Joyously Free!: Trauma and Identity – Healing from Within

In this episode of Joyously Free!, host Joanie Lindenmeyer continues her discussion with clinical social worker Patrick Quivey about healing from trauma and embracing authentic identity. They explore how trauma can fragment our emotional landscape, affecting the brain’s ability to process and integrate feelings. Patrick emphasizes the vital role of emotion in attention, self-awareness, and […]

Episode Transcript

(00:10):
Hi, and welcome KCIW listeners of one hundred
point seven at kciw.org,
Brookings Oregon, the beautiful Brookings. And, of course,
we're syndicated down with KZZH
ninety six point seven FM, access humble Eureka,
California.
Glad you're all here. This is joyously free
with me, none better than best selling author,
Joni Lindenmaier.

(00:31):
I'm so glad you are tuning in. I'm
a thirty four year resident of Harbor, Oregon,
a retired Del Norte High School teacher in
Crescent City, and a twenty twenty five Lambda
nominated author who's written three books in two
years. Woo hoo. I love life, and I
love being the producer and host of this
show. It's my memoir, None Better, that led
to the show because this is where I
actually did an audiobook for it. I'm so

(00:53):
glad you are here with us today. As
in every morning radio show, we begin with
a salutation
because it truly is it's a brand new
day. And if you could please respond with
never been lived before.
Mantras are a good way to start the
day, so here we go. It's a brand
new day.
Never been lived before.
Yahoo. We got this. So this radio radio

(01:15):
show, as Will and Viv named it, is
a show that talks about LGBTQ
plus stories and tips
along with church, religion,
faith, spirituality,
and joy. Hence, we call this joyously freedom
because it's about freedom and joy. That's the
bottom line. It's from my book, second book,
with 2sisterswriting.com,

(01:36):
Elizabeth Ann Atkins.
In this radio broadcast, just like in life,
it is so important to not have hate
speech.
No hate behaviors and no bullying. Let's make
our world happier, healthier, and more harmonious.
We do that with the three c's,
courage, confidence, and collaboration.
It's together that we seek understanding.

(01:58):
Together, we can think out of the boxes
or no boxes at all.
Oh my gosh. I'm so excited. The guest
speaker today will be here in just a
second or two, but we need to do
a little prayer first.
But we've had the speaker before, and I
know this person is also very spiritual.
So let's join our hearts
asking our creator to shine light on our

(02:18):
community
and our world,
our towns,
our families.
Let's believe in hope.
Let's believe in the power of the divine
and that Jesus, God, whatever name you put
on a higher being,
is always with me and with you. So
let's not be afraid or troubled.
Let's not be saddened or depressed.

(02:40):
Let's find that joy and peace that are
internal expressions of love and harmony. It's already
within us. All we have to do is
reach in there and grab it.
Let's center ourselves.
Let's take a big deep breath in
with the good
and out with gout.
Let's breathe in

(03:01):
through your nose
with hope and confidence
and out with any fears or anxiety.
Last one.
Take a big deep breath in.
Oh, all the goodness, all the joys,
and out
with anything bugging you today.

(03:23):
In the name of mother Earth, god our
creator,
Jesus our redeemer, and our holy spirit, we
say, hi.
Hi, spirit. Hi, God. Hi, Jesus.
Thank you for being with us today.
Well, I think you're gonna like this one,
everybody.
My quote for the day is
forgive your enemies.

(03:43):
It messes with their heads.
I'm gonna repeat that.
Forgive your enemies. It messes with their heads.
I was reading scripture the other day from
Luke and it talked about do not judge,
do not condemn,
stop that judgment, stop that condemnation,
but forgive,
have mercy.
And so when this quote came to be,

(04:05):
forgive your enemies, it messes with their heads.
I love that because oftentimes,
we can be coming from a spiritual part
as well as our human part. We can
absolutely
forgive somebody or an institution
or an organization.
We can forgive them so deeply that it
truly is peaceful for us that forgive, and

(04:27):
for them, it blows them out of the
water. It literally blows them out of the
water that we can be so kind and
so peaceful about it. So you know what?
Maybe there's somebody today that you need to
say I'm sorry to. Maybe there's an institution
or an organization that you need to let
it go. Let it go. It doesn't mean
that you you don't remember that, but you

(04:49):
let it go. Get rid of that ugliness.
Forgive your enemies.
Oh, that's my reflection today. And so with
that, let's lift up our friends and our
family,
places where we work, the people we work
with, the people within our community.
Let's thank God for guiding us and healing

(05:10):
us,
for listening to us, for blessing with us,
blessing us to do a bigger will, a
creator God will.
We ask all of this in the Lord's
name. Amen.
So here we are again.
Last time, oh, we've had this gentleman before
on our show and just a wealth of

(05:31):
knowledge and information.
I wanna thank you, the listeners, for being
here because we have with us again
a wonderful
clinical social worker therapist counselor,
Patrick Quivey. Patrick, thank you for being here.
Oh, Patrick's waving to me across the table.
And and, Patrick, today, we've we've dealt with

(05:52):
so many things with trauma and identity. This
will be our last session, and I'm so
grateful for the the previous ones. But today
is about healing from within.
Hopefully, you're gonna be able to give us
some tips on how each of us can
heal from within
from the traumas and the identities that we've
struggled with. Does that sound good today, Patrick?

(06:13):
It sounds like a huge laundry list. Let's
let's try and knock a couple pieces off
of that. That sounds good to me. Thank
you. And thank you for being here. Your
eyes are sparkling. You're looking fantastic, and let
let's just go for it here.
I I've always looked good on radio. Thank
you.
And you brought in a picture today,
a photograph,

(06:33):
an artwork piece and talk about looking good.
I love this. And I are you gonna
talk about that a little bit? Well, I
think I It'd be a great way to
kick it off. I think I shall now.
Okay.
Oh my gosh.
Six out of 20. It's a it's a
personally drawn
picture. It's a it's a lithograph probably done
about fifty years ago,
and I found it in my father's late

(06:55):
my late father's effects after he passed away.
So I had no idea how I how
he got it except that
maybe he might have known the the, the
artist. And,
it's called Angel's Caught in a Staircase,
and
you can see
a round staircase, circular staircase, an angel asleep
near the top.

(07:16):
At the bottom is a harp,
and out through the hallway with many doors
on each side
is a
light out onto the outside world.
And I looked at that, and I
said, holy smokes.
That's people.
That's our internal world.

(07:39):
And,
I had been there for maybe a 100
times before with other people,
and they had been detailing their own work
through their own trauma.
And,
you know, we talked about before, sometimes there
are parts of ourselves that get walled off,
and there are lots of ways of describing

(08:00):
how it is that the brain is affected.
You know, we have this entire system called
the limbic circle,
which pays attention. It's the,
hippocampus,
which does
learning and memory and the amygdala and all
of these,
neurological
kinds of frameworks that, you know, your doctor
could probably describe it better, you can go

(08:21):
look at it.
But let's look at
the the landscape of what we have to
go through in negotiating all these traumatic injuries
to the brain,
because it is to the brain,
how it gets circumspect and held back,
shrunk, so to speak,
and how the mind

(08:43):
creates a landscape of its own internally
to both protect it and also that restricts
us. So this picture
mirrors
what a lot of people have shown me
when they begin to describe either,
in literal ways or in,
more allusion to it, how they have the

(09:06):
feeling of the different parts of themselves. And,
you know, we know that part
of developing an identity is that we are
able to integrate and to synthesize
different feelings that, you know, the the emotions
that are warring within us. We love, we
hate,
we we we,
we have interest, we have boredom, we have
all these
compendium

(09:26):
of feelings. And one of the things that,
the limbic circle does, which is this combination
of the hippocampus
and learning and apparatus,
is
it tends to
condition and temper
the different feelings.
For instance, you could say something to me
that I might find disgusting,

(09:49):
but I like
you. And I'm gonna hold that and and
say, well, I'll temper that because I don't
wanna keep the relationship
no matter if you like sardines or not,
and I can't stand them. Actually, I'm mirroring
my wife's relationship with me. I like sardines.
She can't stand them, but she likes me.
It's a it's a truce.
So,

(10:11):
when
we have trauma,
we must take in the information because it's
arresting.
The parts of our brain that does the
learning
needs to put it someplace,
and
the
you could call it the learning circle, but
the limbic circle

(10:32):
has a way of being activated with certain
kinds
of stimuli for certain kinds of events, certain
certain pieces of learning that are,
just for me. Can you give an example?
Can you give an example of that?
If
If I see,
something that's threatening, I will feel fear.

(10:57):
And
fear
is a lot like courage.
Courage is motivated by a sense of connection
and loyalty.
Okay?
I'm going to do something for you come
hell or high water.
So the tempering back and forth between isolation

(11:19):
with fear,
courage
with social,
connection,
this is how the limbic circle works.
Sometimes
with trauma,
some of these events are so
overwhelming
that we isolate it,
and it gets what we call a feedback
system.

(11:40):
And
the the trauma becomes isolated,
and it does not get synthesized
or integrated with the rest of the feelings.
So you have people, for instance, who become,
oh So is it like a denial? Like
a repression? It is like a repression. Yeah.

(12:02):
It is
it's where The scapegoat?
People
are not able to fully
temper those feelings, so they become isolated and
they become stronger and stronger. So you get
sociopaths,
for instance, who don't temper their their their
feelings of connection
with with others, they're totally isolated. Mhmm.

(12:25):
They you get people who,
let's say neo Nazis, you know, they
they they inhabit
the attention
of hate
because it connects them. So we use attention,
we use emotions,
and all around this limbic circle
of love and hate and

(12:46):
attraction and disgust, we use that whole palette
of information
of feelings
in order to pay attention with. Without emotion,
there is no feeling.
So therefore,
in order not to be zombies, we must
create a feeling in order to attend to
any situation. Oh, I I so get that.

(13:07):
My EQ is higher than my IQ is
what I said. My emotional quotient is, like,
triple that of my IQ. But it's it's
to me, it's so relational
because if we don't have relationships with people,
then those feelings get
I don't know where they go, but they're
not a part of me. Right. And and
you talk about hate, there is so much

(13:27):
hate going right going on right now with
the LGBTQ world, especially with the trans. There's
hundreds of legislations that are up that are
trying to erase, make people invisible.
Do do you wanna jump in there and
talk about that? That's the reality of today,
Patrick. Don't know is that they're creating more
attention to it until the point where there
will be a break in a piece in

(13:49):
the fulcrum where it switches balance and goes
and they go, Oh, these are our children.
Right. And and, you know, there's the oh,
no that comes before the
and
the is coming. Mhmm. And where society will
go wake up and go, like, you know,
the Germans afterwards who said, we did that?
Mhmm. We've been doing this. Mhmm. You know?

(14:11):
We've been scapegoating. We've been paying so much
attention.
Yep. And maybe we do love them. Now
that may seem like a bit of denial
and wishful thinking. Uh-huh. But if you look
at the trajectory of how
new ideas come forward,
it's after the old ones wear out.
We you know?
I wish some of those old ideas would

(14:32):
wear out faster. Let me tell you. They
keep pounding them harder and harder to make
them work until they find out that it
doesn't. Well, that's some Right. So
there was
Can can I bring up a point with
that? Yeah. Okay. So in in the LGBTQ
world, Patrick and you know I'm a lesbian
and and I've been out for a long
time. But, the other day, I was talking
with a person, and they said, you know,

(14:53):
Joni, I finally understand.
And I said, what do you mean? She
goes, my granddaughter
came out to her mother
saying that she was a lesbian.
She goes, it's in my family now. I
get it. That love has to continue.
Before that, it was
anti LGBTQ.
It was hate. It was it was just

(15:15):
ugly stuff. And now that a family member
has come out,
the family is rallying around, I don't know
if that's even the word, supporting this granddaughter.
Mhmm. Is that what we're talking about? Well,
I love the word. Let's use it.
It's somewhere between roiling and and riled up.
Yeah. We are energized.

(15:35):
Yes. And the energy of attention requires an
emotion. The emotion was preset. I love my
family.
This is not my family's behavior, but I
love my family. It is my family's behavior.
I love this behavior.
Yeah.
And so,
And and that's healing from within the family.
Correct?
Mhmm.

(15:56):
So in
this compilation of different emotions that the brain
uses to pay attention with,
we can look back a few thousand years
and understand that,
the cognitive style of thinking,
the syllogisms of this versus that comparison

(16:18):
probably wasn't in existence
until a few thousand years ago. Mhmm. And
there are some anthropologists, I've mentioned this before,
Julian Janes,
a famous writer, talked about how the left
side of the brain didn't really know what
the right side was talking about. And
it works well for us because it allows
us to do evaluative thinking.

(16:39):
And
but when this was coming about,
when people started writing, for instance, and able
to put their own thoughts on paper or
carve it into stone
and say, oh, well, that is me there.
Suddenly, there is me.
Before that,
people heard voices.

(17:02):
It was common.
And if you look at
trauma,
and I was just talking with somebody before
this,
it it often
embodies a way of looking at information saying,
I can't believe what I am seeing.
So part of us believes it and part
of us doesn't. Part of us can can

(17:22):
can absorb it and part of us cannot.
And part of us talks to the other.
And we have this assemblage of different emotions
that can talk amongst themselves.
When the politics of the situation require that
you be
unaware,
that we close off our awareness, you know,

(17:43):
we were talking just before the
the session about the great national tragedy, the
assassination of JFK.
All of us wanted to not be aware,
none of us could have could could resolve
it,
then we start pushing it to the side.
So 2,500
ago,
three thousand

(18:04):
years ago,
we had
the breakdown
of the,
of society
in
the Mediterranean world, the cradle of civilization,
where people started thinking for themselves.
People started saying,
maybe that's not the gods talking.

(18:27):
You had people like Ulysses who defied the
gods.
Ulysses was known,
or Odysseus,
was was known as a liar. Mhmm. In
other words, he was able to hold his
cards back and not tell the gods everything.
Mhmm.
He had developed the belt development of consciousness.

(18:48):
The
the the part of us that says, I'm
gonna hold my cards to myself and think
about this.
Before that, there was this great over honesty
of saying, I am what I am. I
I feel what I feel, and it's not
me. It's that my voice is talking.
So
around
close to 500 BC,

(19:09):
Socrates,
Plato,
his father
wrote down
a allegory,
and it was called the Allegory of a
Cave.
You may have heard this because it
just shows up on our culture. And,
it was in the middle of a book
called The Republic, which was a training manual

(19:30):
for the development of leadership
within this cadre of the elevated,
society of the Greeks. And
dropped in the middle of this book is
this about how to be a man, how
to be a leader, how to be thinking
and all this, is this strange little cave
allegory. And he talked about

(19:52):
people stuck there as if chained
inside of a cave watching shadows on a
wall,
shown to them through firelight by other people
holding up shadow images.
Mhmm. And they would talk, well, is that
a horse or is that a cow? And
they would argue.
And then and then Plato began to describe

(20:12):
and said,
if you drag these people out, bring them
up and out
into the into the sunlight, it will hurt
their eyes.
Mhmm. And they won't believe what's out there.
Mhmm. And if they go back into the
cave, they will talk and and their and
their their fellow prisoners will argue with them
and maybe even hurt them or kill them

(20:32):
to say that can't possibly be the truth.
This is the truth on the wall.
And
then
Well, it's not like gory for now.
How many people are in a cave? Yes.
And
and so
over time, since we've, you know,
had this
running development of, you know, is this the

(20:53):
whole world he's talking about at that? Or
do we even have individual selves and that's
that's a a more modern development?
The question has
usually been,
templated as, are the is this us,
as individuals
trying to get out of our own darkness?

(21:14):
However,
if you look at the description
of the cave,
in the neurological
changes that go in the knowledge,
the affective
burden of the feelings of fear and anger
that are are wrestling within,
is actually a
call it a fifth century BC neurological

(21:35):
map of trauma.
And like the picture I was describing,
it it matches with Freud's,
topographical
map of the id or this
deeply ingrained part of ourselves,
the the ego, the sense of self control
and the superego, the sense of,

(21:56):
social order,
it's topographical,
it's spatial.
And
one of the things we're talking about in
terms of recovery from trauma
is being able to
resolve the inner fight.
Now,

(22:18):
this guy was,
made to commit suicide,
Socrates,
for talking
about the gods as if they weren't there.
Mhmm. He was undoing
the,
trauma encoding. He was saying we can fix
this. Mhmm. And society was saying, no, you
don't. Mhmm. Mhmm.
And so they made him commit suicide. I

(22:40):
was gonna sing a song about that today,
but I just thought it was inappropriate. So
you really think people make people commit suicide,
or do you think it's an internal,
again,
crash and clash internally
that then leads to suicide?
You might call it call it murder within.
Murder within. Because,
sometimes,

(23:01):
they don't even recognize that that if they
kill the victim, the one that bears all
the pain,
that it will kill themselves as well. And
I've had numerous friends commit suicide, and and
we're talking different ages. Oh, yeah. From teenagers
up to seventies. Oh, yeah. Nope. I know
we're gonna wind down with
time, like, never have enough time with you.
Never do.
Yeah. You talk about fear. You talk about

(23:21):
courage. You talk about bravery. You talk about
hate. Talk about all this internal stuff. Mhmm.
What are some tips that you can give
the listeners right now? Something that, like, maybe
a couple bullet points Alright. Of how to
deal with that. Whether it's something you hear
or feel strong,
whether it's a shouting or just this nagging

(23:42):
sense of doubt,
listen to it.
There's number one, listen to it. Don't push
it away.
Let it come out of the cave.
And when it does,
it will feel very odd.
Make it your own
and parent it.

(24:03):
And what do you mean by parent it?
I had a client who
had a part of herself that was like
six years old. Uh-huh.
And all the awe and wonder and
joy of life had been squashed. Uh-huh. It
started coming back.
It started coming back while she was working
her 10 key adding machine as an accountant.

(24:25):
Mhmm. And it
it couldn't do the accounting. Mhmm. And I
said, just let it sit there and observe,
and slowly it will become a part of
you. I love it. And
we sometimes are going around the world as
our our daily world as if we're watching
something. Mhmm. Okay.
So what what Plato was talking about there

(24:48):
was and
he mapped it out,
looking looking at things at night, you know,
sort of from a little bit of a
distance, slowly incorporating the feelings in and introducing
them, as if you're taking your inner child
and walking around the block with them and
pointing things out for the first time. I
love it. I love it. Okay. Listen. Okay.

(25:10):
We're we're gonna, like, down to, like, fifteen
seconds here. So we have listened to it.
Let it out of the cave. Mhmm.
And
last little comment. What's your last one? Those
feelings
that you're pushing away are the feelings that
want to be resolved. There you go. There
you go. And that's once you resolve it,
you find, to me, the joyously

(25:31):
free moment of you being the best person
you can be.
Oh my gosh. Can you believe this? This
has gone by so fast. Once again, Patrick,
I hope that you have at least put
some of your oodles of information out to
all of us. We here at the beautiful
listeners on the gorgeous coast of Southern Oregon,
Northern California, we wanna thank you for being
with us. Thank you for inspiring us, giving

(25:52):
us ways to look at things historically as
well as currently. We love the stories, the
tips, and the hopes that you've given to
us. It it's it's been phenomenal, Patrick.
It it it really has. It's like, oh
my gosh. My brain is just going high
fives, high tens to you, Patrick, for being
a incredible guest speaker.
Mike, thank you for being on the sound.

(26:13):
Tom Bozak, Candice, and Rose at KCIW,
we thank you so much for making this
all happen. KZZH,
Access Humboldt, we thank you for being around
and and making this happen in your area,
Humboldt that is. We wanna also thank all
the people that contribute and sponsor and make
KCIW
a community radio show. We wanna give high
accolades to the Rainbow Connection, Troy, and you

(26:35):
can hear him Fridays at 03:00.
If you're interested in knowing me, remember, I'm
around town,
Have smiles that are big, big, big, and
wear bright colors. Happy day, everybody. Bye.