June 10, 2025 • 50 mins
In this episode of Mind Your Own Karma, we dive deep into the transformative power of the brain and how it can heal after trauma. Join us as we talk to Sydney Curtin, author, serial entrepreneur, and advocate for the unheard, about how trauma impacts the brain-and more importantly, how we can begin to retrain our minds for healing and growth.
Sydney shares her personal journey and insight into why healing isn’t about erasing the past, but about reclaiming your voice, your power, and your purpose. From understanding the science of trauma to practical tools you can use every day, this episode offers a fresh, out-of-the-box approach to healing that you won’t want to miss.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- How trauma affects the brain and how retraining is possible
- The most important things that shape our understanding of healing from trauma
- Practical daily practices to help shift long-held mental patterns
- Why healing doesn’t mean forgetting-and what true healing looks like
- How to begin reclaiming your voice and shifting the labels that hold you back
If you’re ready to dive into unconventional healing modalities and explore how to transform pain into purpose, this episode is for you.
Guest: Sydney Curtin
Sydney Curtin is an author, serial entrepreneur, and coach committed to helping others reclaim their voices, rewrite their stories, and use their struggles as stepping stones to greater strength. Through her businesses, writing, and coaching, she’s empowering individuals to step into their own transformation and healing.
Get In Touch with Sydney:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coach_sydneycurtin/profilecard/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sydney.nicole.5661
TikTok: https//www.tiktok.com/@coach_sydneycurtin
Website: https://www.coachcurtin.com
Connect With Melissa:
-Email Melissa here: mindyourownkarma@gmail.com
-Click here for the Mind Your Own Karma Website
-Click here for Somatic Mindful Guided Imagery
-Find Mind Your Own Karma on Facebook
-Find Mind Your Own Karma on Instagram
-Find Mind Your Own Karma on YouTube
Remember—You might be only one listen away from a totally different life!
Hashtags:
#MindYourOwnKarma #KarmaCrew #PodcastEpisode #HealingPodcast #TraumaHealingPodcast #HealingFromTrauma #RetrainYourBrain #NeuroplasticityHealing #TraumaRecoveryTools #MindsetShift #TraumaInformedHealing #EmotionalHealingJourney #RewriteYourStory #ReclaimYourVoice #OutOfTheBoxHealing #SydneyCurtin #TraumaHealingCoach #HealingWithSydney#WomenWhoHeal #EmpowermentThroughHealing
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hey there, it's Melissa Brunetti, and welcome to the
Mind Your Own Karma podcast. Hey there, Karma crew, thanks
for joining me for this episode of Mind Your Own Karma.
Are you feeling stuck in your story, wondering if the pain
(00:24):
you've carried will ever lead tosomething more?
What if the very thing that broke you could be the key to
building your purpose? Today we're joined by Sydney
Curtin, an inspiring author, serial entrepreneur and
passionate advocate for the unheard.
Sydney has built a life and career around turning struggle
(00:45):
into strength and helping othersdo the same.
Whether through her business, her writing or her community
work, she's on a mission to empower people to reclaim their
stories and use them as fuel fortransformation.
If you are ready to stop shrinking, start healing, and
finally see your purpose as a source of power, then buckle up
(01:10):
Karma crew, because you might just be one Listen away from a
totally different life. Let's RIP off that bandage and
dive in. We are welcoming Sydney Curtin
to the show today. Hi, Sydney.
Hey, Melissa, good to see you again.
You too. So finally getting you on the
show. We've done a lot of talking and
(01:30):
a lot of brainstorming about what we're going to talk about
today. So I'm super excited about this.
But let's start by you just telling us, in your own words, a
little bit about yourself. Sure.
Well, you know, I've been calledan old soul a lot in my life and
I've been through a lot of things that people read about in
books or see and movies. And it's something that
(01:52):
previously I really allowed myself to be defined by.
And then I just decided that that wasn't the mark that I
wanted to leave and that wasn't what I wanted to be known for.
I have two kids that I raised now.
I'm a birth mother. As you know, my oldest daughter
was placed for adoption in 2019 at birth, and that in and of
(02:13):
itself has been a journey. But even then, I didn't want
that instance in my life to be what solely defined me.
And so I really set out to make a mark in a entrepreneurial
perspective and influencing and empowering others to be able to
find their voice in spite of everything that they've been
through, whatever that may be, and to turn their pain into
(02:34):
purpose with that mindset of notbeing a victim to your
circumstances, but allowing thatto become just part of your
story. 1 chapter of it that influences and sets the tone for
you becoming the victor of your story.
That's so awesome. That is exactly what I say too.
And we're going to talk about labels in a little bit, which is
one of my favorite subjects. So, but what originally sparked
(02:56):
your interest in understanding how, 'cause we're going to talk
about how the brain works. So what originally sparked your
interest in that in relation to trauma?
So when I was growing up I had amom that struggled with a drug
addiction and that led to her taking her life from that
addiction. I was the oldest and only girl.
(03:17):
I have two younger brothers and after that event occurred in our
family's life, being raised for a period of time by a single dad
prior to him remarrying. Being the only girl, I found
that my dad, by no fault of his own I might add, was projecting
a lot of his experiences with his wife, my mother, onto me.
(03:37):
And in order to make sense of these things that my mother
dealt with that he didn't reallyunderstand, that she hadn't been
formerly diagnosed or treated with anything outside of some
physical ailments that she dealtwith.
He found himself wanting to findanswers and labels so that he
could protect me. And I recognize now as an adult
(03:57):
and a mother that that was out of protection.
But as a child, that really shaped and influenced the way
that I viewed myself and allowedmyself to be treated myself,
talked track and what I believedI was capable of within the
limitations of those labels thatI had been given.
So that was my original interestwas I want to understand what
this is and how it works becauseI don't like the barrier that's
(04:20):
been set around me as a result of the stigmatism.
Yeah, I just recently watched a podcast with Mel Robbins.
She had like this brain surgeon on there, and he was saying to
make a list of what your childhood taught you about
yourself or what it told you about yourself, and are those
things still true? And I thought, wow, that is very
(04:41):
profound to list that and look at it and see what you still own
or what you're still carrying that you shouldn't be.
Yeah. And change the story if you want
to. And I thought that is such a
great tool to use. Yeah.
Very. So what were one or two of the
most important things that shaped the way that you view
(05:02):
healing from trauma? I love that question.
There's two things that I think were most instrumental, and
there's a lot, but the top 2 that I can think of is 1.
Healing from anything is not linear.
It's cyclical. It comes in waves.
And I just had this happen the other day on Mother's Day, this
(05:23):
last weekend, where I haven't ever, in these last recent
years, I should say in my adulthood, now that I am a
mother, found myself encountering waves of grief with
my own mom. I've healed a lot from that.
And it was my youngest brother who's 19 years old right now.
And so he's just recently graduated high school.
(05:43):
He's living on his own and he was four years old when my mom
took her own life. And so he doesn't have a lot of
cognitive memories of her. He also, as a result of that,
didn't suffer the same levels ofabuse that me and my middle
brother did because of the age gap, which is a blessing and a
curse because he finds himself in this position where he
doesn't really have any cognitive memories of the woman
(06:06):
that carried and birthed him. And he wants those.
And I went out of my way to I have photo albums of my mom.
So I went to try to find one of either her pregnant with him or
pictures with him just so she could have he could have
something of her. He has one picture with her
right now and unfortunately it'sa picture where she was really
(06:27):
unhealthy and very deep in the weeds in her addiction.
And even looking at that picturemakes me really sad for him
because I don't want that to be his cognitive memory of who she
was when she was healthy. And I found myself on Mother's
Day absolutely in tears and angry at her.
Like how could you do this to mybrothers?
You know what I mean? Like they didn't deserve this.
(06:48):
And this poor baby that I ended up taking on the role of
mothering both of my brothers, but specifically my youngest 1.
He doesn't have anything from you.
And I was mad. So knowing that healing is not
linear has been huge for me because I am now allow myself to
encounter and embrace and address those emotions in a way
(07:08):
that I used to not. I used to feel that I wasn't
allowed to have them because of how long it had been post
traumatic event. For example, if it had been X
amount of years, I felt like people in my life expected me to
have had moved on from the loss of my mom or other things that
I've been through in my life. Now as an adult that I
(07:29):
understand how trauma works, I don't find myself encountering
that same obstacle. The second thing that was really
profound for me in addressing healing from trauma was the
cognitive recognition that physical illness is different
than mental illness. And that might sound silly, but
if we were to put 10 people in aroom and expose them to the flu
(07:52):
virus, which hopefully nobody would ever do but you, you know,
X amount of people get the flu. We all have the same symptoms.
Just like back in COVID when youcould test for COVID, put it in
the machine that would isolate the actual virus particle and
tell you what it was that you were testing positive for.
We would all test for that same thing based on a set of results
(08:14):
that we have identified through these scientific methods with
mental illness. What we've done is we don't have
the same nose test or blood test.
It is identified objectively by a set of symptoms that the field
of psychology has isolated to say these are abnormal when
displayed in excess or in combination with these other
(08:36):
symptoms. And then we label that, well,
that's totally subjective, whereas scientific results are
more objective. That realization was really
empowering for me because it means that if it's subjective,
it can change. Yeah.
So you were saying that as an adult you were able to react
(08:58):
differently. How what helped you do that?
Or what what helped you work through trauma?
Through reacting differently to which part?
Just to any trauma that comes up.
So like you were saying for Mother's Day, what happened
there? You kind of let the emotions out
when you were saying that before, you kind of felt like I
(09:19):
couldn't have those emotions. So how do you work through them
now? It's, it's the, there's a couple
different ways. I suppose it depends on what it
is. I think is definitely a primary
part of that. Is it something where I'm
dealing with somebody that I'm having issues in a current
relationship? Is it someone that is deceased?
(09:42):
Is it something that I can control?
Is it something that I can't control?
And all of those objective identification and realization
of the reality of the situation helps me tap into the toolbox
that I have now as a coach and with my background in psychology
to decide what's the best way that I can help myself in this
(10:03):
situation. So with my mom being deceased
and those feelings of compassionI was having primarily to my
brother, for me in that moment, it was allowing myself first of
all to embrace those emotions because I haven't had to deal
with that for a long time. So I allowed myself the space to
be angry and sad for my brother.The second thing was calling him
(10:24):
and I was just honest with him and I told him, hey, I'm right
now looking through these photosand this is what I was trying to
do for you. And then I found myself
encountering this and I just wanted to share it with you
because I love you so much and you didn't deserve this.
Our family didn't deserve this. And she didn't mean to hurt us
either. This was an addiction that took
over her and it was not who she was.
(10:45):
It was something that she had. And that's not a reflection of
you, and it's not a reflection of me.
Yeah. I think one of the huge key
things that you were talking about right now was what control
do you have? Do you have control or do you
not have control? That's huge, I think in kind of
pinpointing those things and andkind of accepting it and seeing
(11:08):
what you can change and what youcan't change.
I talk a lot about controlling the controllables.
I firmly believe that we we don't control anything outside
of how we perceive the situationand what how we choose to react
to the situation. And they're still within that,
even though a lot of control anda lot of influence that we have
(11:30):
as individuals to positively change the outcome of the
situation or lower our expectation gap so that we are
not as disappointed when things don't go the way that we're
hoping. What do you say to people,
'cause I think a lot of people feel like letting the feels come
out over a trauma or something like you just had, you know,
(11:50):
come up. A lot of times it's scary
because they feel like I'm maintaining right now.
And if I take that lid off and Ilet myself start feeling that
could be pretty dangerous and scary.
So what do you say to people that that feel that?
I see you and I don't know what it is that you're going through,
(12:12):
but your feelings are justified,Your reality of the situation,
whatever it is that you went through that was real for you.
But reality of the situation andfeelings inherently are
different. And so 2 individuals or like for
example, just since we were justtalking about it, my brothers
(12:32):
and I all went through very similar things with my mom, but
we all experienced them very differently based on our age,
how she viewed us in her life atthe time, how we were treated at
the time. And that doesn't make my reality
more or less true than my youngest brother's reality.
(12:53):
So because of that, we have the ability not to change the
reality of the situation, but torecognize that those emotions
that we're feeling can also be trained to be more impactful in
a positive way in our life. And that doesn't take away from
what we went through. It just means that we have
control to reshape how we feel and interpret what it is that we
(13:16):
had to go through for our benefit and nobody else's.
It doesn't have to be to benefitsomebody else.
Some people feel like that that I just made inherently takes
away responsibility from the other person.
And that's not that's really true.
Sometimes we won't get that apology and forgiveness is not
something that we as individualshave the luxury always to wait
(13:37):
on. It's not for the person that
asks for forgiveness. And so for those out there that
are listening, that have somebody that they're waiting
for that phone call or that letter or whatever it is that
want that apology, sometimes youhave to make the conscious
decision to free them in your life for you and not for them.
Yeah, yeah. I don't like the word forgive.
(13:58):
I always say I released, I released them because I think
for me that word feels a little more comfortable and it makes me
feel like I'm not releasing you from what you did to me or I'm
not forgiving you for that, but I'm releasing you so that I can,
I can move on, you know, for myself.
So. Here's some truth with that.
One of them is the action of forgiveness to a lot of people
(14:20):
means that if I forgive you for this, I'm allowing you to have a
position potentially in my life again.
Whereas I release you from this means I'm releasing you from my
life and from any emotional responsibility that you've held
over me based on whatever it is that we went through.
And so that relief like this freeing tie from that.
(14:42):
And, and I relate to that. I felt that way about my mom for
a long time. I had to come back to a place
where I truly forgave her. And that may have been easier
for me just because she's not coming back.
So that's not a bridge that I have to cross in re entering
that relationship with her. But there's something to be said
regardless of if you get the apology or if you don't, or if
(15:02):
you're truly forgiving or if you're releasing and choosing to
not remember, which is differentthan forgetting, forgetting and
choosing to not remember. Even that are those are two
different things. So when you choose to release
and choose to not remember, meaning I haven't forgotten but
I am choosing to not allow this to impact my emotional state
(15:24):
anymore, then you allow yourselfthat freedom regardless of what
the other person chooses to do. Yeah.
You might not have control or have had control over what
happened to you, but you have control over how you react to it
now. Yeah.
Can you share a personal moment in your life when you realized
healing was actually possible? Maybe one of the first memories
(15:47):
of that. Yeah, that's another really good
one. I wish that this was universal
in a lot of ways. So when I realized healing was
possible, it was actually hard. This was this was tough.
And I would think that if peoplechoose to reflect on this
question, and that if they have had this moment, it might look
(16:07):
very similar to a lot of people,for me to recognize that healing
was possible. It took drawing boundaries with
the people that had influenced me to believe that I was
restricted to the labels that they had put on me.
For me, that was really difficult because the people
that were putting those labels on me were the most influential
(16:28):
people in my life in my adolescence.
So to draw boundaries and say that I'm restricting this
relationship for my well-being, 1 resulted in an escalation of
that relationship where it became hostile.
It was insulting. It was not no longer beneficial.
(16:49):
When you draw boundaries around people that want you to believe
that you're something, whether they genuinely believe that you
are that or you're not, it will first become worse before it is
better. So drawing those boundaries
around those people that had ledme to believe that I was
something that I did not identify with resulted first in
(17:13):
that feeling of loneliness and isolation.
And that was really, really hard.
I'm a very social person by nature and these were the people
that I had had in my life all ofmy life.
Saying I can no longer have a relationship with you for the
time, for the sake of my well-being was really hard.
And it stayed really hard for a while.
(17:33):
And then I was able to free myself from those labels because
I took the time to learn who I was without the influence of
anybody else. And it was the hardest thing
that I did, and it was also the most rewarding thing that I did.
That's awesome. I had the same kind of epiphany
as well about 15 years ago. Yeah.
(17:56):
Isolation. Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, I had to isolate to find myself, you
know, like I didn't know anything about myself at all and
any kind of influence or I grew up a lot with a lot of
expectations. And so I had to remove myself
(18:17):
from that and kind of away from the all those microscopes that
were looking at me and expecting, you know, my life to
go a certain way so that I couldjust look at myself kind of in
private, you know? Yeah.
And reflect. Otherwise I, I was like too
distracted with labels and things like that.
So. Yeah.
Well, and with our family unit too, my dad was a very, very
(18:39):
well known business figure in Northern, where our family is
still to this day in the Fort Collins history book.
And we have just an enormous amount of people in this town
that know who he is, that know who I am, who my brothers are.
But nobody knew what was going on behind the scenes with my
mom. And then when I became pregnant
(19:00):
at 20 and my dad didn't approve of who her biological father
was, he wanted to ostracize me so that it didn't impact his
image and his mutation. And there was just this weird
concept of like that Band-Aid effect of your personal success
and it somehow like you have to have it all together or
nothing's together. And I, I did like just like you
(19:22):
said, I had to get away from that to figure out what I
wanted. And do I even want these labels?
Do I care to be associated with all of the success or do I just
want to like move States and change my name at this point?
Right, right. So let's talk about retraining
the brain a little bit. Is that even possible?
And what does that process look like?
And I'm sure everybody's wondering, how long does it take
(19:43):
to do that? Sure, sure.
No, that's a really good question.
And it kind of goes back to thatconcept of how healing isn't
linear. So you think about retraining
the brain and retraining the brain from trauma has the exact
same types of skills that go into learning any new concept.
So if you want to learn a new language, if you want to learn a
(20:05):
new CRM, whatever it is that you're learning, your brain
needs the same types of influences based on how some
people are visual learners, somepeople are audio, some people
are show me how to do it and then I will replicate it.
The brain needs that same type of signalling in order to learn
or relearn anything. That being said.
(20:26):
Once you've learned something one way, it is significantly
more difficult to learn it another way.
The reason that this is more complex when it comes to trauma
is because when you're learning something that is not triggering
to the brain, you have an easiertime adapting to whatever it is
that you are are learning. Whereas when you are relearning
(20:50):
how to why are these neuron connections and you want to stop
this thought pattern and retrainthis thought pattern.
You kind of have to go through the weeds with these even bodily
symptoms that we can have as people who have been through
anything traumatic to get there.Whenever something traumatic
(21:11):
happens in our body, our amygdala is kind of the smoke
alarm of our brain and it sends off whenever it believes there
is danger. This danger could be real or
totally perceived. And when that smoke alarm goes
off, your prefrontal cortex, which is notorious for decision
making in the brain, goes offline.
(21:32):
So now you are in total flight or flight response.
From there, your amygdala sends a flight or flight signal to
your body indicating that your nervous system needs to generate
these hormones in excess of cortisol and adrenaline.
So it could be something very literally, and I've experienced
this personally, quite as small as a firework going off.
(21:55):
I have some triggers surroundingsudden unpredictable noises that
I still struggle with. So when I have those happen, I
have to acknowledge in myself that my brain is trying to keep
me safe. And that small pause right there
of instead of responding or reacting to the signal that my
(22:19):
body is sending me that I am in danger, I instead create an
intentional moment of my brain thinks I'm in danger.
Is this real or perceived pause allows me to redirect and
correct the course of action that my brain is trying to take.
Yeah. So how long does it take
normally to keep doing that for it to kind of rewire?
(22:44):
So it's the same way that all ofus have very different
personalities and learn at different rates.
This is based on a plethora of things like emotional quotia,
intellectual quotia, even just our adapt, adaptability to
circumstances and trials. Some of us are more resilient by
nature than others, and that doesn't make one of us more or
(23:05):
less resilient necessarily than the other.
It just means that we have different strengths and
weaknesses as individuals. So back to that concept of
healing not being linear but more cyclical.
I have found even now sometimes if I have that fire work go off
in near proximity and I'm not expecting it, I have a harder
(23:29):
time getting myself back on thattrack of OK, this is my brain
trying to protect me versus the 4th of July for example, when
you are expecting these loud andsudden noises and I want my kids
to experience what this was intended for.
I have a much more conscious train of thought of I am safe,
my body's reactions are not reality.
(23:50):
They're trying to protect me andthen I get to consciously choose
to engage with my kids. So I don't know that there is a
finish line to healing from these things necessarily.
I think that there are some individuals that have a
tremendous amount of success with them, diminishing anywhere
from six months to 12 months, depending on what it is that
(24:11):
they went through. I think that even those
individuals might say though, that randomly 510 years later, I
had something happen and it randomly flared up and I found
myself having to utilize the tools that I'd gained from
counseling or coaching to re engage with myself and assure
myself that I was safe in that moment.
Yeah. So you might have just answered
(24:33):
this, but what actually happens in the brain when someone's
triggered? And how can we learn to respond
differently? I know you were talking about
the hormones in fight or flight.You might have already explained
a lot of that, but. Yeah, yeah.
And they go hand in hand. So it's perfect follow up that
that is what happens though is those when those chemicals get
released, we have to take ourselves out of our nervous
(24:55):
system use utilize grounding activities to help our nervous
system recognize that we are safe.
Some of these things can be breathing activities, cold
plunges. You can even just do this with
just your face and then a bowl of ice.
It doesn't have to be a full body cold plunge.
Journaling can really help things like there are some EMDR
(25:17):
which is eye movement deactivation and or I'm sorry,
desensitizing and redirections where we can cue our body to
recognize like I'm engaged here,you don't have to be in fight or
flight anymore. So that if we don't get ahead of
it before that fight or flight response, we can work on
grounding ourselves to come backto a sense of hey, it's good,
(25:38):
we're safe. And those, those are really,
they're really crucial and helping redirect that thought
pattern too, especially when it maybe gets ahead of us initially
and we catch it what it feels like a little later than
initially. The the, when the prefrontal
(25:59):
cortex shuts off, you're turningit back on when you're engaging
in your nervous system. So when that goes offline and
your body is in that fight or flight and you make the
conscious awareness to cue yourself to come out of that
fight or flight, you're then re engaging in your prefrontal
cortex And the decision making of I'm consciously telling
myself that I am safe in this moment.
(26:21):
And then my encouragement from there is for like, don't address
it right then. Like if if you just went through
that trigger and your body came off of this adrenaline high or
this cortisol high and some people don't even know where it
comes from initially. Like I still every once in a
while will have this weird trigger where I'm like what the
heck just happened sort of thing.
Like you don't recognize all of them and that makes it even more
complicated. Just have a designated journal
(26:43):
and it doesn't. When I say journal, some people
are like man, I don't have the time to write 5 pages of what I
was feeling or like what happened, blah blah blah.
Write a sentence like this happened, then this happened and
then close it and allow yourselfto readdress that later.
Those little insights as to who you are can help you to identify
some of the things that your brain has intentionally buried
beneath your subconscious because it doesn't want to deal
(27:04):
with it. So what are some quick practical
things once someone like, they hear the firework and they, you
know, OK, ask the question, is that something really that I
need to be, you know, addressingwith this fight or flight
feeling or not? You know, is there like a
breathing exercise or something that might help kind of, you
(27:25):
know, calm down your nervous system after it gets jolted like
that? Is there something quick and
easy that people can practice? So I've heard all of the, I feel
like I've heard all of the things that psychology offers.
There's a couple that I've foundto be most effective personally.
And this comes from somebody that is very like I am very
(27:46):
easily sensory overloaded. Some people who are not that
have these triggers might have an easier time doing the
breathing methods. There's a variety of them, or
the five things you see, 4 things you can touch, so on and
so forth. Those aren't quite as effective
for me. I really need an like a nervous
system shock to come out of thatfight or flight response.
(28:09):
Holding an ice cube works reallywell for me.
Just plain ice cube over the sink or dunking my face in cold
water while I am box breathing. So box breathing is 4 seconds
in, four second hold, 4 second out, repeat.
And so I'll do 4 seconds in sharp hold for four seconds
under the water and four second out sharp while I'm exhaling.
(28:30):
When I come out from the ice water, this 100% resets my
nervous system 10 out of 10 times.
And so that system shock totallytakes you out, which is ironic
because the pulled water can actually send you in the light,
but it becomes rather than emotional.
So in one side of things, it's your brain that triggered that,
(28:50):
whereas in the ice water, it's aphysical sensation that's
triggering that. It's almost like matching
somebody's excitement level. Like if somebody's at A10 and
you're like at A5 and you're like chill out kind of thing,
and you instead meet them where they're at.
Now both of you can kind of deescalate and that path.
So that ice water with the box breathing of four in, four hold
(29:11):
4 out helps me a lot. Exercise is the other thing
that's been instrumental. Whatever it is that I've dealt
with in the day or the week or whatever trigger it is, if I can
find time, even if it's for one song where I do a brisk walk or
a brisk run and I only have 3 minutes to do it, that also
helps me instrumentally. OK, so a lot of people think
(29:34):
that healing means erasing the drama or just forgetting that it
ever happened. What do you think true healing
actually looks like? That's yeah, that's powerful
too. So trauma is like a a chapter in
a book. I kind of reference the book
thing. So when something traumatic
(29:55):
happens, a lot of people struggle with working through
that because they've built theiridentity around this trauma.
This was for me in a lot of wayswhere a lot of people even that
knew of me through a friend of afriend knew that I was the girl
that her dad does this and her mom committed suicide.
So that was who I was and I worethat for way, way, way too long.
(30:21):
And because that was how other people knew me to an extent, I
allowed that to become a large piece of my identity.
And that made it even harder to break the chains of that piece
of my story. But moving on from that chapter
didn't mean that I was erasing that chapter.
It just meant that I was ready for the next 1.
And trauma likewise doesn't haveto become our whole identity.
(30:45):
But it takes these obstacles in our lives sometimes to shape us
for who we need to become. And I needed some of those
trials in my life to prepare me for the next thing in my life.
And I don't know that I would have handled them with as much
grace as I had if I hadn't been through other losses and hard
things. And even back to that concept of
(31:08):
not forgiving, but choosing to forget that just because it
happened doesn't mean that I am intentionally avoiding it.
It doesn't mean that it's something that I don't talk
about. It means that if it's relevant,
this is a part of who I am, but it no longer defines me, and I'm
free from that part of my identity.
I am who I am without what I've been through.
(31:30):
Yeah, powerful. And, you know, there's people
that I feel like, I don't know if I want to say they want to
stay stuck, but it's very comfortable.
You know, it becomes a comfortable part of them.
And just being in that pain is familiar.
And it can be frightful to let it go.
(31:51):
What would you say to someone who's still clinging to that
trauma or that identity as a victim?
When you move out of a house, you don't take the house with
you. You just take your belongings
with you. And the reason that I use that
analogy is because when we movedinto the house that we owned,
(32:12):
when my mom did what she did when she was no longer around,
and then later years on, my dad sold that house, I had a really,
really hard time letting go of that house.
But it was never the house. It was the memories that were
associated in that house that was a part of me that I still
(32:32):
was unwilling to let go of. So with the same book analogy,
when it's hard to let go of what's happened to you, trauma
is familiar because we're not allowing ourselves to change the
reality of the feelings that we're having regarding that.
So it doesn't mean that it's true.
Feelings aren't true. And that's hard to hear because
(32:53):
a lot of people are like, will justify why it is that they're
hanging on to trauma. And I deal with this with my
clients all the time where there's like this, this pressing
reason, I can't give you this. I can't give you this because
I'm not ready to let it go. OK, Well, you not being ready to
let it go is different than it'sstill holding influence in your
life, right? Like you're choosing now to let
(33:14):
it affect you because the reality of the situation here
today is that it doesn't have tounless you want it to.
So when you move out of a house,you can take things that are
crucial to you that are a part of who you are, but you can
leave the house. And it's the same thing with
moving on from trauma. You don't have to take all this
with you, especially if it was ahouse built on sand.
(33:36):
You can go build a house with a solid foundation and still have
the pictures and the decor and the memories and it doesn't have
to influence your structure. Yeah, so let's talk about labels
a little bit. One of my favorite subjects, how
can someone begin to shift from the labels that they carry,
(33:57):
especially when those labels arekind of holding them back from
in the healing process? Yeah, this was me for so long.
So the label that I was given just right across the forehead
was borderline personality disorder.
And it was what my mom had been diagnosed with past her death.
So not while she was alive. It was what she had been
(34:17):
diagnosed with when she wasn't even around.
So it was other people's subjective opinion about what
she dealt with that somebody waslike, well, she probably dealt
with either severe bipolar or borderline.
So then when I had these symptoms in my adolescence,
because I was 13 when my mom passed away.
And so of course, I'm going through all of this like normal
puberty stuff, normal teenage stuff, on top of the fact that I
(34:39):
don't have a mother figure in mylife to show me or teach me what
it means to be a woman, and an effective one at that.
So when I was labeled with borderline, I really allowed
that to inhibit what I was capable of as an individual.
Because if I struggle with impulsivity and behavioral
control and emotional regulation, then you can't get
mad at me for when I lash out inthese ways.
(35:02):
Because you have told me that I have this.
Well, that no longer served me when I became a mother because
then it was turned on me. And that is one of the ways that
I was very heavily influenced and coerced into choosing
adoption was you cannot be a mother because you have
borderline and look at what yourmother did.
So you will just rinse and repeat the cycle.
(35:23):
And that's when I decided I don't have this.
I've been using this as an excuse because you've allowed me
to use it as an excuse. And that ownership of this is my
own behavior that I am capable of correcting was incredibly
empowering. It also took me being willing to
admit that I was wrong. And a lot of the things that I
(35:45):
had been doing for so many yearsthat I had allowed myself to do
because of the grace that I was given.
It wasn't even grace, though I shouldn't even say that it was.
I was allowing myself to do it because everybody justified my
behavior based on this label. So it was like, you know, be
patient with her. She has XYZ.
It just wasn't true. And so unfortunately, you're
(36:05):
only pregnant for nine months. And I was heavily influenced and
cohorts to choose adoption for my daughter, which is probably
the single biggest regret of my entire life.
And when that happened, I was bound and determined to prove
that come hell or high water, I was not my mom, I was not
borderline, and I was in controlof my behaviors and the
(36:26):
trajectory of my life. And I spent the next several
years just like working on me and figuring out who I was and
learning emotional regulation skills and healing from the
things that I was just previously unwilling to address.
And then I sat down like three years later with a psychiatrist.
(36:46):
And before I sat down with him, I told the gal that schedules
his appointments do not pull anymedical records.
I do not want him talking to me with any past influence of what
my previous diagnosis have been.And when I sat down with him, we
sat down and talked and did his normal intake where they
objectively tell you based on what you are demonstrating
symptom wise in your life, what they believe that you may be
(37:08):
dealing with. And he told me he was like
normally I'm able to pull from past records so that I have some
sort of basis of what I'm going off of.
But based on our conversation today, the only thing that I
would even remotely consider diagnosing you with would be
ADHD. He said you think very quick
process very quickly and you canaccomplish a lot based on some
(37:30):
of those rushes of dopamine chases that you hit.
But I see nothing else. And even with everything that
you've been on, like been through as an individual, I
wouldn't staple you with anything.
I don't think that you need anything other than regular
exercise and maybe some Adderall.
Like it was just like this. It was almost humorous, like to
(37:51):
hear this being like, you talk fast, you think fast, that's why
you're so successful in this, these business avenues that
you've pursued and achieved and you're free.
That's all that I heard. And so I had him pull it up.
And when he pulled it up after we had had our conversation, I
was like, now I want you to lookat what I've previously been
diagnosed with. And he was like, I completely
(38:11):
disagree with this and here's why.
And he gave me his objective opinion about why I did not meet
the criteria for borderline personality disorder with
extensive examples of what he had witnessed in previous
clients that he would label withborderline personality disorder.
And he deleted it from my medical records.
And since that day, I've never, ever, ever outside of the
(38:32):
context of freeing people from labels shared or identified as
somebody who has ever struggled with borderline.
Yeah, how freeing was that? It was incredible and it was so
needed because that was the I allowed myself to live in the
parameters of individuals who had borderline personality
disorder. You're told that you're
restricted to these limitations and it's not just for
(38:54):
borderline, I mean individuals with bipolar, schizophrenia,
like anything that borders that not neurotic or psychotic
disorder line. You're told that from a
professional standpoint that youare statistically more likely to
have a lesser level of professional success than the
average individual based on these symptoms that you struggle
with when we as individuals are in complete control of changing
(39:17):
those. But nobody wants to take
responsibility for their actionsbecause it's safer to live in
the trauma of what we've been through.
What does it take to be able to objectively say I am not what
I've been through and I will no longer allow this to define me?
Yeah, I think you have to be like, I would say you have to be
sick and tired of feeling sick and tired to pull yourself up
(39:41):
out of there. Yeah, you got to be done.
So your mission is to help people reclaim their voice and
their hope. How do you do that through your
coaching? And what kind of transformations
have you witnessed in some of your clients?
I that's, so it's so exciting totalk about this because I am not
a coach for everybody. And I usually tell people that
(40:02):
in my intake call. I'm going to be the person
that's willing to objectively see your strengths and your
weaknesses as an individual. And I will not allow you to live
in that victim mentality. So if you're comfortable in your
trauma, I am not a good fit for you.
And if you're ready to take control of the things that have
previously defined you, then I promise you I will be the most
(40:23):
reliable and effective accountability partner you've
ever had because I get to know you on this level where I can
tell you this is what I see in you.
This is the passion that I see. These are the strengths that I
see. Here are the areas of growth.
Here's what we can refine and change.
And then I know some of what you've been through enough to
when you share an obstacle that you're encountering with me, I
(40:45):
can objectively say, is this in any way, shape or form related
to XYZ events in your life? Is your perspective of this
shifted or altered because of these things that you've shared
with me? And we can redirect that train
of thought. So I have witnessed, I had a GAL
and obviously will not share personal information, but I had
(41:06):
a GAL that had dealt with sexualassault from a family member and
hadn't told anybody for 25 years.
For 25 years she had never shared it with a soul and then
decided that she needed to tell somebody and she didn't want to
deal with a counselor. And her reasoning for that was
really just that she didn't wantto be diagnosed with things she
had kept. She lived a very successful
(41:26):
life. She actually has a very
professional, well-rounded and stable career that she's been in
for a long time. So she was afraid about the
stigmatism that came with counseling or the realm of
psychology. So she went throughout of a
coach and after working with herfor 18 months, a little over 18
months actually, she actually became a victims advocate.
(41:46):
So now she not only has her fulltime career, but she found her
voice. She's no longer afraid of
sharing her story. She boldly proclaims that
because she has overcome that and she's lived a successful
life where she's healed and it doesn't own her and she's not
afraid of it. She doesn't avoid the same
things that she wants avoid because of fear of being in that
(42:06):
same vulnerable situation again.And she can give other women the
power to find their voice pertaining to that specific
situation that she tragically had to endure, but it doesn't
define her anymore. So witnessing those people to
find their voice, regardless of what it is that they've been
through, is the most rewarding part of coaching.
(42:27):
Yeah, I think that's, I mean, the purpose of going through
anything is to help the next person going through it as well.
Otherwise it's just a waste. Like I, you know, that's how I
feel. It's like, I'm not going to
waste what I've been through andwhat I've learned and how I kind
of helped myself out of it. Or the, the, you know, the tools
(42:48):
in my toolbox, I'm gonna give them to you.
You can take them or leave them.Everybody's healing combination
is different. But if they help you, great.
I'd like to help you through it quicker than it took me to get
through. That was my biggest thing with
being a birth mom too, because when I entered into interviews
with adoptive parents, they giveyou this pathetic 1 sheet of get
(43:09):
to know you questions. And this is really not.
At the time I was like, OK, interview questions and I had
this mindset of interview and the formality of that.
And so it was inappropriate based on the context of what a
traditional interview is to ask some of these more invasive
questions is the word that I'm going to use.
But really adoption is not a transaction.
(43:30):
It's also not a jab application.It's the marriage of two
families specifically when pertaining to an open adoption.
And I was not given the tools that I needed to know that I was
being matched with the family that fit the needs of what my
view was of an open adoption formy daughter and I.
And shortly after, they ended upclosing the adoption and
breaking all of the promises that they had made, not only to
(43:52):
me, but to me and my daughter that I was making decisions on
behalf of in the realm of adoption.
And so I wrote a book and it's called Courageous
Considerations. And it is very, it's such a
short book because when you're going through something like
this, you don't need a homework assignment.
But it really is just a bullet point list of questions of now
that I know what I know and havebeen through, what I've been
(44:13):
through. These are the questions that
would have objectively helped meto identify if this was actually
a good fit for what my vision and definition of open adoption
was. If I had asked those questions,
never in a million years would Ihave been matched with her
current adoptive parents. And they're great people.
They're perfectly qualified based on home studies and income
demographics and background checks.
(44:35):
That was not what was important to me in the context of an open
adoption. Yeah, that's crazy.
I know When my adoption, when I finally did meet my birth
mother, she was like, oh, I toldhim I wanted you to go to this
kind of this kind of family and that kind of family.
And they told me that they that that you did and, you know, it
was just little things, you know, like religious, you know,
(44:57):
stuff or whatever, wasn't anything huge.
But still she was like, they told me that, you know, this is
the kind of family you went to and that wasn't the case.
So it happens all the time. So for someone listening right
now, who's carrying maybe a silent trauma or feeling
unheard, unseen, or unfixable, what would you say to them?
(45:21):
I would say from a faith perspective that all of those
things are alive from the enemy,and that the enemy wants you in
a place that is held by chains because it leaves you the
victim. And that my faith has been
instrumental in my healing journey.
(45:43):
So regardless of whether or not you identify with my specific
branch of faith, that you have to have a reason bigger than
yourself to break free of those chains.
And for me, it was Jesus Christ that broke those chains.
And I was absolutely no longer held down by any of the titles
that I had been given by the world or the enemy.
But that there is nothing that'sunfixable and it's liberal
(46:06):
steps. So if you're not ready to deal
with it yet, then make micro commitments to yourself where
it's not healing. Like that's a big word.
Healing is a big word when you've been through big things.
But it's self-care. And instead of saying I'm
unfixable, say I'm a survivor and I'm still healing and or I'm
(46:26):
a survivor and like I'm not broken, I'm fixing myself and,
and all of these little tiny verbiage changes.
Be aware of what you say to yourself because that self talk
track is going to instrumentallyincrease the rate of your own
relationship with yourself. It will help in how you view
(46:48):
yourself. If you view yourself as a
victim, you'll stay there. And if you even just change the
little things that you say to yourself throughout the day,
regardless of whether or not you're ready to work on the
bigger things right now, if you're still going to find
yourself happier throughout the day, you're no longer living in
this state of things just happened to me and I'm not in
control of it, but I am in control of how I perceive the
(47:11):
situation. And even if it's not ideal, and
even if I'm still hurting and recovering from things, I have
authority over how I view the situation.
Yeah, I think the over kind of overlaying umbrella of what
you're saying is just have some self compassion for the process
and where you're at, you know? Absolutely, yeah.
Have self compassion and find people that you can surround
(47:32):
yourself with that are distant from whatever it is that you're
healing from and that are a positive influence in your life.
And it doesn't mean that you have to share things with them,
but being around effective people will make you more
effective. Yeah, definitely.
So Sydney, what's next for you? What's happening and where can
we find you and all those things?
(47:53):
Yes. You can find me on my website,
www.coachcurtain.com. I am still passionate and doing
my coaching. We're finishing up the final
loose ends on the book that willbe out by the third week of
June. And I am still working on a
mobile application that I'm developing that uses AI for
(48:14):
individuals that can't afford therapy.
And so that is still a work in progress.
You can also find me on my social media handles, which all
of which are Coach under score, Sydney Curtin.
And I would love for people to reach out with questions,
comments, concerns, how this episode impacted them and what
they want to see us talk about next.
Yeah, awesome. Thanks so much for coming on
(48:36):
today and sharing a little bit about your story and telling us
about your coaching. It sounds super exciting.
Like I tell me when your websitecomes up because I want to.
Go check it out. Absolutely, the the website is
up the book website. The book is.
Oh, OK. The book website is not up yet.
Yeah, well, let us know when that book comes out so that we
can advertise it for you. But yeah, thanks for sharing
(48:59):
today. It's great.
Sydney, that was incredible. Thank you so much for bringing
depth, clarity, and a fresh perspective to what healing can
actually look like. The way you broke down the
science, paired it with compassion, and offered hope
through practical tools was justwhat so many people need to
(49:21):
hear. And conversations like this are
why I started this podcast to explore the approaches that
don't always get the spotlight, but that challenge the status
quo and truly change lives. And if you are a practitioner or
guide offering something outsidethe box, something that's
challenging the norm and actually helping people heal, I
(49:44):
want to hear from you. Send me an e-mail at
mindyourownkarma@gmail.com and let me know what you're doing,
why it works, and let's get you on the podcast.
And if you're ready to go deeperinto your own healing journey,
check out my website at Somatic Healing journeys.com.
(50:04):
These sessions are a powerful way to tap into what your body's
been trying to tell you all along and start releasing what's
been stuck without having to relive it.
Thanks for listening today, Karma crew.
Remember to take what you need and leave what you don't.
And always remember to mind yourown karma.
(50:26):
I'll see you next time.
Hey there, it's Melissa Brunetti, and welcome to the
Mind Your Own Karma podcast. Hey there, Karma crew, thanks
for joining me for this episode of Mind Your Own Karma.
Are you feeling stuck in your story, wondering if the pain
(00:24):
you've carried will ever lead tosomething more?
What if the very thing that broke you could be the key to
building your purpose? Today we're joined by Sydney
Curtin, an inspiring author, serial entrepreneur and
passionate advocate for the unheard.
Sydney has built a life and career around turning struggle
(00:45):
into strength and helping othersdo the same.
Whether through her business, her writing or her community
work, she's on a mission to empower people to reclaim their
stories and use them as fuel fortransformation.
If you are ready to stop shrinking, start healing, and
finally see your purpose as a source of power, then buckle up
(01:10):
Karma crew, because you might just be one Listen away from a
totally different life. Let's RIP off that bandage and
dive in. We are welcoming Sydney Curtin
to the show today. Hi, Sydney.
Hey, Melissa, good to see you again.
You too. So finally getting you on the
show. We've done a lot of talking and
(01:30):
a lot of brainstorming about what we're going to talk about
today. So I'm super excited about this.
But let's start by you just telling us, in your own words, a
little bit about yourself. Sure.
Well, you know, I've been calledan old soul a lot in my life and
I've been through a lot of things that people read about in
books or see and movies. And it's something that
(01:52):
previously I really allowed myself to be defined by.
And then I just decided that that wasn't the mark that I
wanted to leave and that wasn't what I wanted to be known for.
I have two kids that I raised now.
I'm a birth mother. As you know, my oldest daughter
was placed for adoption in 2019 at birth, and that in and of
(02:13):
itself has been a journey. But even then, I didn't want
that instance in my life to be what solely defined me.
And so I really set out to make a mark in a entrepreneurial
perspective and influencing and empowering others to be able to
find their voice in spite of everything that they've been
through, whatever that may be, and to turn their pain into
(02:34):
purpose with that mindset of notbeing a victim to your
circumstances, but allowing thatto become just part of your
story. 1 chapter of it that influences and sets the tone for
you becoming the victor of your story.
That's so awesome. That is exactly what I say too.
And we're going to talk about labels in a little bit, which is
one of my favorite subjects. So, but what originally sparked
(02:56):
your interest in understanding how, 'cause we're going to talk
about how the brain works. So what originally sparked your
interest in that in relation to trauma?
So when I was growing up I had amom that struggled with a drug
addiction and that led to her taking her life from that
addiction. I was the oldest and only girl.
(03:17):
I have two younger brothers and after that event occurred in our
family's life, being raised for a period of time by a single dad
prior to him remarrying. Being the only girl, I found
that my dad, by no fault of his own I might add, was projecting
a lot of his experiences with his wife, my mother, onto me.
(03:37):
And in order to make sense of these things that my mother
dealt with that he didn't reallyunderstand, that she hadn't been
formerly diagnosed or treated with anything outside of some
physical ailments that she dealtwith.
He found himself wanting to findanswers and labels so that he
could protect me. And I recognize now as an adult
(03:57):
and a mother that that was out of protection.
But as a child, that really shaped and influenced the way
that I viewed myself and allowedmyself to be treated myself,
talked track and what I believedI was capable of within the
limitations of those labels thatI had been given.
So that was my original interestwas I want to understand what
this is and how it works becauseI don't like the barrier that's
(04:20):
been set around me as a result of the stigmatism.
Yeah, I just recently watched a podcast with Mel Robbins.
She had like this brain surgeon on there, and he was saying to
make a list of what your childhood taught you about
yourself or what it told you about yourself, and are those
things still true? And I thought, wow, that is very
(04:41):
profound to list that and look at it and see what you still own
or what you're still carrying that you shouldn't be.
Yeah. And change the story if you want
to. And I thought that is such a
great tool to use. Yeah.
Very. So what were one or two of the
most important things that shaped the way that you view
(05:02):
healing from trauma? I love that question.
There's two things that I think were most instrumental, and
there's a lot, but the top 2 that I can think of is 1.
Healing from anything is not linear.
It's cyclical. It comes in waves.
And I just had this happen the other day on Mother's Day, this
(05:23):
last weekend, where I haven't ever, in these last recent
years, I should say in my adulthood, now that I am a
mother, found myself encountering waves of grief with
my own mom. I've healed a lot from that.
And it was my youngest brother who's 19 years old right now.
And so he's just recently graduated high school.
(05:43):
He's living on his own and he was four years old when my mom
took her own life. And so he doesn't have a lot of
cognitive memories of her. He also, as a result of that,
didn't suffer the same levels ofabuse that me and my middle
brother did because of the age gap, which is a blessing and a
curse because he finds himself in this position where he
doesn't really have any cognitive memories of the woman
(06:06):
that carried and birthed him. And he wants those.
And I went out of my way to I have photo albums of my mom.
So I went to try to find one of either her pregnant with him or
pictures with him just so she could have he could have
something of her. He has one picture with her
right now and unfortunately it'sa picture where she was really
(06:27):
unhealthy and very deep in the weeds in her addiction.
And even looking at that picturemakes me really sad for him
because I don't want that to be his cognitive memory of who she
was when she was healthy. And I found myself on Mother's
Day absolutely in tears and angry at her.
Like how could you do this to mybrothers?
You know what I mean? Like they didn't deserve this.
(06:48):
And this poor baby that I ended up taking on the role of
mothering both of my brothers, but specifically my youngest 1.
He doesn't have anything from you.
And I was mad. So knowing that healing is not
linear has been huge for me because I am now allow myself to
encounter and embrace and address those emotions in a way
(07:08):
that I used to not. I used to feel that I wasn't
allowed to have them because of how long it had been post
traumatic event. For example, if it had been X
amount of years, I felt like people in my life expected me to
have had moved on from the loss of my mom or other things that
I've been through in my life. Now as an adult that I
(07:29):
understand how trauma works, I don't find myself encountering
that same obstacle. The second thing that was really
profound for me in addressing healing from trauma was the
cognitive recognition that physical illness is different
than mental illness. And that might sound silly, but
if we were to put 10 people in aroom and expose them to the flu
(07:52):
virus, which hopefully nobody would ever do but you, you know,
X amount of people get the flu. We all have the same symptoms.
Just like back in COVID when youcould test for COVID, put it in
the machine that would isolate the actual virus particle and
tell you what it was that you were testing positive for.
We would all test for that same thing based on a set of results
(08:14):
that we have identified through these scientific methods with
mental illness. What we've done is we don't have
the same nose test or blood test.
It is identified objectively by a set of symptoms that the field
of psychology has isolated to say these are abnormal when
displayed in excess or in combination with these other
(08:36):
symptoms. And then we label that, well,
that's totally subjective, whereas scientific results are
more objective. That realization was really
empowering for me because it means that if it's subjective,
it can change. Yeah.
So you were saying that as an adult you were able to react
(08:58):
differently. How what helped you do that?
Or what what helped you work through trauma?
Through reacting differently to which part?
Just to any trauma that comes up.
So like you were saying for Mother's Day, what happened
there? You kind of let the emotions out
when you were saying that before, you kind of felt like I
(09:19):
couldn't have those emotions. So how do you work through them
now? It's, it's the, there's a couple
different ways. I suppose it depends on what it
is. I think is definitely a primary
part of that. Is it something where I'm
dealing with somebody that I'm having issues in a current
relationship? Is it someone that is deceased?
(09:42):
Is it something that I can control?
Is it something that I can't control?
And all of those objective identification and realization
of the reality of the situation helps me tap into the toolbox
that I have now as a coach and with my background in psychology
to decide what's the best way that I can help myself in this
(10:03):
situation. So with my mom being deceased
and those feelings of compassionI was having primarily to my
brother, for me in that moment, it was allowing myself first of
all to embrace those emotions because I haven't had to deal
with that for a long time. So I allowed myself the space to
be angry and sad for my brother.The second thing was calling him
(10:24):
and I was just honest with him and I told him, hey, I'm right
now looking through these photosand this is what I was trying to
do for you. And then I found myself
encountering this and I just wanted to share it with you
because I love you so much and you didn't deserve this.
Our family didn't deserve this. And she didn't mean to hurt us
either. This was an addiction that took
over her and it was not who she was.
(10:45):
It was something that she had. And that's not a reflection of
you, and it's not a reflection of me.
Yeah. I think one of the huge key
things that you were talking about right now was what control
do you have? Do you have control or do you
not have control? That's huge, I think in kind of
pinpointing those things and andkind of accepting it and seeing
(11:08):
what you can change and what youcan't change.
I talk a lot about controlling the controllables.
I firmly believe that we we don't control anything outside
of how we perceive the situationand what how we choose to react
to the situation. And they're still within that,
even though a lot of control anda lot of influence that we have
(11:30):
as individuals to positively change the outcome of the
situation or lower our expectation gap so that we are
not as disappointed when things don't go the way that we're
hoping. What do you say to people,
'cause I think a lot of people feel like letting the feels come
out over a trauma or something like you just had, you know,
(11:50):
come up. A lot of times it's scary
because they feel like I'm maintaining right now.
And if I take that lid off and Ilet myself start feeling that
could be pretty dangerous and scary.
So what do you say to people that that feel that?
I see you and I don't know what it is that you're going through,
(12:12):
but your feelings are justified,Your reality of the situation,
whatever it is that you went through that was real for you.
But reality of the situation andfeelings inherently are
different. And so 2 individuals or like for
example, just since we were justtalking about it, my brothers
(12:32):
and I all went through very similar things with my mom, but
we all experienced them very differently based on our age,
how she viewed us in her life atthe time, how we were treated at
the time. And that doesn't make my reality
more or less true than my youngest brother's reality.
(12:53):
So because of that, we have the ability not to change the
reality of the situation, but torecognize that those emotions
that we're feeling can also be trained to be more impactful in
a positive way in our life. And that doesn't take away from
what we went through. It just means that we have
control to reshape how we feel and interpret what it is that we
(13:16):
had to go through for our benefit and nobody else's.
It doesn't have to be to benefitsomebody else.
Some people feel like that that I just made inherently takes
away responsibility from the other person.
And that's not that's really true.
Sometimes we won't get that apology and forgiveness is not
something that we as individualshave the luxury always to wait
(13:37):
on. It's not for the person that
asks for forgiveness. And so for those out there that
are listening, that have somebody that they're waiting
for that phone call or that letter or whatever it is that
want that apology, sometimes youhave to make the conscious
decision to free them in your life for you and not for them.
Yeah, yeah. I don't like the word forgive.
(13:58):
I always say I released, I released them because I think
for me that word feels a little more comfortable and it makes me
feel like I'm not releasing you from what you did to me or I'm
not forgiving you for that, but I'm releasing you so that I can,
I can move on, you know, for myself.
So. Here's some truth with that.
One of them is the action of forgiveness to a lot of people
(14:20):
means that if I forgive you for this, I'm allowing you to have a
position potentially in my life again.
Whereas I release you from this means I'm releasing you from my
life and from any emotional responsibility that you've held
over me based on whatever it is that we went through.
And so that relief like this freeing tie from that.
(14:42):
And, and I relate to that. I felt that way about my mom for
a long time. I had to come back to a place
where I truly forgave her. And that may have been easier
for me just because she's not coming back.
So that's not a bridge that I have to cross in re entering
that relationship with her. But there's something to be said
regardless of if you get the apology or if you don't, or if
(15:02):
you're truly forgiving or if you're releasing and choosing to
not remember, which is differentthan forgetting, forgetting and
choosing to not remember. Even that are those are two
different things. So when you choose to release
and choose to not remember, meaning I haven't forgotten but
I am choosing to not allow this to impact my emotional state
(15:24):
anymore, then you allow yourselfthat freedom regardless of what
the other person chooses to do. Yeah.
You might not have control or have had control over what
happened to you, but you have control over how you react to it
now. Yeah.
Can you share a personal moment in your life when you realized
healing was actually possible? Maybe one of the first memories
(15:47):
of that. Yeah, that's another really good
one. I wish that this was universal
in a lot of ways. So when I realized healing was
possible, it was actually hard. This was this was tough.
And I would think that if peoplechoose to reflect on this
question, and that if they have had this moment, it might look
(16:07):
very similar to a lot of people,for me to recognize that healing
was possible. It took drawing boundaries with
the people that had influenced me to believe that I was
restricted to the labels that they had put on me.
For me, that was really difficult because the people
that were putting those labels on me were the most influential
(16:28):
people in my life in my adolescence.
So to draw boundaries and say that I'm restricting this
relationship for my well-being, 1 resulted in an escalation of
that relationship where it became hostile.
It was insulting. It was not no longer beneficial.
(16:49):
When you draw boundaries around people that want you to believe
that you're something, whether they genuinely believe that you
are that or you're not, it will first become worse before it is
better. So drawing those boundaries
around those people that had ledme to believe that I was
something that I did not identify with resulted first in
(17:13):
that feeling of loneliness and isolation.
And that was really, really hard.
I'm a very social person by nature and these were the people
that I had had in my life all ofmy life.
Saying I can no longer have a relationship with you for the
time, for the sake of my well-being was really hard.
And it stayed really hard for a while.
(17:33):
And then I was able to free myself from those labels because
I took the time to learn who I was without the influence of
anybody else. And it was the hardest thing
that I did, and it was also the most rewarding thing that I did.
That's awesome. I had the same kind of epiphany
as well about 15 years ago. Yeah.
(17:56):
Isolation. Yeah.
Well, yeah, I mean, I had to isolate to find myself, you
know, like I didn't know anything about myself at all and
any kind of influence or I grew up a lot with a lot of
expectations. And so I had to remove myself
(18:17):
from that and kind of away from the all those microscopes that
were looking at me and expecting, you know, my life to
go a certain way so that I couldjust look at myself kind of in
private, you know? Yeah.
And reflect. Otherwise I, I was like too
distracted with labels and things like that.
So. Yeah.
Well, and with our family unit too, my dad was a very, very
(18:39):
well known business figure in Northern, where our family is
still to this day in the Fort Collins history book.
And we have just an enormous amount of people in this town
that know who he is, that know who I am, who my brothers are.
But nobody knew what was going on behind the scenes with my
mom. And then when I became pregnant
(19:00):
at 20 and my dad didn't approve of who her biological father
was, he wanted to ostracize me so that it didn't impact his
image and his mutation. And there was just this weird
concept of like that Band-Aid effect of your personal success
and it somehow like you have to have it all together or
nothing's together. And I, I did like just like you
(19:22):
said, I had to get away from that to figure out what I
wanted. And do I even want these labels?
Do I care to be associated with all of the success or do I just
want to like move States and change my name at this point?
Right, right. So let's talk about retraining
the brain a little bit. Is that even possible?
And what does that process look like?
And I'm sure everybody's wondering, how long does it take
(19:43):
to do that? Sure, sure.
No, that's a really good question.
And it kind of goes back to thatconcept of how healing isn't
linear. So you think about retraining
the brain and retraining the brain from trauma has the exact
same types of skills that go into learning any new concept.
So if you want to learn a new language, if you want to learn a
(20:05):
new CRM, whatever it is that you're learning, your brain
needs the same types of influences based on how some
people are visual learners, somepeople are audio, some people
are show me how to do it and then I will replicate it.
The brain needs that same type of signalling in order to learn
or relearn anything. That being said.
(20:26):
Once you've learned something one way, it is significantly
more difficult to learn it another way.
The reason that this is more complex when it comes to trauma
is because when you're learning something that is not triggering
to the brain, you have an easiertime adapting to whatever it is
that you are are learning. Whereas when you are relearning
(20:50):
how to why are these neuron connections and you want to stop
this thought pattern and retrainthis thought pattern.
You kind of have to go through the weeds with these even bodily
symptoms that we can have as people who have been through
anything traumatic to get there.Whenever something traumatic
(21:11):
happens in our body, our amygdala is kind of the smoke
alarm of our brain and it sends off whenever it believes there
is danger. This danger could be real or
totally perceived. And when that smoke alarm goes
off, your prefrontal cortex, which is notorious for decision
making in the brain, goes offline.
(21:32):
So now you are in total flight or flight response.
From there, your amygdala sends a flight or flight signal to
your body indicating that your nervous system needs to generate
these hormones in excess of cortisol and adrenaline.
So it could be something very literally, and I've experienced
this personally, quite as small as a firework going off.
(21:55):
I have some triggers surroundingsudden unpredictable noises that
I still struggle with. So when I have those happen, I
have to acknowledge in myself that my brain is trying to keep
me safe. And that small pause right there
of instead of responding or reacting to the signal that my
(22:19):
body is sending me that I am in danger, I instead create an
intentional moment of my brain thinks I'm in danger.
Is this real or perceived pause allows me to redirect and
correct the course of action that my brain is trying to take.
Yeah. So how long does it take
normally to keep doing that for it to kind of rewire?
(22:44):
So it's the same way that all ofus have very different
personalities and learn at different rates.
This is based on a plethora of things like emotional quotia,
intellectual quotia, even just our adapt, adaptability to
circumstances and trials. Some of us are more resilient by
nature than others, and that doesn't make one of us more or
(23:05):
less resilient necessarily than the other.
It just means that we have different strengths and
weaknesses as individuals. So back to that concept of
healing not being linear but more cyclical.
I have found even now sometimes if I have that fire work go off
in near proximity and I'm not expecting it, I have a harder
(23:29):
time getting myself back on thattrack of OK, this is my brain
trying to protect me versus the 4th of July for example, when
you are expecting these loud andsudden noises and I want my kids
to experience what this was intended for.
I have a much more conscious train of thought of I am safe,
my body's reactions are not reality.
(23:50):
They're trying to protect me andthen I get to consciously choose
to engage with my kids. So I don't know that there is a
finish line to healing from these things necessarily.
I think that there are some individuals that have a
tremendous amount of success with them, diminishing anywhere
from six months to 12 months, depending on what it is that
(24:11):
they went through. I think that even those
individuals might say though, that randomly 510 years later, I
had something happen and it randomly flared up and I found
myself having to utilize the tools that I'd gained from
counseling or coaching to re engage with myself and assure
myself that I was safe in that moment.
Yeah. So you might have just answered
(24:33):
this, but what actually happens in the brain when someone's
triggered? And how can we learn to respond
differently? I know you were talking about
the hormones in fight or flight.You might have already explained
a lot of that, but. Yeah, yeah.
And they go hand in hand. So it's perfect follow up that
that is what happens though is those when those chemicals get
released, we have to take ourselves out of our nervous
(24:55):
system use utilize grounding activities to help our nervous
system recognize that we are safe.
Some of these things can be breathing activities, cold
plunges. You can even just do this with
just your face and then a bowl of ice.
It doesn't have to be a full body cold plunge.
Journaling can really help things like there are some EMDR
(25:17):
which is eye movement deactivation and or I'm sorry,
desensitizing and redirections where we can cue our body to
recognize like I'm engaged here,you don't have to be in fight or
flight anymore. So that if we don't get ahead of
it before that fight or flight response, we can work on
grounding ourselves to come backto a sense of hey, it's good,
(25:38):
we're safe. And those, those are really,
they're really crucial and helping redirect that thought
pattern too, especially when it maybe gets ahead of us initially
and we catch it what it feels like a little later than
initially. The the, when the prefrontal
(25:59):
cortex shuts off, you're turningit back on when you're engaging
in your nervous system. So when that goes offline and
your body is in that fight or flight and you make the
conscious awareness to cue yourself to come out of that
fight or flight, you're then re engaging in your prefrontal
cortex And the decision making of I'm consciously telling
myself that I am safe in this moment.
(26:21):
And then my encouragement from there is for like, don't address
it right then. Like if if you just went through
that trigger and your body came off of this adrenaline high or
this cortisol high and some people don't even know where it
comes from initially. Like I still every once in a
while will have this weird trigger where I'm like what the
heck just happened sort of thing.
Like you don't recognize all of them and that makes it even more
complicated. Just have a designated journal
(26:43):
and it doesn't. When I say journal, some people
are like man, I don't have the time to write 5 pages of what I
was feeling or like what happened, blah blah blah.
Write a sentence like this happened, then this happened and
then close it and allow yourselfto readdress that later.
Those little insights as to who you are can help you to identify
some of the things that your brain has intentionally buried
beneath your subconscious because it doesn't want to deal
(27:04):
with it. So what are some quick practical
things once someone like, they hear the firework and they, you
know, OK, ask the question, is that something really that I
need to be, you know, addressingwith this fight or flight
feeling or not? You know, is there like a
breathing exercise or something that might help kind of, you
(27:25):
know, calm down your nervous system after it gets jolted like
that? Is there something quick and
easy that people can practice? So I've heard all of the, I feel
like I've heard all of the things that psychology offers.
There's a couple that I've foundto be most effective personally.
And this comes from somebody that is very like I am very
(27:46):
easily sensory overloaded. Some people who are not that
have these triggers might have an easier time doing the
breathing methods. There's a variety of them, or
the five things you see, 4 things you can touch, so on and
so forth. Those aren't quite as effective
for me. I really need an like a nervous
system shock to come out of thatfight or flight response.
(28:09):
Holding an ice cube works reallywell for me.
Just plain ice cube over the sink or dunking my face in cold
water while I am box breathing. So box breathing is 4 seconds
in, four second hold, 4 second out, repeat.
And so I'll do 4 seconds in sharp hold for four seconds
under the water and four second out sharp while I'm exhaling.
(28:30):
When I come out from the ice water, this 100% resets my
nervous system 10 out of 10 times.
And so that system shock totallytakes you out, which is ironic
because the pulled water can actually send you in the light,
but it becomes rather than emotional.
So in one side of things, it's your brain that triggered that,
(28:50):
whereas in the ice water, it's aphysical sensation that's
triggering that. It's almost like matching
somebody's excitement level. Like if somebody's at A10 and
you're like at A5 and you're like chill out kind of thing,
and you instead meet them where they're at.
Now both of you can kind of deescalate and that path.
So that ice water with the box breathing of four in, four hold
(29:11):
4 out helps me a lot. Exercise is the other thing
that's been instrumental. Whatever it is that I've dealt
with in the day or the week or whatever trigger it is, if I can
find time, even if it's for one song where I do a brisk walk or
a brisk run and I only have 3 minutes to do it, that also
helps me instrumentally. OK, so a lot of people think
(29:34):
that healing means erasing the drama or just forgetting that it
ever happened. What do you think true healing
actually looks like? That's yeah, that's powerful
too. So trauma is like a a chapter in
a book. I kind of reference the book
thing. So when something traumatic
(29:55):
happens, a lot of people struggle with working through
that because they've built theiridentity around this trauma.
This was for me in a lot of wayswhere a lot of people even that
knew of me through a friend of afriend knew that I was the girl
that her dad does this and her mom committed suicide.
So that was who I was and I worethat for way, way, way too long.
(30:21):
And because that was how other people knew me to an extent, I
allowed that to become a large piece of my identity.
And that made it even harder to break the chains of that piece
of my story. But moving on from that chapter
didn't mean that I was erasing that chapter.
It just meant that I was ready for the next 1.
And trauma likewise doesn't haveto become our whole identity.
(30:45):
But it takes these obstacles in our lives sometimes to shape us
for who we need to become. And I needed some of those
trials in my life to prepare me for the next thing in my life.
And I don't know that I would have handled them with as much
grace as I had if I hadn't been through other losses and hard
things. And even back to that concept of
(31:08):
not forgiving, but choosing to forget that just because it
happened doesn't mean that I am intentionally avoiding it.
It doesn't mean that it's something that I don't talk
about. It means that if it's relevant,
this is a part of who I am, but it no longer defines me, and I'm
free from that part of my identity.
I am who I am without what I've been through.
(31:30):
Yeah, powerful. And, you know, there's people
that I feel like, I don't know if I want to say they want to
stay stuck, but it's very comfortable.
You know, it becomes a comfortable part of them.
And just being in that pain is familiar.
And it can be frightful to let it go.
(31:51):
What would you say to someone who's still clinging to that
trauma or that identity as a victim?
When you move out of a house, you don't take the house with
you. You just take your belongings
with you. And the reason that I use that
analogy is because when we movedinto the house that we owned,
(32:12):
when my mom did what she did when she was no longer around,
and then later years on, my dad sold that house, I had a really,
really hard time letting go of that house.
But it was never the house. It was the memories that were
associated in that house that was a part of me that I still
(32:32):
was unwilling to let go of. So with the same book analogy,
when it's hard to let go of what's happened to you, trauma
is familiar because we're not allowing ourselves to change the
reality of the feelings that we're having regarding that.
So it doesn't mean that it's true.
Feelings aren't true. And that's hard to hear because
(32:53):
a lot of people are like, will justify why it is that they're
hanging on to trauma. And I deal with this with my
clients all the time where there's like this, this pressing
reason, I can't give you this. I can't give you this because
I'm not ready to let it go. OK, Well, you not being ready to
let it go is different than it'sstill holding influence in your
life, right? Like you're choosing now to let
(33:14):
it affect you because the reality of the situation here
today is that it doesn't have tounless you want it to.
So when you move out of a house,you can take things that are
crucial to you that are a part of who you are, but you can
leave the house. And it's the same thing with
moving on from trauma. You don't have to take all this
with you, especially if it was ahouse built on sand.
(33:36):
You can go build a house with a solid foundation and still have
the pictures and the decor and the memories and it doesn't have
to influence your structure. Yeah, so let's talk about labels
a little bit. One of my favorite subjects, how
can someone begin to shift from the labels that they carry,
(33:57):
especially when those labels arekind of holding them back from
in the healing process? Yeah, this was me for so long.
So the label that I was given just right across the forehead
was borderline personality disorder.
And it was what my mom had been diagnosed with past her death.
So not while she was alive. It was what she had been
(34:17):
diagnosed with when she wasn't even around.
So it was other people's subjective opinion about what
she dealt with that somebody waslike, well, she probably dealt
with either severe bipolar or borderline.
So then when I had these symptoms in my adolescence,
because I was 13 when my mom passed away.
And so of course, I'm going through all of this like normal
puberty stuff, normal teenage stuff, on top of the fact that I
(34:39):
don't have a mother figure in mylife to show me or teach me what
it means to be a woman, and an effective one at that.
So when I was labeled with borderline, I really allowed
that to inhibit what I was capable of as an individual.
Because if I struggle with impulsivity and behavioral
control and emotional regulation, then you can't get
mad at me for when I lash out inthese ways.
(35:02):
Because you have told me that I have this.
Well, that no longer served me when I became a mother because
then it was turned on me. And that is one of the ways that
I was very heavily influenced and coerced into choosing
adoption was you cannot be a mother because you have
borderline and look at what yourmother did.
So you will just rinse and repeat the cycle.
(35:23):
And that's when I decided I don't have this.
I've been using this as an excuse because you've allowed me
to use it as an excuse. And that ownership of this is my
own behavior that I am capable of correcting was incredibly
empowering. It also took me being willing to
admit that I was wrong. And a lot of the things that I
(35:45):
had been doing for so many yearsthat I had allowed myself to do
because of the grace that I was given.
It wasn't even grace, though I shouldn't even say that it was.
I was allowing myself to do it because everybody justified my
behavior based on this label. So it was like, you know, be
patient with her. She has XYZ.
It just wasn't true. And so unfortunately, you're
(36:05):
only pregnant for nine months. And I was heavily influenced and
cohorts to choose adoption for my daughter, which is probably
the single biggest regret of my entire life.
And when that happened, I was bound and determined to prove
that come hell or high water, I was not my mom, I was not
borderline, and I was in controlof my behaviors and the
(36:26):
trajectory of my life. And I spent the next several
years just like working on me and figuring out who I was and
learning emotional regulation skills and healing from the
things that I was just previously unwilling to address.
And then I sat down like three years later with a psychiatrist.
(36:46):
And before I sat down with him, I told the gal that schedules
his appointments do not pull anymedical records.
I do not want him talking to me with any past influence of what
my previous diagnosis have been.And when I sat down with him, we
sat down and talked and did his normal intake where they
objectively tell you based on what you are demonstrating
symptom wise in your life, what they believe that you may be
(37:08):
dealing with. And he told me he was like
normally I'm able to pull from past records so that I have some
sort of basis of what I'm going off of.
But based on our conversation today, the only thing that I
would even remotely consider diagnosing you with would be
ADHD. He said you think very quick
process very quickly and you canaccomplish a lot based on some
(37:30):
of those rushes of dopamine chases that you hit.
But I see nothing else. And even with everything that
you've been on, like been through as an individual, I
wouldn't staple you with anything.
I don't think that you need anything other than regular
exercise and maybe some Adderall.
Like it was just like this. It was almost humorous, like to
(37:51):
hear this being like, you talk fast, you think fast, that's why
you're so successful in this, these business avenues that
you've pursued and achieved and you're free.
That's all that I heard. And so I had him pull it up.
And when he pulled it up after we had had our conversation, I
was like, now I want you to lookat what I've previously been
diagnosed with. And he was like, I completely
(38:11):
disagree with this and here's why.
And he gave me his objective opinion about why I did not meet
the criteria for borderline personality disorder with
extensive examples of what he had witnessed in previous
clients that he would label withborderline personality disorder.
And he deleted it from my medical records.
And since that day, I've never, ever, ever outside of the
(38:32):
context of freeing people from labels shared or identified as
somebody who has ever struggled with borderline.
Yeah, how freeing was that? It was incredible and it was so
needed because that was the I allowed myself to live in the
parameters of individuals who had borderline personality
disorder. You're told that you're
restricted to these limitations and it's not just for
(38:54):
borderline, I mean individuals with bipolar, schizophrenia,
like anything that borders that not neurotic or psychotic
disorder line. You're told that from a
professional standpoint that youare statistically more likely to
have a lesser level of professional success than the
average individual based on these symptoms that you struggle
with when we as individuals are in complete control of changing
(39:17):
those. But nobody wants to take
responsibility for their actionsbecause it's safer to live in
the trauma of what we've been through.
What does it take to be able to objectively say I am not what
I've been through and I will no longer allow this to define me?
Yeah, I think you have to be like, I would say you have to be
sick and tired of feeling sick and tired to pull yourself up
(39:41):
out of there. Yeah, you got to be done.
So your mission is to help people reclaim their voice and
their hope. How do you do that through your
coaching? And what kind of transformations
have you witnessed in some of your clients?
I that's, so it's so exciting totalk about this because I am not
a coach for everybody. And I usually tell people that
(40:02):
in my intake call. I'm going to be the person
that's willing to objectively see your strengths and your
weaknesses as an individual. And I will not allow you to live
in that victim mentality. So if you're comfortable in your
trauma, I am not a good fit for you.
And if you're ready to take control of the things that have
previously defined you, then I promise you I will be the most
(40:23):
reliable and effective accountability partner you've
ever had because I get to know you on this level where I can
tell you this is what I see in you.
This is the passion that I see. These are the strengths that I
see. Here are the areas of growth.
Here's what we can refine and change.
And then I know some of what you've been through enough to
when you share an obstacle that you're encountering with me, I
(40:45):
can objectively say, is this in any way, shape or form related
to XYZ events in your life? Is your perspective of this
shifted or altered because of these things that you've shared
with me? And we can redirect that train
of thought. So I have witnessed, I had a GAL
and obviously will not share personal information, but I had
(41:06):
a GAL that had dealt with sexualassault from a family member and
hadn't told anybody for 25 years.
For 25 years she had never shared it with a soul and then
decided that she needed to tell somebody and she didn't want to
deal with a counselor. And her reasoning for that was
really just that she didn't wantto be diagnosed with things she
had kept. She lived a very successful
(41:26):
life. She actually has a very
professional, well-rounded and stable career that she's been in
for a long time. So she was afraid about the
stigmatism that came with counseling or the realm of
psychology. So she went throughout of a
coach and after working with herfor 18 months, a little over 18
months actually, she actually became a victims advocate.
(41:46):
So now she not only has her fulltime career, but she found her
voice. She's no longer afraid of
sharing her story. She boldly proclaims that
because she has overcome that and she's lived a successful
life where she's healed and it doesn't own her and she's not
afraid of it. She doesn't avoid the same
things that she wants avoid because of fear of being in that
(42:06):
same vulnerable situation again.And she can give other women the
power to find their voice pertaining to that specific
situation that she tragically had to endure, but it doesn't
define her anymore. So witnessing those people to
find their voice, regardless of what it is that they've been
through, is the most rewarding part of coaching.
(42:27):
Yeah, I think that's, I mean, the purpose of going through
anything is to help the next person going through it as well.
Otherwise it's just a waste. Like I, you know, that's how I
feel. It's like, I'm not going to
waste what I've been through andwhat I've learned and how I kind
of helped myself out of it. Or the, the, you know, the tools
(42:48):
in my toolbox, I'm gonna give them to you.
You can take them or leave them.Everybody's healing combination
is different. But if they help you, great.
I'd like to help you through it quicker than it took me to get
through. That was my biggest thing with
being a birth mom too, because when I entered into interviews
with adoptive parents, they giveyou this pathetic 1 sheet of get
(43:09):
to know you questions. And this is really not.
At the time I was like, OK, interview questions and I had
this mindset of interview and the formality of that.
And so it was inappropriate based on the context of what a
traditional interview is to ask some of these more invasive
questions is the word that I'm going to use.
But really adoption is not a transaction.
(43:30):
It's also not a jab application.It's the marriage of two
families specifically when pertaining to an open adoption.
And I was not given the tools that I needed to know that I was
being matched with the family that fit the needs of what my
view was of an open adoption formy daughter and I.
And shortly after, they ended upclosing the adoption and
breaking all of the promises that they had made, not only to
(43:52):
me, but to me and my daughter that I was making decisions on
behalf of in the realm of adoption.
And so I wrote a book and it's called Courageous
Considerations. And it is very, it's such a
short book because when you're going through something like
this, you don't need a homework assignment.
But it really is just a bullet point list of questions of now
that I know what I know and havebeen through, what I've been
(44:13):
through. These are the questions that
would have objectively helped meto identify if this was actually
a good fit for what my vision and definition of open adoption
was. If I had asked those questions,
never in a million years would Ihave been matched with her
current adoptive parents. And they're great people.
They're perfectly qualified based on home studies and income
demographics and background checks.
(44:35):
That was not what was important to me in the context of an open
adoption. Yeah, that's crazy.
I know When my adoption, when I finally did meet my birth
mother, she was like, oh, I toldhim I wanted you to go to this
kind of this kind of family and that kind of family.
And they told me that they that that you did and, you know, it
was just little things, you know, like religious, you know,
(44:57):
stuff or whatever, wasn't anything huge.
But still she was like, they told me that, you know, this is
the kind of family you went to and that wasn't the case.
So it happens all the time. So for someone listening right
now, who's carrying maybe a silent trauma or feeling
unheard, unseen, or unfixable, what would you say to them?
(45:21):
I would say from a faith perspective that all of those
things are alive from the enemy,and that the enemy wants you in
a place that is held by chains because it leaves you the
victim. And that my faith has been
instrumental in my healing journey.
(45:43):
So regardless of whether or not you identify with my specific
branch of faith, that you have to have a reason bigger than
yourself to break free of those chains.
And for me, it was Jesus Christ that broke those chains.
And I was absolutely no longer held down by any of the titles
that I had been given by the world or the enemy.
But that there is nothing that'sunfixable and it's liberal
(46:06):
steps. So if you're not ready to deal
with it yet, then make micro commitments to yourself where
it's not healing. Like that's a big word.
Healing is a big word when you've been through big things.
But it's self-care. And instead of saying I'm
unfixable, say I'm a survivor and I'm still healing and or I'm
(46:26):
a survivor and like I'm not broken, I'm fixing myself and,
and all of these little tiny verbiage changes.
Be aware of what you say to yourself because that self talk
track is going to instrumentallyincrease the rate of your own
relationship with yourself. It will help in how you view
(46:48):
yourself. If you view yourself as a
victim, you'll stay there. And if you even just change the
little things that you say to yourself throughout the day,
regardless of whether or not you're ready to work on the
bigger things right now, if you're still going to find
yourself happier throughout the day, you're no longer living in
this state of things just happened to me and I'm not in
control of it, but I am in control of how I perceive the
(47:11):
situation. And even if it's not ideal, and
even if I'm still hurting and recovering from things, I have
authority over how I view the situation.
Yeah, I think the over kind of overlaying umbrella of what
you're saying is just have some self compassion for the process
and where you're at, you know? Absolutely, yeah.
Have self compassion and find people that you can surround
(47:32):
yourself with that are distant from whatever it is that you're
healing from and that are a positive influence in your life.
And it doesn't mean that you have to share things with them,
but being around effective people will make you more
effective. Yeah, definitely.
So Sydney, what's next for you? What's happening and where can
we find you and all those things?
(47:53):
Yes. You can find me on my website,
www.coachcurtain.com. I am still passionate and doing
my coaching. We're finishing up the final
loose ends on the book that willbe out by the third week of
June. And I am still working on a
mobile application that I'm developing that uses AI for
(48:14):
individuals that can't afford therapy.
And so that is still a work in progress.
You can also find me on my social media handles, which all
of which are Coach under score, Sydney Curtin.
And I would love for people to reach out with questions,
comments, concerns, how this episode impacted them and what
they want to see us talk about next.
Yeah, awesome. Thanks so much for coming on
(48:36):
today and sharing a little bit about your story and telling us
about your coaching. It sounds super exciting.
Like I tell me when your websitecomes up because I want to.
Go check it out. Absolutely, the the website is
up the book website. The book is.
Oh, OK. The book website is not up yet.
Yeah, well, let us know when that book comes out so that we
can advertise it for you. But yeah, thanks for sharing
(48:59):
today. It's great.
Sydney, that was incredible. Thank you so much for bringing
depth, clarity, and a fresh perspective to what healing can
actually look like. The way you broke down the
science, paired it with compassion, and offered hope
through practical tools was justwhat so many people need to
(49:21):
hear. And conversations like this are
why I started this podcast to explore the approaches that
don't always get the spotlight, but that challenge the status
quo and truly change lives. And if you are a practitioner or
guide offering something outsidethe box, something that's
challenging the norm and actually helping people heal, I
(49:44):
want to hear from you. Send me an e-mail at
mindyourownkarma@gmail.com and let me know what you're doing,
why it works, and let's get you on the podcast.
And if you're ready to go deeperinto your own healing journey,
check out my website at Somatic Healing journeys.com.
(50:04):
These sessions are a powerful way to tap into what your body's
been trying to tell you all along and start releasing what's
been stuck without having to relive it.
Thanks for listening today, Karma crew.
Remember to take what you need and leave what you don't.
And always remember to mind yourown karma.
(50:26):
I'll see you next time.
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