Journeying Through Darkness to Wellness with Deanne Smith

When the world seems to spin into chaos, where do we find the strength to confront the pain within us? Join me as trauma recovery coach Deanne Smith shares her profound insights on navigating the stormy seas of personal and collective trauma. Together, we dissect how these deep wounds impact our rationality and emotional well-being, and why it's crucial to not only advocate for peace but also to engage in the hard work of healing. Deanne draws from her own life story, inviting us into the vulnerability and resilience required to mend the scars left by our past.

Life's darkest moments can feel insurmountable, and sometimes, we find ourselves reaching for anything that might offer a fleeting escape. This episode illuminates the lesser-seen coping strategies, from the clutches of addiction to the false sanctuary of gambling, that many grasp at in hopes of relief. But it's within these narratives of struggle where we unearth the turning point—the courage to choose life, to walk towards recovery, and to begin crafting a life worth cherishing. Deanne's own leap from the brink serves as a powerful testament to the transformative decisions we're all capable of making.

Healing isn't a solo journey—it's a tapestry woven with threads of faith, personal accountability, and the sharing of our most intimate tales. We discuss how embracing a connection to a higher power can guide us through life's harshest trials and the remarkable health transformations that can occur when we listen to our intuition and turn towards alternative healing practices. By the end of our conversation, it's clear that sharing our stories isn't just cathartic for us—it has the potential to light the way for others, encouraging them to find solace and strength in their own paths to peace.

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:35

Hey you, wherever you are in the world right now. Thank you so much for being here with me. We know that we live in some volatile times and we know that the world is changing. So let's create a bridge as we travel through one another's countries, removing all the labels, coming together as one people, finding our home in one world. And as we do this, this is why our signature talk today we are designed to heal is so important. So settle in, as I welcome my guest, deanne Smith. Hi, deanne, hello, I'm so excited to be here. Oh, my goodness, thank you so much for being with me today.

Speaker 2: 1:19

So Deanne is an artist, a mother. She's an addict in 20 plus years of recovery and has spent her life struggling with the effects of early childhood and ongoing complex trauma, being diagnosed in 1998, at age 31, with post traumatic stress. She helped this helped her to understand that she was struggling and why she was struggling, but in spite of doing her best to avoid it, she became disabled in 2002. And today she is a trauma recovery coach, using her experience and skills to teach others that each of us holds the keys to our own healing and we can use them to set free ourselves from devastations, of trauma. Holy, freaking moly.

Speaker 2: 2:12

Do I understand all of that, deanne, and I appreciate your transparency and coming forward and the vulnerability to be able to do this particular show with me, because I understand how difficult this could be for a lot of people to just come out and use their voice. And I know, in a world that we're living in right now, it's really interesting because the entire globe is experiencing some level of trauma, unknowingly, because literally everything that they used to know has been stripped from them. People have lost jobs, they've lost their loved ones, in some cases to COVID. There's been so much upheaval and there's a lot of grief and there's a lot of trauma that's occurring in the world. Now, when you look at this, like what? From your perspective? What do you see?

Speaker 1: 3:13

Based on my personal experience with trauma and all the things that I have researched and studied, my perspective is that very few people get into adulthood, or very far into adulthood, without experiencing trauma. So right now there are a lot of people saying, oh, the whole world is going through a traumatic experience, but what I'm seeing is new trauma on top of old trauma, unresolved trauma, which just magnifies everything, intensifies everything, and so people are especially like in social media. People are talking about broken family relationships because of this current circumstance and losing friends on social media and so much anger and so much angst and frustration and I feel like a hammer and everything is a nail. I see trauma. I just see trauma after trauma after trauma.

Speaker 1: 4:23

All of these responses, all of this misery is based on trauma.

Speaker 1: 4:31

The first thing trauma does is it reduces our capacity to access our rational thinking, because that response to trauma comes out of our instincts which we don't have conscious control over. So we're being extremely emotional and we become more and more rational the more intense it gets, because our rational mind is being removed from our access more and more. So the longer it goes on, the more rational everyone becomes. The more emotional we become, the less we think and I've just watched this thing just it's like a snowball, an avalanche going downhill. The longer it goes on, the bigger it gets, and it just breaks my heart because what I'm seeing is the growth of the devastation, of trauma, and that's not something that everybody's talking about. They're going. Oh, we need to be calm and we need to be peaceful, we need to be kind of, but it's really hard to do that when you, when you're feeling all of those emotions, everything becomes personal, and knowing, knowing that we need to do that and being able to do that are two different things. So it's, it's been really hard to watch.

Speaker 2: 5:53

Yeah, and I think you're exactly right when you say that it's highlighting other traumas that people have experienced during their lifetime. And one of the things that I talked about is being a little girl locked in a closet and my mother closes the closet door and the closet shelf falls on top of my back and my body retained that information on a cellular level. Now, I didn't know that going through my life, but I definitely, I definitely knew that when I was going through therapy and literally could feel the pain in the cells of my back, like literally could feel that and I think that's what most people don't understand is that when we go through traumatic situations, we hold on to that in the memory of ourselves. So, for most people in the United States, when 9 11 happened, you know exactly where you were, you know what you were doing, who you were with and you could in detail outline everything about where that moment was for you and what it looked like. And, interestingly enough, this current environment that we're living in in this space is an environment is such that we are also retaining information on a cellular level of this period of time. So it's really, really important that we recognize that and, to your point. It's not being discussed enough, it's not being talked about, and we do need to talk about it.

Speaker 2: 7:32

So people have this awareness of this is what trauma feels like, right?

Speaker 2: 7:38

So let me ask you I know that you have, you know, this extensive experience in crisis and trauma and unfortunately, I you know it's something that nobody wants to have, but I personally, for me personally, I look at my own experience as being gifted to me to use it for good, which is what I'm doing in the world today.

Speaker 2: 8:05

But for people that are experiencing the heaviness of the weight of how we're living today, a lot of people cannot decipher how to move through it and what to do with it. So they're turning to vices. So they may be smoking. They may be, you know, doing drugs or eating really crappy food. You know doing things to their bodies that they really know is not helping them, but it just kind of, for a moment, they think it makes them feel better, but they're actually manifesting more harm within themselves. So I know you have this extensive information that you can talk to around this. So I'm going to give you the floor for a minute and if you could just jump in and share a little bit about. You know some of the some of what's going on in people that are using these vices and how you can relate to that in what to do with it, maybe.

Speaker 1: 9:06

I remember when I was in active addiction and I was at a clinic, there was a undergraduate in social work who was asking clients if they would be willing to be interviewed for a research project. I was like sure, why not? And so the question, the primary question that she was trying to get information about, was why do people who don't have much money, who live in difficult circumstances, who are struggling in life, why do they spend their resources and their time and their energy getting into substance abuse? Because it's not logical, it doesn't make sense. Because if you've got limited resources, then whatever you, whatever those resources you invest in a vice of any kind, whether it's alcohol or drugs or food or whatever it is. Whatever you're investing your resources in diminishes those resources for basic needs like housing and gas, for your car to go to work and stuff like that. And I explained to her it's really not about anything that makes sense when you are in a situation where you feel trapped. And being in a situation where you feel trapped and you're miserable, so your ability to your capacity or your opportunity to feel less trapped by doing something or to actually change the situation so that you're not miserable, when that is out of your hands, then it's just basic, automatic, thoughtless response to find something to feel better in the moment. If I can't make this go away, I can take a vacation from it. And people who get into vices like this I'm gambling, you know. I mean there's some really serious financial losses that go into gambling and yet many of the people who are caught up in gambling don't have much in the way of money to spend. They're doing it because they think they're going to get a windfall, but that's not really what keeps them going back. It's the adrenaline and the endorphins and stuff. It's a chemical response that we get caught up in and we don't want to let go of. But that's not the point I was making.

Speaker 1: 12:01

The point I'm making is that when we feel trapped, we look for some way to avoid experiencing what we don't want to experience. And the choice to use something to take a mental vacation and escape that way is not just human, it's also animals. I mean water buffaloes in a war-torn African country found hallucinogenic wild plants when they couldn't escape the effects of the war and had themselves a party, chilled out by the river and took a mental vacation from this dress. They were living it. It's a response that is very, very natural. It's just not healthy and we live with the consequences of it, just as we do any other choice we make.

Speaker 1: 13:08

So the answer to that woman's question was if I'm stuck in a situation where I absolutely have no choice but to experience something that I reject is acceptable, I'm going to use whatever resources I have to escape it. And if I can't physically escape it, if I can't alter it materially, then I'm going to take a mental vacation, I'm going to alter my chemistry, I'm going to invest my attention in a way that's going to let me avoid experiencing something that I can't tolerate. And I was surprised that that wasn't something she had already thought of, but it seemed obvious to me. Of course, I was in active addiction and I was asking myself why am I doing this?

Speaker 1: 14:09

It's not about rationality, it's not about intelligence, it's not about anything that makes any sense, because it doesn't. It's a need to escape, and when you feel trapped and there are no other avenues, the mind is a wondrous thing and we can use it to escape what isn't tolerable Trauma. Long-term trauma consequences come out of exactly that scenario. So we may be adding trauma when we get into an addictive situation, but in the moment, that's our instinctive response to what we can't accept, what we can't tolerate. And so it works, in the moment it works.

Speaker 2: 14:59

Yeah, and I know for a lot of people too, and it's also work. There's people that are using work to escape the trauma that they're experiencing. So, you know, sometimes it's not even drugs or alcohol or, you know, sex or whatever. It could be the financial stuff. It could be work as well. So I think that's important to mention as well. But, with your particular journey through life and congratulations on you know, being 20 years plus in recovery, that is amazing and what a testament to your courageous bravery. You know, just facing that when you are in the height of your addiction to make that decision to, you know, just fight with everything you had to not live in that space anymore and avoid the experience, as you had said. So for people around the world that are listening right now, dan, is there any tools or any suggestions that may help anyone listening that may be thinking well, I could just do this and it will allow me to avoid this experience. Like, what would you say to them?

Speaker 1: 16:28

The truth is that I did not choose to end my addiction until it was a choice of do I want to live or die? I got into addiction because, underneath all of my thinking and all of my circumstances, to me at that time in my life, life was a trap that I needed to get out of. As a child, I went to bed every night asking God, please don't make me wake up, let me come home. I want to come home. This is not home. I don't belong here. Let me come home. And that did not go away when I got into adulthood. And so, by the time I got into addiction, that was a really powerful motivation for almost everything in my life. And one day I looked in the mirror and said you're at a point where you get to make a choice Do you want to live or do you want to die? And you know, up until you get to that point where you're actually confronting the reality of death, it's easy to hypothesize, to guess what you'll do and how you'll feel about it. But I surprised my own self in that moment because I looked in myself and said I really don't want to die. And that was the last thing I expected when I was sitting and having a conversation with myself, when I was looking myself in the eye. I really didn't want to die, and all of these years I had spent praying to die. All of these years I had engaged in self-destructive behavior, hoping that you know, when this is over, I won't have to deal with it because I won't be here anymore. But when it came right down to the moment when I was staring a decision in the face and knowing that my next action would determine whether I lived or died, I didn't want to die. And when I made that decision, then I knew it was just a matter of being congruent with myself to stop wrestling with something that I now understood about myself, which was that I really did want to live, I wanted life, and that it was up to me to turn that situation into something that was a life worth having. And you know, by the time you get to that point in addiction, you've already tried all the other ways. You know to turn your circumstances around and to create the life that you want.

Speaker 1: 19:27

And generally, what happens, especially for people with trauma in their history, even when they don't know that the trauma is in their history, they keep bumping into these invisible walls. They try to do something that looks simple, it looks reasonable, and they fail at it. And it happens over and, over and over again and they don't understand why. So at that point, when I made the decision I wanted to have a life, I looked for resources I hadn't used before. I looked for avenues that I hadn't tried before, because my perspective was different Up until that point, it was this really sucks, I want out, I don't want to live, I don't want to experience this life. From that point forward, it was I want more, I want better, I need to find a way to make it better. And so I joined a 12 step group. I found a counselor, I started reading about recovery. I started reading about.

Speaker 1: 20:42

I did, at this point, know that I had trauma in my history. This was after I was diagnosed, so I started pulling out information that I could get my hands on about trauma, about healing trauma, about what we understand what trauma is and how it affects us. And the most important thing I did was I sat with myself All of those years that I was finding my life intolerable. I was running from myself. I started learning to read at three, so books were my first escape and I spent all of those years trying to escape and that meant that I did not spend time with myself. I didn't connect with myself.

Speaker 1: 21:39

The most important thing I did when I chose to create a life worth living was I got to know myself and the books I read, the counselors that I talked to, the people I met with they were all very different.

Speaker 1: 21:54

I was very much in love with them.

Speaker 1: 21:55

I was very much in love with them in the 12 step program, I mean, I went to church, people in church. I took Bible classes, not because I hadn't ever had Bible classes, but because I thought it would be good to be in that environment to be reminded of the things I had learned in the past that were uplifting. All of those connections were different because I wasn't trying to get out of life anymore, because I was looking for resources to help me change my circumstances and change my feelings, and that meant I really had to sit with myself and I had to connect to myself. So at that point the most important thing I did was reaching inside and examining inside and getting to know the parts of me I didn't know, and reaching outside and getting to know other people in a way I hadn't gotten to know them before. That was harder for me, because disconnection from yourself makes it almost impossible to connect with others. But because I was making that effort, it was a gradual improvement in both being connected to myself and to others.

Speaker 2: 23:18

Yeah, so if I could jump in for a second in prayer. Prayer is a powerful, powerful thing. So I wanted to just go back to how you were talking about bumping into the invisible walls and you have this reoccurring pattern where it just keeps happening and happening. And was there a defining moment where it became abundantly clear, you know, kind of like an aha moment that you wanted to go from living a life where you were trying to escape it to wanting to be part of it. Was there a defining moment for that?

Speaker 1: 24:05

I was living with a guy that I thought was absolutely wonderful. He wasn't, but that was my perception. I was five years into my addiction and I had physically been diminished so much by those years of using the choice, that defining moment when I had to decide do I want to live or die? It was also a recognition that my body was going to collapse if I kept going. And that aha moment came shortly after, sitting in a crack house spending a windfall for enough drug to potentially kill me if I used it in a certain way. And I heard God's voice in my head. Forgive me, this is very powerful for me to recall. I heard God's voice in my head and I said I really don't want to be here. And he said I know, and I'm really angry at you, god. And he said I know. He said but I love you, you are mine and you're not done yet. There's a purpose. Did you have yet to complete? And I said I don't want to stop this. And he said I know, but I'm not going anywhere. I'm right here with you and I'm just waiting for you to get to the point. When you're done, when you're done, we'll move forward.

Speaker 1: 26:27

That night I smoked an astronomical amount of crack. I drove myself back to my mom's house who was providing me with a place to live and food to eat, and terribly upset about what I was doing, but doing the best she could to love me. And I looked at my stepfather and said I think I just overdosed, can you drive me to the hospital please? And he did, and at that point I got into an outpatient detox and recovery program. It lasted about I don't know six or eight weeks. That was my aha moment, though you know, recovering from an addiction like that isn't a straight line. It's the same kind of thing as alcoholism. You make a decision, you do well, then boom, there you are again and you have to pick yourself up and get back on track and just recognize I'm not perfect, but I can still keep going.

Speaker 1: 27:41

And that's what I did, but that defining moment you're talking about, that was, was like oh, it's not up to me anyway, deanna.

Speaker 2: 27:56

I am wrapping my arms around you virtually and giving you a hug right now.

Speaker 2: 28:04

I could feel all of what you just said and it was amazingly beautiful and powerful, and I can only imagine the mixed feelings that you had in that moment when God was speaking to you. I can only imagine you know the the sense of questioning it or the curiosity around it, and maybe even you know I mean, it sounds like for a moment you did want to push it aside because you continued on your path to try to overdose, and then you retracted it because you knew that that's not the direction you wanted to take, which I'm so glad you did that, because you know to have you here today to speak to the audience and talk about this intimate space of your life. I can't even put words on it, but thank you for allowing us to be in that space with you to help understand. You know what this looks like for a lot of families that are going through this process with other people. You know loved ones in their life, because it is a hard, hard thing to do, but I think you know.

Speaker 1: 29:22

One of the things I'm wondering is did you have a belief in God prior to God showing up in this moment, oh yeah, it's interesting because I I'm able to remember some of the the earliest moments of life, before most people have any memory, probably because a lot of trauma happened during those first years. But I remember having a conversation with my grandmother when I was about three. I had come home from Sunday school and I had contemplated all of this stuff that I had learned in Sunday school and I remember announcing to my grandmother I have mommy and I have you and I have granddaddy, but I have one more parent. And she's like, really, I said I have God, god Jesus is my brother and I have God. Later, decades later, late in my grandmother's life, I confess to her that I had always had a sense of God's presence in my life. I didn't always pay attention to it, but that it was always there. And she looked at me and she said that's the Holy Spirit. That's a gift and not everybody gets to experience that. That's a gift and I'm I prayed for you to have it right.

Speaker 1: 30:56

So, yeah, and and the truth is that there was an awful lot about my life that I just really I didn't blame God for it, I was just angry that that he didn't stop it from happening.

Speaker 1: 31:08

And, of course, the younger we are, the less we understand the how that kind of thing works anyways.

Speaker 1: 31:17

So I'm I Am grateful, I'm immensely grateful, that at any point in my life, from the time I was at least three years old, if not younger if I wanted to pay attention, I Could sense God's presence in my life, or I could see God's hand in in what was going on around me, no matter how awful it was, and some of it was truly awful and and not everybody, like my grandmother told the truth, not everybody has that. But you know, I don't believe that God leaves us hanging without support. So if we don't have that particular experience of God, there are other ways that he shows up that we can recognize. All we have to do is pay attention, to look for it, to be aware of it. For my mother, for my mother it's, you know, like the things you're talking about, certain things to show up repeatedly in her life, little objects or Images. So it's very different for her, but yeah, there's always some way to know if you're interested in looking for it and attention.

Speaker 2: 32:37

Yeah, in that aha moment that you had, it sounds like that's when you fully surrendered. It's when you fully surrendered and really I mean it brought you to your knees and you were just totally, you know, naked, exposed and vulnerable. And here I am and Mold me the way that you choose to mold me. I mean that's what it sounds like to me. Is that fair, the best?

Speaker 1: 33:05

it was a task. So there are multiple times during my life, before that moment, where I had tried to commit suicide and it didn't work. I there's nobody matter than somebody who wants to die, who tries to commit suicide, and they wake up and they're still alive. That's really angry and that happened multiple times and you know, at some point I got to where it was. You know this is. This is more trouble than it's worth. I'm gonna stop doing this.

Speaker 1: 33:33

But in that moment when I'm having this conversation with God and he's telling me I have something for you to do. You're not Coming home yet, it's not time, and I'm going to be here with you through everything. I'm not going away. You're not alone in this moment or in anything. At that moment, what I understood was I don't get to choose. I Didn't choose the moment of my birth. I don't get to choose the moment of my death. It's not up to me. And I looked and it was like a flash, just a flash.

Speaker 1: 34:14

All the times that I had attempted to get out of my life and it didn't work. And I'm like, oh, that's not. I don't have that option, I'm not in control of that. That brought something home to me. That's really hard to put in words Because all the ways I've heard it expressed sort of diminishes the, the, the potency of the idea, but generally it gave me an understanding that a promise that he had a purpose for me, that he gave me when I was 20, was Not yet fulfilled, but that didn't mean it wasn't going to be that I had a purpose in this life and that I was not going to be able to bail out on it just because I I went out right, um, and so at that point it was like, oh, god's in control of this.

Speaker 1: 35:15

Now, I not everybody perceives God the same way. I do not. Everybody's faith is exactly like mine and that's fine, but it, I think that's, I think that's a an understanding that that transcends the divisions of different kinds of faith. Um, however you, however anyone, might conceive the whole idea of having a life purpose, I think this is true. So, yeah, I hope that answered your question.

Speaker 2: 35:50

Yeah, and I, I think you know I've actually have sat in a spiritual service at a addiction recovery center and it was astounding to me how many People that were in recovery had gone up and had personal testimonies of God showing up in their life and it would just bring them to tears and make them weep, because that experience was so powerful and so life-changing, as it was for you, and it just changed the direction and the course of their entire life. And I have heard this, you know, so many times. Just, you know, being in the audience of all of that, I personally have never have gone through Addiction in that format. I was an, and I was an addict of work. That was my addiction. When I was trying to escape, I was trying to escape my traumas. That was my addiction. But I didn't even recognize that until I was in adulthood and had to face certain things. We it's really interesting as humans we have layers that we have to shed and we're constantly, you know, changing and moving through our process.

Speaker 2: 37:15

And One of the things that you said earlier that was so profound was that and I'm sure it was a really Fueled in that moment where you were just on your knees and just totally like okay, I'm done, I'm done, I'm ready to just change all of this and really live, live the life that I Want to live, right, but it's this moment of holding up the mirror and Looking yourself in the mirror and saying I don't want to be that person anymore. I want to be this new person. I want to reinvent myself and just be the best me I possibly can be. But it really doesn't happen With this outer vessel. It happens with the inner space of our soul and I would love, I would love you know, to have you talk a little bit about how as your title is how we are designed to heal.

Speaker 1: 38:22

Yeah, yeah, before I do that, though, I want to go back to what I was talking about before, because the reason I described all that Was that in the moment when I'm sitting in the crack house and I'm about to I'm about to smoke through enough crack to kill me God says you know, this is not gonna work, you're not done. Yet I Did it anyway, right? I smoked it all, went home and had my stepfather drive me to the hospital. That was a test. I didn't and I didn't know that's what I was doing, but I was testing God and I was testing, true, right? Um? So I needed that moment, and I think a lot of times when we're on a recovery journey, we get to moments where we test is this real? Is this the truth? Is Anything different? Is there something here I need to know that I didn't recognize before this moment For it?

Speaker 1: 39:27

You know, toddlers test boundaries. They feel safe when they know where the boundaries are and they test them to make sure they're solid and they can be dependent and relied upon. We don't stop doing that when we're adults. We just do it differently. And in that moment, I tested God, I tested those boundaries, but because I did that, I had a confidence and a and an assurance, a Strong conviction that what God said to me in that moment was true, and Knowing that, knowing that I could rely on that to be true, is one of the things that kept me going. So tell me again, I wanted to say that because it was important to me. What, what is it you want me to talk about now?

Speaker 2: 40:19

Yeah, so yeah, and thank you for you know bringing up that test part. I mean I don't encourage anyone to you know test like that, but of course, if you're suicidal, reach out to you, know your hotlines and your community and reach out for support. But I was asking you in regards to your title and how we're designed to heal and looking at that inner part of ourselves, like what, what are some things that you did that helped you with that? I mean, I'm hearing some spirituality was definitely part of it, right?

Speaker 1: 40:55

But that wasn't all of it. So you know, when you live with trauma you also have going on inside of your body the consequences of the biochemistry associated with trauma. So we know Now which we didn't know years ago. But we know now that a lot of illness, a lot of degenerative illnesses and autoimmune illnesses come out of the chemical responses our bodies hold to the trauma events. And by the time I was 50 I had metabolic syndrome. I had. I was almost 300 pounds Because I had systemic inflammation. I was, my body was storing enormous quantities of water. I was in constant pain. I Only slept. Now I started having insomnia at age seven because of things that were happening then, but it got worse and by the time I was 50 I couldn't sleep more than three hours. The pain would wake me up. There was no physical position that wasn't painful, there was no part of my body that wasn't painful and I was back to wanting to die.

Speaker 1: 42:14

I had gone through Between 31 and 50. I saw a lot of therapists, I saw a lot of MDs, I tried a bunch of medications for a variety of problems and At that moment, by the time I was 50, had just discovered I had a lump in my left breast and I knew I had cancer. And I sat back and I realized all of those years had not given me improvement, that I had progressively gotten worse and worse, no matter who I talked to, no matter what medication I was using, no matter what anyone did within the confines of mainstream medicine and what an insurance policy would pay for because, remember, by this time I'm also disabled. I don't have a lot of funds to work with. I need my insurance to pay for medical care. I got frustrated. I said you know, this sucks and it's been growing worse and worse for years. I need to do something different. I need the trajectory of this path to go in a different direction. So I fired all my doctors. My mom took out a loan to take me to an alternative practitioner who used nutrition to heal, and that was an amazing experience because my pain at that point, before I saw that guy, I walked bent over. I had no strength and I had so much pain I couldn't straighten up. About a third of the way through the program that he put me on, I was standing perfectly upright, walking across a parking lot in full strides and not experiencing pain to do it. I stopped in the middle of the parking lot and just bawled like a baby, because it was in the middle of the parking lot that I realized I'm just walking. You know that was the beginning of a journey into what is popularly known as alternative health.

Speaker 1: 44:35

Right, I did a lot of research into metabolic syndrome and all of the different my vocabulary just blew out of my head Symptoms, and to all of the symptoms I was dealing with. I looked at food, I looked at herbs, I looked at supplements, I looked at mental health. I looked at all of it from an entirely different perspective. I read debates and controversies Because I wanted to understand why people follow certain ones, because not everybody does. So why do some people think this is the truth and other people think this is the truth? So I got more than one side on everything I researched and then I prayed about it and I trusted my gut. You know it's those years of therapy that got me to the point where I could trust myself at all and be aware of my gut and trust it. That self-trust is what allowed me to change my life, in spite of how unconventional it was, and every step I took based on that self-trust brought me some kind of discernible improvement. It wasn't some nebulous thing, it was concrete. So I kept doing it and the path I took from that point forward is a bit complicated and we don't have to spend a lot of time on it.

Speaker 1: 46:22

The end result is that I haven't seen. First of all, I had a double mastectomy because the tumor was so large and it was a very aggressive form of cancer. I had the surgery and then fired the oncologist. I've never seen a physician so angry in my life and I did everything that I found to do that made sense to me, that clicked with my gut, and I cleaned up the toxins in my diet. I cleaned up the toxins in my home and I sat down and narrowed down the most powerful herbs and supplements to the fewest, with the greatest impact because, again, I'm on disability, I don't have a lot of money. I tried talking to practitioners like herbalists, et cetera, et cetera, and I couldn't afford them. Insurance doesn't pay for them. So I did what I could do with what I had to work with and I scared the hell out of my family because they knew what I was doing and it's not something that inspires confidence in people who haven't done that kind of research, but I'm 62. I'm healthier than I was at 40. I have zero pain in my body. I lost three clothing sizes and I'm still losing weight. I'm still healing. I don't have a lot of strength or stamina, but that is gradually improving. I have been cancer free since the surgery. I stopped going back for checkups because the doctor was finding nothing to be alarmed about. He was digging because he just knew he would and it wasn't there, so I just quit going.

Speaker 1: 48:12

It's about taking personal responsibility for the things that matter to you about your life. My ex-husband, when he watched me go through all this, was like I don't understand why you're giving this up. I don't understand why you're changing that. He went through a different kind of cancer and the surgery and all the treatment after it and still lives with the side effects the permanent side effects, neurological side effects from the treatment he had. And I looked at him and I said I didn't want what you got, I want something better and this is working for me. And he said I'm old enough and he's older than me. I'm old enough to do things the way I want to do. I say, yes, you are. You're also old enough to live with the consequences of those choices. I'm choosing different consequences.

Speaker 1: 49:13

So for me, again, I was looking at a life and death situation and I simply chose quality over quantity. I had already had more quantity than I wanted in my youth and in my younger adult years and recognized that quality invalidates quantity if it's poor quality. And I looked at my daughters, I looked at my mother and I said I know this is scary, but if the rest of my life is going to be miserable and I have an opportunity to avoid that kind of misery, I would rather have a high quality, shorter life than a much longer miserable life. That's my choice, that's my priority. Besides, you know God's got this anyways. Either it's my time to go or it's not. I don't have a lot of influence on that. So the choice is not whether or not I'm going to die, it's whether or not the quality of my life until my expiration date arrives. Those are the choices I can make, and quality, high quality, is what I'm opting for.

Speaker 1: 50:29

And it scared them and it upset them because they're contemplating the possibility of losing me. But you know what they did. They said it's your life, you get to make that choice and we will support whichever route you choose. That's amazing and that's the thing. That's the most important thing, right? I don't know what my expiration date is.

Speaker 1: 50:54

I don't get to choose that thing, but I do get to choose how I experienced the life up until that moment and in the years when I thought I didn't have a choice. It wasn't that I didn't have a choice, it was that I didn't know, I didn't have the information. I was diagnosed in 1989. You know, the mainstream medicine was still trying to figure out what the heck PTSD was. What is trauma? They didn't know, nobody could tell me. But that's not true anymore. So my health recovery in every aspect of my life and my trauma recovery and my addiction recovery has followed the same trajectory as medicines, which is as more science, more technology, better understanding became available, more knowledge became available, and so my journey improved and shifted according to what I could find, what I could learn.

Speaker 2: 52:09

You have an incredible journey that you have shared with us and I'm so appreciative and I'm so grateful that you're not only you know through this addiction that you've gone through and you've overcome so much trauma in your life, but you're a cancer survivor. I mean there's so many things that just make your story so powerful and again, thank you so much for inviting us into your world and into this space with you. It's just so personal but I know so many people listening can identify with what it is that you're saying and I love that part that you said at the end about taking the personal responsibility, because it really ties the entire conversation together. As far as when you were younger and what you did with you know everything and how you took personal responsibility of your health. You know here at this stage of life there's so many things going through that just really resonate. I want to ask you go ahead, can?

Speaker 1: 53:23

I jump in.

Speaker 1: 53:25

I got so caught up in telling this story forgot the point that you asked me to make, which was you know where does we're designed to heal come from?

Speaker 1: 53:35

My experience through those years was that when I eliminated the things that were contradictory to healthy function, whether it was mental or physical, when I removed the things that got in the way and provided what was needed to support healthy function, my body and my mind both had automatic designs designed into them. Automatic healing processes were designed to self heal and that has been proven over and over and over in my experience. And so, to me, understanding that we're designed to self heal, that we simply need to know what to remove and what to add in order to support an inbuilt process, changes the way we look at healing. A lot of people and that includes me for many decades believe that you know when I'm broken, something outside of me has to fix me. But my most recent experience has proven repeatedly that it's not that something outside of me needs to fix me. It's that I need to get out of the way of the self healing processes that are built into me, and when I can do that, miracles happen.

Speaker 2: 55:05

I'm sorry, absolutely, that was the answer to your question no, I think it's exactly the right answer, because it's so true that you know we are meant to self heal and all the products that we put into our body they're either working for us or they're working against us. It's really that cut and dry. I mean there's just no other way to put it. And that's why it's really important to detox the body with a lot of water, make sure you're eating healthy foods, I mean, if there really is a lot of truth to that, and I wish more people really understood that and embrace that. So thank you for that message. And I do have one last question for you. So I ask all of my guests on Retreat to Peace if I were to pick up your earth angel feather off the ground, what would your message to the world be?

Speaker 1: 56:00

That would be my message. That is what I'm telling everyone is that we're designed to heal. I've discovered, after a lifetime of living with with trauma and the consequences of having trauma in my past and an ongoing situations that added more and more trauma, I discovered that trauma no longer requires a laborious, painful investment of years or decades of therapy and coping skills, with no guarantee that our efforts are going to give us the results we're looking for. That's not to lay fault on anyone or any institution or system. It's just that it's something that I understand now because of new information, new knowledge and new tools, and so healing doesn't mean upgrading coping skills. It means we don't need them anymore and that's accessible to us. So each of us holds the keys to our own healing, because we're designed to heal and we only need to learn how to use them. So healing can be rapid, cumulative and permanent. We know how to cooperate with our own inbuilt healing processes, and sharing that message is really my passion now.

Speaker 2: 57:32

I love that, deans. Thank you, thank you. Thank you so much for being a guest on my show today. I appreciate again so much of your rawness, your transparency. It was really hard for me not to cry with the God moment. It was there, but I didn't want to let the audience know that. But yes, I mean I appreciate you and I appreciate your message and I just know so many people around the world are really going to connect with you. So thank you so so much.

Speaker 1: 58:08

Thank you for having me. I'm honored and grateful for the opportunity to share my story because that's part of my purpose right To be able to let other people hear my story and share the things that I've learned and allow God to use me sort of like a pipeline to help others heal to do that work, because it's something we have to do for ourselves. We can't do it to each other, we can't do it for each other. So I'm grateful. I'm grateful for the opportunity for your audience to hear my story. Thank you.

Speaker 2: 58:53

Thank you, and that's all we have time for today. This is Catherine Daniels, with Retreat to Peace, reminding you to live your authentic life in peace. And, as always, retreat to Peace and we'll see you next time you.