Full Circle Fridays|Week 6: Full Circle

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What does coming Full Circle mean to me? I named my business this; I talk about my own full circle healing; I believe everyone can come full circle themselves. So what am I really talking about?

Well, provocatively, I don’t even know that this is a circle shape in the way I view it. To me, with coming full circle, it means you hit an arcing point (not necessarily stopping point), where you’ve had enough, and you realize you need to untangle some knots and heal some wounds and fix some things and make some changes. It’s in that development, that recognizing where you are and having earnest desire to see a new outcome, that you start the arcing down into a full circle lifestyle. You change the course of the path, and you essentially return to yourself.

I believe we are all born with an innate worthiness and goodness. I believe we have a lot of path choices and a good GPS navigation system built-in to help us along. Then I also believe that many good and many bad things can thwart your effort to choose the best path for yourself at times — but nothing can actually take away your right path. Things like: childhood neglect, abuse, losing a loved one, being an ARMY kid moving all over the world, falling in love, finding a secure career, or having a baby inside or outside of a relationship. Without classifying any of those things, they are all able to capture your spirit for a time and move you off your path, maybe onto a whole new path you never knew existed, or maybe into someone else’s path.

However, no matter what — your true path that is available for your best lived life is still there. It didn’t leave you, you (voluntarily or not) left it. Life does that — lures us, thrusts us, hog ties and drags us, tempts us, lies to us. Anything to get us off our intended authentic path. I don’t mean this path to be just the things of “doing” but also the things of “being”. Who we are authentically when we are true to ourselves, healed and whole again, is actually more important than the lifestyle choices, career options, and relationship status. When on the intended path of your life though, you do discover your authenticity — as well as the best ideas, concepts, goals, etc for your life because you are living in your trueness.

So at some point in time on this road of Life, you have to make a pivot. You re-arc where you were and start coming home inside yourself. When you’ve had that introspection, realization, and recalibration, this is where the deep dive starts and where the hard trauma recovery road begins. Now, you are navigating through the waters of trauma processing, identity reconfiguration, understanding your trauma triggers and responses, making peace within yourself for what you’ve been through, doing the therapeutic work, intentionally changing the lies you’ve been believing about yourself, etc, etc, etc. This step of the journey — that’s arduous recovery road. You do all that though in order to close that arc and come back to your original self.

Sometimes that looks like walking along in one long circle, sure. Often for me, it’s a big, long winding road the wrong way, making the U-turn on the cul-de-sac, and finding my way back to the main road. You may have gone so deep down several “no outlet” roads that you have to wiggle your way out very carefully, like a maze. Sometimes it’s stair-stepping around in the same area trying to find what level you need to get off on. Life never looks the same for any one person, and it is more often than not very messy for most of us.

This is why I say that the trauma recovery road is not just very hard, but also very worth it. The trauma identity life you are living is not easy either, so why not take the harder working road back to the place you are ultimately looking for? Healing. Wellness. Health. Managing yourself from a place of authenticity. True self-love. Living in harmony with yourself and circumstances. Peace. Joy. Your own designed quality of life.

The Full Circle moment starts when you change directions and commit to the recovery journey. The healing comes from the hard work of closing the gap from what trauma made of you to getting back to who you were meant to be.

I believe you can do this and that you can intuitively run/walk/crawl/slide your way back to your authentic self. Any guidance you need along this journey, from deciding if you should adjust your arc to traveling back into your true self, I’d love to help you as you go. Feel free to send me a message on the “Connect” tab of my website, or schedule a Complimentary Discovery Call on my “Work with Me” section in the link below and see if coaching is right for you.

The advocacy and coaching work that I do now with trauma survivors is part of my full circle healing. It’s part of my story; it’s how I’ve come to my authentic self. I just came back with a story to tell, experiences to share (and I threw a little wisdom and knowledge in with it) so that I help others create what looks like their best life.

Full Circle Fridays|Week 5: Eat, Pray, Love

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Nope.  No, this isn’t a book or movie recommendation.  For this topic, I aim to help you build a resource of goal setting.  We talked last week about how childhood trauma (or really any age trauma) steals away creativity, dreams, and joy.  In that week’s Mindful Monday meditation, you thought about a dream you used to have that for whatever reason didn’t get achieved.  Did you spend time after contemplating something that dream wanted you to know?  Maybe you resurrected a childhood dream and wanted to see if there was still life in it. Dreams, fantasies, ideas – they are all wonderful.  The difference between dreams and goals are dates.  To turn a dream into a reality, it takes planning, step-by-step preparing, setting a date you aim to complete the goal.  If you haven’t spent much time thinking about this, I invite you to do.  Achieving even small goals is a momentum to boost you into bigger wins down the road.  As trauma survivors, we need that extra confidence in ourselves.  So if you haven’t dreamed in a while, goal set ever, or just are feeling nervous about this – start small.  You can build some self-trust as you go. 

The reason I consider this topic a therapeutic intervention is because even giving yourself permission to dream is filling a big hole in our trauma survivor hearts.  From there, planning and preparing to accomplish something that you actually want to do is huge for your healing.  Recognizing you have something in your spirit that is YOURS, that is making itself known and is being expressed through wishing and wanting is huge.  Actually, writing it down and finding the steps to realize it is amazing.  You are working on repairing the intrapersonal bridge inside of yourself that has been damaged by your trauma.  Listening to your soul’s soul, hearing, acknowledging, and then acting on that is brave.  Finding time for yourself to work on this goal is self-focused.  As you make small steps, you can practice self-praise.  If you fall off the preparation trail or miss a deadline to the goal, you can practice non-self-judgment and get right back to it. 

Trauma recovery coaching is based on client-led goals.  The client and I collaboratively come up with positive mission statements that they want to see become true.  This doesn’t have to be a Julia Roberts production.  These are things like “I want to care for myself more this week.”  That goal then has to have action steps attached to it – where the client can set themselves up for opportunities to show themselves care.  A goal could be “To be most true to myself, I want to leave this job and find one that serves my mental health better.”  The action steps below that are more involved and take more time than one week – but they start small with maybe ‘make a list of options I need at a job to feel safe’ (i.e. flexible hours, work at home, unlimited vacation) or ‘figuring out what field of work I would be most fulfilled in’ (since a purpose driven day is most likely to have a good impact on MH) or ‘make a spreadsheet to see if I am able to leave this job and take a hiatus to breathe and figure out what I want to do’ (because if this is possible, the client can take a 2-3 week hiatus with savings money if they job is so stressful they can’t even find time to search within themselves).  Without the goal setting objective, some may get stuck in the loop that they don’t like their intense and high-powered job but they can’t even find space in their mind to figure out what they want to do to even begin this new journey.   This is where coaching is there to lend a helping hand.

So I invite you to take some space, somewhere, however long, whatever that looks like for you – and ask yourself what you want to Eat, where you want to Pray, to who and how do you want to Love?   (And obviously you are finding your own version.)  Not everyone desires to sail off to Bali to work on themselves.  What does this look like for you?   Can you think of a few dreams – big or small, from your childhood or as an adult, easy or simple – just imagine them for a while?   

I’d love to help you walk through healthy goal setting to improve your current situation. Whatever blocks you may have right now may be due to unresolved trauma or unhealed traumatic responses and fears.  The wounds you carried years ago, may be haunting you today by not letting you live your fullest life.  Trauma Recovery Coaching may be a beautiful relationship to help you find dreams, write them down as goals, design the action steps, and deal with the emotions that come up on each of those tasks.  It doesn’t matter if you want to Drink, Sleep, and Laugh or Dance, Cry, and Shower – your trauma healing road is within your grasp right now.  Let’s start walking together.  

Full Circle Fridays|Week 4: Dance Therapy

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Like we heard on this week’s Mindful Monday, trauma often squelches our soul of things like creativity, childhood dreams, and the ability to visualize wants and desires at all.  Then on Wellspring Wednesday, we dove into what Developmental Trauma is (trauma during the first few childhood years of life) and how it trains your brain with all kinds of coping skills that were useful as an abused child but are maladaptive mechanisms now as adults.  Often times, these two are linked. 

If you used to love to paint, ride horses, play pretend with your dolls, run around on the playground, or make puppet shows, you may be also able to remember when those things (or at least the desire to do them) came to a halt.  This may come back to the age when your trauma started.  A “timeline trauma” as I call it, may have cut your life into two parts – before and after trauma.  If you were a child full of hopes and dreams and play and fun, then something happened like a parent died or you were sexually abused, you may have collapsed inside yourself.  All the sudden, you didn’t have room for play because your brain was trying to make sense of what had happened. 

If you grew up with Attachment or Developmental trauma, the joy that kids of what we call “good enough” homes had may have never been afforded to you.  You may have grown up afraid of playing, letting loose, running around carefree at the playground, talking to kids you just met, laughing loudly.  Your trauma brain may have been always trying to keep you small in an effort to keep you from being in harm’s way.  Alternately, your emotions may not have been allowed to develop in your childhood trauma.  Maybe you never realized you wanted to play or run or be loud or jump on trampolines because you were busy being hypervigilant to the anger levels in the home to try to calm any violence about to break out.  Maybe your longing wasn’t to run and play because it was busy knowing when to run and hide.  Maybe you couldn’t ever imagine leaving the home to ride bikes with the neighborhood kids because you had to make sure your alcoholic mother was safe. 

Now you are here, as an adult, out of your childhood trauma, yet you still have those sensations in your body – that being loud, having fun, being silly, falling down or messing up, running free, or jumping in a pile of leaves isn’t safe.  Or maybe you feel out of your depth because you actually never were able to do those things. 

So the resource today I want to share is an option – and maybe just the type of thing you need to jump start your inner child healing.  Dance Therapy (also called Dance Movement Therapy or DMT) is a therapeutic modality that activates kinesthetic, rational, musical, and emotional brain functions.  This type of movement means you are using your body, mind, and emotions all together to accomplish something fun and also healing.

The ability to express yourself, as a trauma survivor, can often be awkward if not completely painful.  We also know that many of us struggle with the mind/body connection due to our trauma.  Not only is dance good exercise (which releases all those happy hormones), but also a release of energy can help you sleep better, regulate your heart rate variability, and balance your emotions.  What’s different about dance therapy is that a DMT therapist will be walking you through the movements (that can be traditional dance to yoga flows) with their designed instructions.  This uses fluid movements to actually allow your emotions to speak through your body, flowing out of your while expressing your inner being through your physical vessel.  The therapeutic side of it comes from the DMT therapist as they read your body language and the emotions that are coming out of you.  The therapist may mirror your movements, give you props to use to express yourself when words aren’t available, cue creative visualizations, offer you kind suggestions to move your emotions through, and keep you in a safe environment so you can feel the freedom to move.  The non-verbal communication with your DMT therapist builds trust and security. 

This is not a dance class.  Although in your healing journey - dancing, karaoke, ice skating with friends, skydiving – those are all great things, but this is actual therapy.  It’s a modality, a resource beyond talk therapy.  Not that you can’t find healing going out dancing with a lover – but this is dancing with a therapist to work on self-expression, emotional regulation, releasing stress and pain from your body caused by your trauma, “unstucking” things that are trapped inside where words aren’t there. 

Motion is very rehabilitative, and a creative expression of yourself is powerful to realign your mind, body, and soul.  Kinetic therapies integrate your authentic self as you can come back to the you who was meant to be before any trauma wounded your inner child.  This also is a self-reflective therapy as you work in a space where maybe you feel self-conscious or have held onto a stoic rigidity in order to protect yourself.  Dance therapy may teach you to trust yourself and uncover deeper self-awareness. 

I invite you to try this sometime.  Simply search for DMT facilities in your area.  If you have more questions or comments, I’d love to hear from you.  Just click on my website in the show notes and select the “Connect” tab to shoot me a message.   Let’s try something new.  Let’s let our inner child dance.

Full Circle Fridays|Week 3: Cognitive Behavior Therapy

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Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a type of psychotherapy that focuses on negative thoughts and patterns or loops.  This treatment can be very helpful for people struggling with PTSD, anxiety, OCD, phobias, addictions, and other life-altering disorders.  CBT is designed to help you become aware of your destructive thoughts – to recognize the emotions and beliefs that are attached to those thoughts.  Awareness is always a key step, and namely for CBT, it must be first. 

So many Trauma Survivors are stuck in their mind, with dangerous thoughts about themselves, others, and the world at large.  Often coming in specific thought patterns – like waves – they are identifiable but appear to be justifiable.  Most survivors are battling the idea that they are to blame for their abuse.  Because of that, they tend to attack themselves inwardly. (Although some trauma survivors may also turn their behaviors outward to others.)  However, your actions don’t just “happen”.  Actions are driven by thoughts – whether created by or intruded into the mind.  Sometimes thoughts are coming from someone/somewhere else – something you maybe heard your abuser tell you over and over.  At some point, their words became a belief about yourself, and your mind is doing what the mind does.  The mind’s job is to look for dangerous and help keep you safe.  If your mind has the running thought pattern and belief that you are the danger, it will spend all day attacking you to keep you safe from yourself.  The same is true if your body and mind believe that the world as a whole is unsafe or that everyone is against you, for instance.  Your mind will spend a great deal of time trying to remind you of this truth that the world is unsafe, and therefore your thoughts can be found looping through thinking to try to save you from harm.  The mind is so wonderful because it truly does these things FOR you to keep you protected.  Outside of your abuse and trauma now though, these beliefs and thoughts are no longer helpful.  They have become maladaptive coping skills that you can appreciate your mind for using to save you but realize that they no longer serve you. 

Those are just some examples of how your thoughts can progress into thought patterns, which then can exacerbate anxiety or even create it.  An important part in the CBT process is to start challenging your thoughts by getting curious about them.  You can challenge your thoughts and fact check them for accuracy.  With CBT training under your belt, this resource will help you to be aware when you are thinking destructive thoughts and teach you techniques to pause and identify the legitimacy of these thoughts.  Even if they don’t feel untrue in the moment, there are other questions you ask of your thoughts. Firstly though, if they are untrue, you are able to process through the incorrect thought or idea and move forward.  If it seems true at the time you, you can also ask your thoughts: if they are necessary, does thinking this serve me, is this something I need to dwell on right now, is there another way I can frame this thought so it’s not so upsetting, etc.   Thought patterns - that maybe are years old and have deep rooted beliefs and emotions attached to them – can be difficult to identity as inaccurate.  This may mean realizing that your perception of current reality is inaccurate, and it can feel jarring to come to terms with the grandiosity of your negative thoughts.  This is a huge step in CBT technique training.  These thoughts are often linked to behavior patterns (often self-destructive and may be addictive) as if your mind has given you this attached behavior as a prescription to cure the thought.  However, we know this only sets you into a patterned loop again. 

This is where CBT is very useful with survivors who have a maladaptive coping skill of a dependency such as food, drugs, or alcohol, as well as anyone suffering from OCD.  We had spent decades trying to stop behaviors without giving the necessary attention to the thoughts that drive the behaviors.  CBT came about in the 1960’s and is designed to flip that script and start recognizing, challenging, and reframing or reshaping the thought patterns that are behind the coping behaviors.  Especially if you suffer from intrusive thoughts that tend to appear out of nowhere or come to you in your own mind but sound similar to your abuser, getting to the root of the thoughts themselves are paramount in your healing journey. 

We had previously talked about the basics of functional care for yourself.  This type of healing found through CBT is a great steppingstone on the path to healthier, intuitive eating, and even better sleep.  A lot of survivors find themselves struggling in these areas due to intrusive thoughts.  If you aren’t having success in a lot of the basics of self-care, you may have these underlying forces of destructive and obsessive thought patterns that are sabotaging.  Thinking on negative things creates a worry and a stress that is hard for the body to know what to do with; often the negative thoughts get trapped in parts of our body unable to resolve either because they are not solvable, not true, not properly perceived, not useful, etc.  Sleeping and digestion can be interrupted by being overstressed and worried.  Retraining your thought patterns is a lifesaver for some.

CBT is not successful for everyone, but it actually is highly successful for most thought-driven behavior issues.  It has been one of the top researched therapies and is fairly simple to try.  Although some CBT sessions can be emotionally triggering, the risk of CBT is low.  It often is covered by insurance as a type of talk therapy with a CBT trained therapist.  It is a hugely goal-oriented therapy, so you can really measure your gains quite easily and build momentum from there.  While this is not a get-well-quick situation and often takes a time to progress to mastery over your thinking, this is a recommendation that the reward can be life changing and healing from many types of suffering.  CBT also incorporates other techniques while learning to change your cognitive mind that are also helpful for every day issues found amongst survivors.  CBT can teach or utilize writing, breathwork, calming techniques, visual relaxation, and reframing.  All of those things are recommendations for survivors to try as well.  They are all powerful tools for your toolbox and to pack them with cognitive retraining is a double down on positive steps forward. 

Remember – as we talked about on the last episode, self-compassion is a motivator and leader.  So if you think CBT may be right for you, talk with your trauma recovery coach or therapist for more info.  Then let self-compassion hold your hand down into this therapy to attempt to conquer your self-harming and self-destructive thoughts.  This is a great first way to honor yourself with compassion by trying something that could put a whole new perspective on your world and future.   

*Just a quick side note: CBT has been so impactful that you can even find self-help CBT guidance in the form of CDs and workbooks to guide you through doing CBT on your own.  If you do stumble upon this as an option for yourself, please note that self-CBT may be harmful or ineffective for someone suffering with severe PTSD or clinical depression or extreme OCD, etc.  In that case, I would recommend you work with a professional and then later you can use the self-guided workbooks as reinforcements and continuing work on yourself.  It may be helpful to ask your trauma coach or therapist if the self-help option is appropriate for you. 

Full Circle Fridays|Week 2: Books

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On this Full Circle Friday, I thought it would be fun to talk about some books that I find immeasurably helpful on this path we call Life.  I have no affiliation to any of these authors, nor am I receiving any compensation for recommending them.  I have read every one of these (most more than once) and can say they are powerful for Trauma Survivors!  I personally have benefited from each of these in my healing and in understanding so much more about myself and my potential.  If you aren’t a reader, I believe all these picks have an audio book option on Amazon or wherever you listen to content.  Listening to audio books is a rewarding practice for road trips, regular commutes, while exercising, or walking alone. I don’t recommend using these types of books to help you sleep.  While that’s a great practice, I more prefer fiction for that task if you like.  These are the books that you want to be fully aware and present while reading or listening to so that you can take away all golden nuggets of wisdom and savor the remarkable moments of revelation.  For me, these picks are special because they have been digested in powerful ways - along with being notated, highlighted, earmarked, and then later journaled or quoted in my journals.  These are in no particular order.  I hope you’ll find some of these advantageous in your full circle journey!

What Happened To You? (by Dr. Bruce Perry, PHD and Oprah Winfrey)

This is a very nice read.  It’s a conversational style book between Dr. Perry and Oprah.  Oprah has been working with Dr. Perry for many years, so they have a wonderful relationship.  They basically break down trauma (intergenerational and personal) in such easy-to-understand terms.  They discuss everything from attachment, to neuroscience, to emotional engagement, to generational bias, to healing, and post traumatic growth.  So much sheer wisdom, science, exploration of emotions, and heart-warming stories of Oprah’s own healing journey!

The Alchemist (by Paulo Coelho)

This book is almost as old as I am!  It’s what we would call “enchanted”.  This book is a journey in and of itself.  We get to follow along as Santiago, the traveler, forges his way through the world in search of worldly treasure, but if you can guess, he finds much more treasure in wisdom and his own heart.  It’s a pilgrimage of sorts as he makes his way to the mecca of his inner being.  Of course, the discovery along the way is even as precious as the totality of his journey – as in life that the process should be more important than the destination.  “Said the alchemist, ‘Rest well tonight, as if you were a warrior preparing for combat. Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure. You’ve got to find the treasure, so that everything you have learned along the way can make sense.’” (pg 115)

The Untethered Soul (by Michael A. Singer)

How I love this book!  This is one I try to read once a year.  This book digs into the heart of who we truly are, who we are meant to be.  It knocks down any limitation you can put on yourself and really puts you on an inner journey.  This is such a transformative read.  It teaches us how to “open” and “stay open”.  Things that happen in life (such as trauma), we have a response to.  These responses or reactions helps us to open to what the world is trying to teach us and gift us with, or they close us.  We definitely do not want to close to the possibilities of life.  Closing up your heart creates a negative memory that gets trapped inside you.  This book challenges you to go beyond what has happened to you and create your own new narrative about how you interact with this world.  I love how it personally helped me to stay away from the victim mentality.  “You were not put on Earth to suffer.  You’re not helping anybody by being miserable… you have to let go of the part of you that wants to create melodrama.”  (ch. 15)

No Bad Parts (by Dr. Richard Schwartz, PHD)

If you are a trauma survivor, this book can and very well may change your life.  Internal Family Systems (IFS) was created by Dr. Schwartz the author.  In this, his latest book, he really lays out IFS therapy.  It teaches the common reader what IFS is, how to use it by identifying your ‘protectors’ and ‘exiles’.  IFS trained therapists are all around the globe, but this book brings it into your home with several self-exercises and true understanding of how our parts work.  I am currently studying IFS and plan to take an “IFS informed” course this coming year to add to my coaching certification.  Parts-work is much like inner child wound healing work.  It’s finding your inner parts, examining them, befriending them, healing them, so that you can move forward with internal harmony and work more from your True Self.  Five Stars from me.  Anything I can get my hands on with IFS is helping me in my own trauma healing and more so as a Trauma Recovery Coach with my clients.  I also tend to love anything that has transcripts of actual client sessions – which this book has several of them.  It is jaw dropping and eye opening to see Dr. Schwartz in action!

The Gift (by Edith Eger)

First of all, I must say how greatly I love this woman.  Dr. Edie is so inspirational, a personal hero of mine.  She is a Holocaust survivor and the kindest and funniest woman.  She has truly turned her deep, deep trauma into Post Traumatic Growth and used that growth to benefit the world as a whole.  Her story transcends anything you can imagine, and yet she has chosen to turn her tragedy into her most powerful gift.  Nearly every paragraph in my copy has some life-changing sentence highlighted.  She leaves you with zero excuses to work on your own healing but is kind enough to recognize that everyone is on their own path there.  She went back to school to get her doctorate at almost 50-years-old and was lamenting this age situation to a supervisor.  They said to her “You’ll be fifty anyway.”  She clung to that and continued on for all these years later to educate and transform herself to help her clients and everyone she crosses paths with.  “Do something you’ve never done before.  Change is synonymous with growth.  To grow, you’ve got to evolve instead of revolve.”  (ch. 9) “We’re all victims of victims.  How far back do you want to go, searching for the source?  It’s better to start with yourself.” (ch. 10)

Awareness (by Anthony DeMello)

This is another well-worn book in my library, one that I try to read again every year.  There’s probably not a very adequate way for me to explain this book.  This is a mesh of spirituality book, full of messages that will bend how you psychologically think about the reality around you.  It’s full of stories of everyday people who do everyday things – without thinking about them.  The author says that everyone walks around “asleep” until they choose to wake up.  It’s a different concept, but once you read it, you’ll suddenly realize that it’s totally true.  “We’re always dissatisfied, we’re always discontented, we’re always pushing.  Go on, put out more effort, more and more effort.  But there’s always that conflict inside; there’s very little understanding.” (pg 157) His insights have been challenging to me, but the more that I read it, the more that I have morphed into this ‘awareness’/’awakening’ so it’s less jarring.  However, my first read or two, his concept of the types of selfishness (for instance) took me weeks to digest, and I think about that on a regular basis.  One of my favorite paragraphs is talking about not clinging anything – even the good things: “Do you want to enjoy a melody? Do you want to enjoy a symphony?  Don’t hold on to a few bars of the music.  Don’t hold onto a couple of notes.  Let them pass, let them flow.  The whole enjoyment of a symphony lies in your readiness to allow the notes to pass.”  (pg 110)

Those are just some of my favorites.  I’d love to hear if any of these books are in your top picks if you’ve read them.  If you haven’t, let me know if you choose to read them.  I find these kinds of books to be super great resources in healing wounds from our past. They teach us about ourselves and challenge us to be all we can be.  What are some of your favorite books?  Shoot me a message or a comment below and let me know!

Full Circle Fridays|Week 1: Agency

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To round out our week one – where on Mindful Monday I discussed the duality of life and on Wellspring Wednesday I explored how each person has to discover their own regimen for well-living – I thought I’d come full circle today with the word “agency”.  This topic goes beyond trauma survivors today, as it’s applicable to all people no matter your circumstances.  I shared on Monday the complexities of the opposite nature of life and how this can actually be useful to recognize that we have options and availability by not being stuck in one path of thinking.  Wednesday, I spoke on how each person can use these options to design a systematic regimen of self-care to live their possible life – even after trauma. 

When you look at the information that’s out there – I often find myself feeling overwhelmed with the seemingly contradictory science behind self-improvement.  I read a lot of books and listen to even more podcasts.  As someone with many biological after-effects of trauma myself, I have to limit my intake of “health and wellness” education.  In one morning, I could listen to a podcast where this brilliant scientist and world renown author might be on one of my most trusted host’s shows talking about what to eat, when to eat it, how to fast, for how long, and why.  I could flip to the very next podcast in queue only to find an equally qualified, totally believable, passionate health guru unwittingly totally debunk the prior guest with all kinds of similarly researched “must follow” diets and fasting rituals.   You’ve all heard these things … one website says a glass of wine is actually good for you and another says any alcohol in any form at any time is taking years off your life.  One site swears to completely have a breakthrough with intermittent fasting, and yet still another will tell us ‘intuitive eating’ is the new health craze sweeping the nation.   One says plant-based is the only right way, and another scientist literally only eats meat for a month.  Sometimes these “contradictions” make my head spin.  The truth is, we still don’t understand enough about the body, the mind, and certainly not the soul enough to have ANY completely conclusive answers to literally anything.  For instance, I have to take food specific info completely with a grain of salt (pun intended) due to my health conditions and a rare GI disease.  I have had to figure out specifically what works for me no matter what my podcasts tell me to try – like what I was saying about discovering and designing your own best life your own way on Wednesday.

So what does this have to do with “agency”?  I want to challenge you to explore your personal agency today.  I don’t want today to be a concept to try or a book to read … I want today to be about you evaluating your own choices.  Maybe you need to account for another person’s abuse and how you got to where you are today.   You can take an inventory of how you handle your day-to-day life, and you can judge yourself (kindly) about what you would like to be different in this New Year.  2022 is primed for taking ownership of your own self-agency.  You can direct your own steps – everything from learning to follow your own intuition to actually reading a book someone recommends.  No matter where you consume wisdom, advise, self-help tips, and the like – it all starts with understanding the nature of your own agency.  The more in control you feel of your own choices, by giving power to yourself rather than to your abuser, the more you are going to be free to exercise within that power.  I want you to know that personal agency is something no one can GIVE you and no one can TAKE from you.  Abusers ultimately want more power and control and so they are trying to steal yours.  Please, don’t let them do this.  One of the first steps a survivor takes to move into survivorhood from victimhood is to recognize and acknowledge their trauma.  Once you can fully understand what happened TO you, you can start taking back the power of what you are going to DO with what happened to you.  You can move forward and accomplish goals in your trauma recovery journey by recognizing that you are in the driver’s seat of your life. 

As a coach, it’s my work to help you read the map, create goals to getting to destinations, remind you to buckle up, assist if the car breaks down, sing along to the radio with you, read the manual to find a replacement part, keep you company, point out the speed limits, and other ‘passenger seat roles’.  I can’t sit in your driver’s seat though.  I can only remind you of your own agency, support your choices, encourage your ideas, and bum along for the ride of your lifetime. 

You are the agent of your journey.  You are truly the only one who can manifest any kind of change.  In fact, you are the only one who can decide when you even want anything to change.  You control your daily environment – no matter how stuck or lost you may feel.  That power you hold within your agency is the magical cure to allow yourself to dream again, to seek out the options and opportunities of life, to reclaim your inner child, to heal, and to grow.  There are many things in life that you can compare and contrast, and even more things that seem like total contradictions.  You have the influence and the impact to determine what’s best for your healing, how to go about pursuing it, and who to allow along for the ride.  Buckle up; it’s go time.