been released.

And there are many questions I get from this. And like I said, this is going to be devoted in the future to a whole conversation on this is why emotions get stuck and why can’t I release them myself. And I mean, if you could release them yourself, you would’ve let them go from the beginning. And the best thing to do is that when you feel an emotion when we feel an emotion, whether it’s sad, grief, whatever it is, that we just feel it and we write it out. But that’s not the way people live in life. We suppress, suppress, suppress, and it just gets stuck in our body until it’s ready to come out. Unfortunately, sometimes in unhealthy ways. And when you do release ’em in healthy ways, that’s really the best. So in working with patients, especially over the last year or two, I’ve seen something different than emotions come up.

So I have a patient laying there. I know when it’s an emotional release, but then I started to notice just some weird things going on in people’s bodies and things were being released. I was praying in my mind for them, I don’t know, is this person going to be okay with me praying for them? That was initially. Now I just pray because I know better the person is there and not realizing at the moment that there is deliverance happening there. Over the past year, I’ve had this ability to discern a lot more efficiently. And for those who don’t know what discernment means, some people call it intuition. I like to call it discernment. And here’s the definition. It means to understand or know something through the power of the Holy Spirit perception in the absence of judgment with the view to obtaining spiritual guidance and understanding.

So it’s not my knowledge, it’s not my wisdom, it’s God’s wisdom that’s being downloaded into me. There’s no way I could know that about this person unless it’s God giving me that information about that person. And that’s what started happening in my clinic last year. So one of the cases, and I’m not going to share details, to protect these individuals’ privacy, I had this person come in for the first time, and had a lot of psychiatric issues. I usually do not work with these types of cases, but something in my spirit said, help her. So I did. And this person sitting across from me, and immediately the Holy Spirit is telling me to protect my mind, to guard my mind, and to get ready to work on her. So I told her, I told this person, Hey, I know what we’re going to do.

Let’s do this therapy, and we start doing craniosacral therapy. Immediately she went into this resting state, which makes sense. That’s the key thing herself. Her body, and her brain was in a resting state. From there, what started to happen was there were some very odd movements in her abdomen and her body that I started to realize, wait a minute, there is something else here. And in my spirit, once again, I knew there were demons in this person. I had never done deliverance. I was not familiar even with the term deliverance. I was not familiar with any of this. I did not go to medical school to be trained for this. Definitely not. I was not trained anywhere. So in this moment, I am deeply praying in my spirit, God, Jesus, to help me right now. What do I do with this person? And Jesus started telling me, holy Spirit started guiding me and telling me what to do.

And it was one after another and after another. And I could feel these things leaving her. And then I would turn to her and ask, are you okay? What do you feel in your body? And she would tell me, I have something here. I have something in my neck or my mouth. And I knew that this was, once again, demons trying to control these parts of her body. So I started again to pray, to pray and do what I was being guided to do to deliver her. And then after that, she was like a completely different person. The person who walked in and the person who left, very, very different that even my assistant noticed. Her continence was different, her appearance was different. And when she left, she said, you know what? More hospitals and psychiatric hospitals need to do what you’re doing here because this is what I needed there.

This person was hearing voices, demonic voices torturing her. She was having conversations with these demons. And after that, I continued to work with her. I did a couple more deliverances for her to completely make sure that these were out. And yes, the Holy Spirit was brought through her to feel her in the moment as these things come out because we know if the house is empty, the demons come back. So she was filled with the Holy Spirit and walked her through accepting Jesus. Not the typical things that you do in a medical clinic. I understand and I understand risk. I understand the consequences of doing something like that is risky. But I, Anna would have never in my mind said, this is what I’m going to do. That was led by the Holy Spirit and because Holy Spirit was leading me in that moment to do this, there was protection over me.

This woman needed it, and she wanted to be healed from this completely, completely different person who she is now. And it’s a process of working through this. So is she evil? Was she wrong? Was she a bad person that she attracted this? No. This is all brought by trauma through childhood. And this is what people need to understand, that when a person has demons or they’re demon-influenced or oppressed, it’s sometimes it’s not because they’re doing witchcraft or they’re doing bad things. It’s trauma. When children have sexual trauma, sexual abuse, and physical abuse, their souls are fractured. And this opens up the door for demons to come in and influence them. When we are weak, when we’re in pain, it is very easy for people to be influenced. This is when typically children do not know they’re attacked in this way. And so I’ve seen many different cases.

Another case is a man who had a lot of physical symptoms, cardiac, and digestive issues, went to numerous specialists and doctors, they did extensive blood work and imaging and testing and everything was normal. They said you’re fine. You’re a healthy man. And he was like, but I don’t feel well. I feel my heart. Something’s wrong with my heart and I have digestive issues and can’t leave my house. A lot of issues. And these are things that with this situation, it was a building a relationship first. And when I did deliverance on him, all of those issues were gone. There was no reason for even herbs or natural things. This person was eating healthy, was moving their body, but there was something there, and it was all rooted in childhood trauma. So that childhood trauma, that there needed to be this spiritual deliverance for him to release that.

And then there’s a process. This is where I really believe that working with the right mental health expert counselor therapist is really important because then they help to alleviate, to work out those other things in a more cognitive way where this is working more on the physical and spiritual level. Hey, I know this is a lot, and I know this is not your typical conversation that your doctor’s going to have, but I just want to say I feel very blessed to be in this position that God has put me here even through medical school because it gives me this wider perspective of seeing the person as a whole, seeing them from the spiritual component and not being afraid to talk about that spiritual aspect about who you are. The physical understanding, the physical, mental, emotional, and all the medical conditions that can contribute to illness are very important.

So I feel like I am in a unique situation. I would pray that more nature paths would have the courage to also do the same because you’re going to see your patients drastically improve a lot better. It’s a process. Healing is a process. It takes time. And when you are willing to go through that process, every time you go through a healing opportunity, you start to see the benefit and you love how you feel after while you’re doing the healing. It is a very uncomfortable, very icky, very painful situation to go through. But like I said, if you’re working with the right people, they will help you get through that. And there’s releasing any shame, any guilt, any of those emotions, and really working on forgiveness is super important. Imagine how many people with cancer need to work on the emotional stuff and forgiveness. It’s not to blame themselves that they’ve caused this cancer, but it’s the lack of us not knowing this information that is making us sick.

And so this podcast is designed to give you knowledge, and different perspectives so that you can make sense of this yourself and go and apply it for yourself and get the right help. So the takeaway from today is really find the root cause of your healing, find the root cause so that you can heal on a much deeper level. I believe now after seeing so many cases of these coming to me where there isn’t a true physical illness, it’s a spiritual, it’s a trauma root cause. My belief is that almost all conditions most likely do have a spiritual root cause. And this is the area that many people, tippy toe around it or completely avoid conversation. And I pray that you have the courage to dive deep into this part of who you are and start developing a relationship with God because you’re going to find that the only person that can really, the only way that you can get true healing is from God himself. Another quote I found that I’ve always liked is that trauma can be passed down from generation to generation, but so can healing. So it doesn’t matter what trauma has been passed down to you, you can heal and you can pass that healing on to your children, onto your grandchildren and future generations that you may never ever meet, right? So we’re going to step into the segment of the good, the bad, and the ugly about our sick care medical system because what it is

Today, I’m actually going to talk about something good. The good thing about our medical system is surgery. Emergency medicine is one of the best in this country. We have such advanced technology in hospitals now that a lot of those surgeries are done robotically, and so it minimizes the time of surgery and it’s more efficient so there are fewer errors. And so there are good things in our medical system, and the technology that’s used in surgery is one of them. Hey, I want to thank you for joining me today. I know I talked a lot today on topics that are probably uncomfortable for you, but they’re very important for us to talk about and we will be having more of these conversations. So tuned, stay tuned to our next episode. I’m going to be talking about, guys, I’m going to be talking about something that we so desperately need in our society, in our world today. So you do not want to miss this conversation. It is deep, it is very philosophical, very spiritual and emotional. So stay tuned for that conversation. Hey everyone, I want to thank you, and as always, 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, and 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.

The post Episode 7: How to know if the root cause of disease is physical, mental, spiritual or behavioral? appeared first on Raíces Naturopathic Medical Center.