August 31, 2025 • 29 mins
Episode VBB 344 features Certified Mental Health and Trauma Recovery Life Coach Teresa Ford. Her story samples her life journey as a child raised by emotionally immature and emotionally unavailable parents who left her unprepared to live an empowered life. Ironically, it was the death of a parent — her mother — that triggered Teresa to explore the keys to healing from generational trauma. On her personal journey, Teresa learned to dismantle codependency, parentification, anxiety, depression, grief, loss, emotional abandonment, and debilitating people pleasing. Teresa now coaches women on taking an intentional stand against playing small, dimming their light, or waiting for permission to thrive and to embrace the fullest expression of their power and purpose. https://www.teresaford.life/about
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Episode Transcript
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Virgin, Beauty, Bitch, podcast (00:00):
inspiring women to overcome social stereotypes and share unique
(00:10):
life experiences without fear of being defiantly different.
Your hosts, Christopher and Heather. Let's talk, shall we!
This is a very, very unique situation.
We had a guest on last week and we had such a fantastic conversation.
And then technology got the best of us.
(00:32):
So I think the universe was saying you have to talk to her again.
And our guest was Certified Mental Health and Trauma Recovery Life Coach Teresa Ford.
And we want to welcome you back, Teresa, to Virgin Beauty, bitch.
Thank you.
I'm glad to be here.
I mean, getting to talk with you twice is not a hard job.
(00:53):
I love it.
So I started off last time with a quote from your website, which I think is so powerful.
I always say you shouldn't hire a coach who hasn't done what you are trying to do.
And that quote speaks to me as in where your life has been and what experience has taken
(01:17):
you to get to this point where you can coach others.
And you maybe walk us through what that foundation has been like for you in your life.
Yeah, I think book learning takes you so far, but experience goes very deep.
So when I'm working with my clients, it comes from a place of starting from the beginning.
(01:39):
My childhood was, it was full of emotional chaos.
And it happened because my parents were emotionally immature and emotionally unavailable.
There's an absence of love.
It's a profound absence of love when that happens.
There's a lot of managerial stuff that's going on, but it's not actually the nurturing that
(02:03):
we need as children.
So it was more of a high expectation that we would function on an adult level and then
we were held responsible for the way our parents felt.
So that really puts you on a different path because you're in this new space of trying to make
mom and dad feel better all the time.
And that was an impossible task because it wasn't our job to do that.
(02:25):
That is just heartbreaking to start off life at a deficit, really.
You know, I look at it as they were the perfect parents for me for what I needed to do in
this world and that is to overcome the darkness and stand in the light.
(02:45):
And that's what we're all doing.
We're all alchemists.
We need to find those things that are still bothering us now.
They still cause trouble.
We trip over ourselves in life.
We're in a trauma loop.
We keep doing the same things over and over, hoping things will change.
That's darkness.
That's just plain old pain and struggle.
But if we understand that everything that has happened to us was actually happening for
(03:10):
us so that we could take what we didn't want and turn it into something we do want, it changes
everything because that's how we sort of rise up out of the ashes, right?
We become the Phoenix.
Comes into light.
How do we, okay?
Most of us, you're young when this is all going on.
You don't have life experience.
(03:31):
You don't have wisdom to make the connections to these dots.
Like you say, take your darkness and your darkness is what it is.
That sets you up for lightness.
What happened to you that you made those connections and you turned what was dark for you into something
that challenged you to be the best you can be?
That's a great question.
(03:53):
I don't know that I really recognized anything was wrong.
I just knew that I was spending a lot of time looking for love and looking for ways to get
validated, looking like I was just trying really, really hard.
And I think that's one of the key signs for many of us is that we're trying really hard
(04:13):
to be successful or to get validation or to find love and get someone else to love us
so we can feel better.
And those are key indicators.
But I didn't recognize that the story that I carried with me from my childhood was you
can try all you want and you're still not going to be lovable enough.
So my first marriage, I married a good guy and I was a good girl.
(04:38):
And so it was a good match.
But the actual match energetically subconsciously, let me make this point that 5% of our brain
is conscious thought.
95% is unconscious thought.
So the unconscious stories that we take into our lives are just revealed in the relationships,
(05:01):
especially the relationships that we form.
And so the relationship that I formed was with somebody that could not attach to me.
He could not connect to me.
And so he had an avoidant attachment style, which made me an anxious attachment style.
I was wondering why he couldn't love me because it was the same story that I carried with me
(05:22):
from my mom that she couldn't love me.
So that was 26 years of trying, trying, trying, and figuring out codependency and these trauma
wounds that he had with his mom and that I had with my mom.
And we had all these wounds, but we didn't really know what it was.
It wasn't actually until I discovered that I just couldn't stay in the marriage anymore
(05:45):
because I needed to grow and get beyond the trauma loop.
And he was comfortable in the trauma loop.
And so that was the, that was kind of the beginning of the end for me to discover on my
journey of healing from childhood wounds that there was a deficit of love and absence
of understanding that I already was the love that I didn't have to try to get the love.
(06:10):
Does that make sense?
So what was that process like for you when you transition from seeking this external
validation, trying to find that I am enough through other people to what you just focused
in on that it's all within you are the love you are already enough?
What was that transition process like there?
(06:30):
And was there a catalyst moment for you?
Oh, there most certainly was.
When your entire life gets dismantled like all the things that like I was in fitness, I
was, you know, a personal trainer specializing in hormonal fat loss.
I was a mother of five and there was, there came this moment where it started actually with
(06:53):
my mother's death.
And so she passed away in May of 2010.
And then two months later, I lost my energy.
Like I had no more than two hours of energy a day.
And I couldn't figure out what that was and I developed all these food allergies and, you
know, and so I, you know, lost my health.
And then I wasn't able to keep working.
(07:13):
So I lost my clients.
I was having a faith crisis in the middle of all that wondering who I was the God.
And then also I knew I had to address my marriage that it just, I couldn't stay in the trauma loop
anymore.
So when you dismantle everything that you've ever known to be who you are, right, those were
(07:35):
my identities, you know, we all have identities of who we are to everybody else.
When you strip all that away, you end up, oh, flat on your back crying.
It's a mess, you know, wondering, who am I and what am I doing here?
When you start to ask those really, really deep questions, you're going to get some really,
(07:56):
really deep answers and you need to buckle up.
It's because the answer that you end up getting is you don't have to try and be anything.
You already are enough.
Like, I realized that from the moment I was born that everyone in the room was like, is
she breathing?
Yes.
(08:17):
Yay.
Like the whole, you know, the crowd erupts.
She's breathing.
And that's where our value lies.
It doesn't get any better or worse throughout life.
The fact is that we are.
We are here.
We're viable.
We're living human beings.
And when you realize that you don't have to be anything to anybody else, then you can
(08:40):
start to actually unfold all your gifts and talents for the right reasons.
We're not efforting and trying and looking for validation and, you know, fearing judgment
and criticism, we're just in this really unique, peaceful space of being unapologetically
yourself.
When you deal with and have a client that comes to you with all of this baggage, like,
(09:07):
you're just trying to reduce them back to the simplest thing.
How do you dismantle all of what they have known as their identity, their whole life?
It's trying so hard.
A really good question.
Again, we're just, we're pulling everything back.
Who are you before you were conditioned to believe you are who you are now?
(09:29):
Like comprehend that one.
If you just take all the conditioning, like our parents did the best they could with what
they had to work with, but they were just trying to sift and sort through their own pain,
their own fears, their own worries about am I giving my child enough or am I enough to
give anything to my child?
They were trying to guide us with that kind of conditioning and if we could just pull it
(09:55):
all away.
It's like, okay, but who are you without all that stuff?
Without all those false beliefs that make us worry and look out at the world with fearful
eyes.
Who is that person, you know, and what it really boils down to is we're just love and
light.
That's it.
Like it's not more than that.
It's not less than that.
It's just love and light.
(10:16):
The eternal, infinite wisdom, infinite intelligence, infinite emotional connection that we
are.
So when we scale that back, then we have to look at everything else because false beliefs
that we think are true are making us feel less than.
(10:37):
So negative emotion is on the side of false beliefs that are not true, but we're acting
as if they are positive emotions are the love and light that we are.
Those are those hold a lot of truth.
So I use truth, love and light synonymously.
So before operating in truth and you know, you hear out there in the world my truth.
(11:00):
This is my truth.
It's like, well, you can have your truth because if, you know, if you think it's true, you're
right.
And if you think it's not true, you're right.
So either way, you're right.
But if it's not working for you, it's not serving you well, it's not helping you grow.
If it's not, you know, helping you with your expansion because that's the only reason we're
here is for that expansion, that further light knowledge that we came here to get.
(11:26):
Right.
If we're not doing that, then our belief systems that we think are true, your truth is
not actually helping you because it's, it's got an absence of truth to it.
It has an absence of love, love, truth, light, they're all the same.
So if there's an absence of love because it's a fear-based thought, we're going to struggle.
(11:48):
It doesn't get better.
And that's how we know it's like, man, I keep doing the same thing over and over and over.
And what's going on?
It's because you're operating from a false belief that you think it's true.
I'm interested to know your take on, I mean, something that you just so eloquently said
was, you know, life being, part of life being an exploration of understanding, you know,
(12:13):
these elements.
And I'm wondering what you think the role is of the wide spectrum of emotions that humans
have to play with.
So you know, what I think of what it means to be human and when people fall into fear-based
decision-making or sadness or, I mean, the hundreds of emotions that people can feel, what role
(12:39):
do you think that plays in human exploration of self?
It's, it's where your growth lies.
It's just, it's everything.
So you've never had an emotion you can't name.
We were given these emotions to experience them because there's, there's got to be opposition
and all things.
That's how we grow.
We experience the contrast.
We know what we don't want.
(13:00):
And then our job is to recognize what we don't want and move into what we do want.
Now the way we recognize what we don't want is the way it makes us feel.
That's the very first thing that we'll notice because like I mentioned before, 5% of your brain
is conscious.
The rest is, is in your body.
You've done something over and over.
You've thought a thought that has put the emotion in your body so many times.
(13:23):
It's like driving the car, but you don't remember going from point A to point B because
you just, you don't have to remember the blinkers and the pedals and the steering wheel and
the turn.
We don't have to remember all of that anymore because we've done it so many times.
It's in the body.
We're just driving, right?
And we can think about the grocery list and we can think about the other things.
That's how we've trained our body.
That was what our childhood was made of was all the practicing of thoughts based on the
(13:48):
information coming in.
And we created this database that just operates automatically without our thought being in
the conscious mind.
So if it's locked in the body, your body is just going to respond without the conscious brain
recognizing that it started with a thought.
The thought was either assigned to fear or love on some level.
(14:10):
It could be in a high grade fear or it could have been a low grade fear, same with love,
right?
Or, you know, on the low scales more towards neutral between love and fear.
It could be right in there.
But most of the time we're not like, whoa, I can think about the thoughts I'm thinking
about.
What was I think about?
Gee, I don't know because it's just going through your brain.
(14:30):
You know, you're having, you know, 100 every nanosecond and we're just not aware of what
we're thinking about.
But it is 100% linked to the conditioning of our childhood and what we were taught to
think about.
So when you can find the emotions and the most powerful emotions we have are triggers.
We call them triggers.
(14:51):
It's when your nervous system has been activated.
We can just, they're just tapping on our shoulders going, you're irritated again.
You're feeling bitter.
You know, they got a little anger under there.
Those are your greatest teachers because if you can figure out the thoughts you were thinking
about before that emotion tapped you on the shoulders and like, man, that person is so
(15:16):
annoying to you, right?
It's just whispering to you that you're annoyed again.
If you can take annoyance and go, wait, what?
Oh, what was I thinking about that person?
Now here's what's interesting.
This is, this just came in.
So undiluted love is the absence of judgment.
(15:38):
If we're having a thought that triggers something in the body that has a sense of flavoring
or a hint of the past, it's going to come up as though it is a hint of the past.
It's going to come up as though it is a threat to you.
And so that's why we have the negative emotion.
This is a threat to me.
That threat has judgment added to it because without judgment undiluted love is just unconditional
(16:05):
love.
It's like, you don't have to change so I can be happy.
You can be you.
I can be me.
We're not divided.
We're all connected.
Like it would change everything in our viewpoints on political events or the economy or our bank
account or anything that makes us get a little crazy in the emotional scale.
(16:27):
If there was no judgment about whether it was right or wrong, good or bad, we could be
at peace.
But if there's negative emotion there, it is trying to get your attention so you can
go back and find that part of you that got lost in the past in a loop of false beliefs or
(16:48):
the lack of love, lack of light, lack of truth.
Does that make sense?
So if I know this goes really, really deep, but if you're going into your past, you may
not have a memory, but your nervous system remembers it.
That's why it came up to your attention.
Taped you on the shoulders like this is irritating us.
This is frustrating us.
(17:10):
This makes us sad.
This makes us scared.
Our fear is high.
If we can tap into that, we can go back and grab that little part of us that was a child
in our conditioning, tucker under our arm and just say, you're with me now.
You're safe.
And that is the nervous system work that you changing how your body feels and responds
(17:31):
to certain things that are going on in your environment.
And if it activates your nervous system, it's going to bring in those negative emotions.
Those negative emotions are little pieces of you that got lost in the past.
We bring you into the present and we do nervous system work to help you feel safe and secure
in the here and now because you're not back there anymore.
(17:51):
It's just your body is a database of everything that's ever happened.
It's not programmed to know what's coming.
It hasn't been into the future yet.
Does that?
That was kind of a roundabout way of answering that.
There's so much to unpack there.
Did it bring up questions for you?
Well, I was going to say that that's some of the most powerful therapy that I've ever
(18:13):
done is a therapist who helped me go back into specific memories as a child.
And then I became the parent that I needed at the time in the ways that I needed it.
And that kind of healing in my nervous system that I bring to present day, it's been some
of the most helpful therapy I've done to date.
(18:35):
So I really resonate with what you're saying.
Yeah, it actually puts the power back in your court.
Like a lot of people feel powerless.
They feel helpless to change the environment that there is, things that aren't making them
happy.
And if you can, if you can tap into your nervous system and whenever I say nervous system,
I tap right here, I just below my collarbone.
(18:56):
Have you ever done the EFD tapping?
Yeah, it's all the emotional freedom tapping.
It just helps you get in touch with little you, the little you that got stuck in the past
before your little brain was developed enough to handle an adult situation that you were
not being offered guidance for.
Right?
So you tap here, you're like, hey, hey, whatever that is, this irritating you right now, it's
(19:22):
going to be okay because you're not back there.
I'm right here.
I'm with you.
It's the adult you, the adult brain that can help the little underdeveloped brain grow
up.
She can now develop into a more deliberately and intentional adult.
Does that make sense?
(19:42):
So do you get, you're getting all those little pieces that got left behind of you and bring
them into the wholeness of who you are?
This makes me kind of sad that how many years that we spent being educated in our childhood
never are we given any of these directions about how to be the best of what we are meant
(20:06):
to be and how to walk that path.
So the things that we learn in school to help us in an economic world, how do we handle
those things through the gifts that we have naturally that nature has given us?
Yeah, I appreciate that, Chris, you know, because it does feel a little bit like time has
been lost if we had known these things back then.
(20:29):
We could have been so much better now.
But I truly am a big believer in everything happens in its perfect timing that we are not
introduced to these ideas until we're ready to receive them.
So like you Heather, you're younger than I am.
I received these just a couple of years ago, right?
You received them before you got to my age.
(20:51):
So even that idea of being able to grab it when you hear it and if it resonates, it's
the right timing for you.
So also, our gifts and talents are there.
And if we're busy just swinging swords and control zillas, just burning down buildings
(21:12):
as she's trying to navigate life, we're going to be a little bit distracted, kind of busy
and we're not really going to get to the good stuff of how we can empower ourselves and feel
real peace and harmony with the flow of life, right?
We're not going to get into that yet if we're out there being super distracted.
But the gifts and talents are there.
(21:33):
And as soon as we remove the distraction, those gifts and talents just come to the surface
where we actually can rise to the full potential.
I call it how we fulfill the measure of our creation.
Like we were all created for our purpose, we're here to help lift each other up, right?
And so if you stay there, it's in that low place, that low frequency of my life sucks and
(21:58):
I didn't find out about this stuff until too late in life.
And those things that bring our vibration down, that's just you waiting for you to step
up and get behind yourself, get full support from yourself and give yourself permission
to get rid of those unhelpful stories and then take this new information and run with
(22:23):
it.
Because it's not hard stuff to figure out.
It makes so much sense.
The thoughts that we have trigger the nervous system, right, at the base of your school and
that nervous system sends hormonal signals out throughout the body and the bodies receiving
signals that this is safe or this is not safe.
If it's not safe, meaning we feel like there's a chance of abandonment or rejection or criticism
(22:48):
or judgment, if we're sensing that something like that is going to harm us, there's probably
a part of our nervous system that remembers the first time that ever happened back in our
childhood when we were two or three years old and our nervous system responds as if it's
a, you know, as if we're two or three all over again, right, and it receives these signals.
(23:14):
So when you can really tap into how to change your thoughts so your nervous system is sending
out all as well, you are safe, kind of hormonal signals, then we can be in this place of parasympathetic
nervous system, rest and digest, right.
And if we are in that space, we're not really swinging our swords anymore or burning down
(23:37):
buildings, you know, we're literally just in the boat flowing downstream, super easy,
don't even have to pat.
I like the sound of that.
Great picture.
Going in that flow already where you're supposed to be.
Yeah, but that's the hardest part, right, because people, they get in their boat, the boat,
(24:01):
they were taught to hop into and they turn around backwards and they grab the paddle and
they try and paddle upstream against the current in a wind storm because they're working harder
and trying harder to be validated.
See me look at me work hard, look at me be successful, look at me trying to get your validation
and it is for nothing because it's no one else's job to validate you, but you, right, it's
(24:26):
your job to say, hey girl, you're doing it, right.
It's your job to be that support system for you now that we're adults, right.
If you didn't get it in your childhood, it's your job now to go, you know what, though,
I'm doing pretty good.
I like the direction I'm going, but if we're always like, man, I suck, this is hard, I don't
(24:48):
know.
It's going to be a lot harder because that is an upstream thought versus turning around
in the boat, set the paddle down, let the stream, like the water never flows upstream.
The water always goes downhill.
It knows the way it's going to go.
The current can take you where you want to go and you don't have to work at it, but we're
(25:12):
accustomed to paddling really hard in the wrong direction.
We love to ask our guests if there is one of the names in our show that you have a story
or a visceral response or something that moves you when you hear it or all three to whatever
is going downstream in the boat for you of the virgin, the beauty and the bitch.
(25:37):
I love the idea of beauty because it is who you become on the journey.
That's the beauty.
It has nothing to do with what you look like.
It's who you're being in the moment, right.
Tomorrow's not here.
Yesterday's gone.
It's who are you being today right now that you love the most, right.
There's so much beauty in that.
(25:59):
One of my favorite soap boxes to climb on top of is that when we get better, everybody
else gets better, but it's not just random everybody else.
It's those people within our circle of influence.
It's especially within our family line, especially because when you get better and you feel
better and you're healthier and your boundaries are in place and you've got emotional awareness
(26:25):
of how to bring yourself back into a good and safe emotional state.
Everybody else is like, "What are you doing?"
That looks amazing.
I want to be able to do that too, right.
Then they come along for the ride, not because you did it for their sake, you did it for
you, but there's so much beauty in your change, your increased health and wellness, you know,
(26:49):
mental and emotionally.
It's just a phenomenal ripple effect that you see in families where children are like,
"Wow, mom used to struggle, but now she's different.
She's better and we like it because she's not in pain anymore."
That concept is profound because it says that beauty is contagious and that has nothing
(27:12):
to do with the way you look.
Beauty is contagious if you're beautiful from the inside.
Right.
We're just here to lift each other up.
That is a great picture.
I hear you and I want a piece of your action.
I want to work with you or I want to connect with you.
(27:32):
How do I go about doing that?
Yeah, you just hop on my website and grab the contact form at Teresa4.life.
That's Teresa, no H-T-E-R-E-S-A, Ford isn't Chevy.
Ford is a post-achievy, yes, that's life.
(27:56):
I cannot really say to you how grateful we are to have had this opportunity to not talk
to you just once but talk to you twice.
If we talk to you 20 times, I believe we would still be learning something profound and
new.
I hope we do get a chance to do this again.
It was so fun, my pleasure.
(28:17):
Thank you so much.
It round two was just as wonderful.
So I'm really grateful for this extra time with you.
Thank you for doing that and it's a joy to have you in the show.
Thank you.
It's been a lot of fun.
And you have been listening to the Virgin, the beauty and the bitch.
Find us like us.
(28:38):
Share us.
Please reach out to us.
Bring your friends.
Come on back.
To become a partner in the VBB community, we invite you to find us at virginbeautybitch.com.
Like us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
And share us with people who are defiantly different.
(29:01):
Like you.
Until next time, thanks for listening.
(upbeat music)
inspiring women to overcome social stereotypes and share unique
(00:10):
life experiences without fear of being defiantly different.
Your hosts, Christopher and Heather. Let's talk, shall we!
This is a very, very unique situation.
We had a guest on last week and we had such a fantastic conversation.
And then technology got the best of us.
(00:32):
So I think the universe was saying you have to talk to her again.
And our guest was Certified Mental Health and Trauma Recovery Life Coach Teresa Ford.
And we want to welcome you back, Teresa, to Virgin Beauty, bitch.
Thank you.
I'm glad to be here.
I mean, getting to talk with you twice is not a hard job.
(00:53):
I love it.
So I started off last time with a quote from your website, which I think is so powerful.
I always say you shouldn't hire a coach who hasn't done what you are trying to do.
And that quote speaks to me as in where your life has been and what experience has taken
(01:17):
you to get to this point where you can coach others.
And you maybe walk us through what that foundation has been like for you in your life.
Yeah, I think book learning takes you so far, but experience goes very deep.
So when I'm working with my clients, it comes from a place of starting from the beginning.
(01:39):
My childhood was, it was full of emotional chaos.
And it happened because my parents were emotionally immature and emotionally unavailable.
There's an absence of love.
It's a profound absence of love when that happens.
There's a lot of managerial stuff that's going on, but it's not actually the nurturing that
(02:03):
we need as children.
So it was more of a high expectation that we would function on an adult level and then
we were held responsible for the way our parents felt.
So that really puts you on a different path because you're in this new space of trying to make
mom and dad feel better all the time.
And that was an impossible task because it wasn't our job to do that.
(02:25):
That is just heartbreaking to start off life at a deficit, really.
You know, I look at it as they were the perfect parents for me for what I needed to do in
this world and that is to overcome the darkness and stand in the light.
(02:45):
And that's what we're all doing.
We're all alchemists.
We need to find those things that are still bothering us now.
They still cause trouble.
We trip over ourselves in life.
We're in a trauma loop.
We keep doing the same things over and over, hoping things will change.
That's darkness.
That's just plain old pain and struggle.
But if we understand that everything that has happened to us was actually happening for
(03:10):
us so that we could take what we didn't want and turn it into something we do want, it changes
everything because that's how we sort of rise up out of the ashes, right?
We become the Phoenix.
Comes into light.
How do we, okay?
Most of us, you're young when this is all going on.
You don't have life experience.
(03:31):
You don't have wisdom to make the connections to these dots.
Like you say, take your darkness and your darkness is what it is.
That sets you up for lightness.
What happened to you that you made those connections and you turned what was dark for you into something
that challenged you to be the best you can be?
That's a great question.
(03:53):
I don't know that I really recognized anything was wrong.
I just knew that I was spending a lot of time looking for love and looking for ways to get
validated, looking like I was just trying really, really hard.
And I think that's one of the key signs for many of us is that we're trying really hard
(04:13):
to be successful or to get validation or to find love and get someone else to love us
so we can feel better.
And those are key indicators.
But I didn't recognize that the story that I carried with me from my childhood was you
can try all you want and you're still not going to be lovable enough.
So my first marriage, I married a good guy and I was a good girl.
(04:38):
And so it was a good match.
But the actual match energetically subconsciously, let me make this point that 5% of our brain
is conscious thought.
95% is unconscious thought.
So the unconscious stories that we take into our lives are just revealed in the relationships,
(05:01):
especially the relationships that we form.
And so the relationship that I formed was with somebody that could not attach to me.
He could not connect to me.
And so he had an avoidant attachment style, which made me an anxious attachment style.
I was wondering why he couldn't love me because it was the same story that I carried with me
(05:22):
from my mom that she couldn't love me.
So that was 26 years of trying, trying, trying, and figuring out codependency and these trauma
wounds that he had with his mom and that I had with my mom.
And we had all these wounds, but we didn't really know what it was.
It wasn't actually until I discovered that I just couldn't stay in the marriage anymore
(05:45):
because I needed to grow and get beyond the trauma loop.
And he was comfortable in the trauma loop.
And so that was the, that was kind of the beginning of the end for me to discover on my
journey of healing from childhood wounds that there was a deficit of love and absence
of understanding that I already was the love that I didn't have to try to get the love.
(06:10):
Does that make sense?
So what was that process like for you when you transition from seeking this external
validation, trying to find that I am enough through other people to what you just focused
in on that it's all within you are the love you are already enough?
What was that transition process like there?
(06:30):
And was there a catalyst moment for you?
Oh, there most certainly was.
When your entire life gets dismantled like all the things that like I was in fitness, I
was, you know, a personal trainer specializing in hormonal fat loss.
I was a mother of five and there was, there came this moment where it started actually with
(06:53):
my mother's death.
And so she passed away in May of 2010.
And then two months later, I lost my energy.
Like I had no more than two hours of energy a day.
And I couldn't figure out what that was and I developed all these food allergies and, you
know, and so I, you know, lost my health.
And then I wasn't able to keep working.
(07:13):
So I lost my clients.
I was having a faith crisis in the middle of all that wondering who I was the God.
And then also I knew I had to address my marriage that it just, I couldn't stay in the trauma loop
anymore.
So when you dismantle everything that you've ever known to be who you are, right, those were
(07:35):
my identities, you know, we all have identities of who we are to everybody else.
When you strip all that away, you end up, oh, flat on your back crying.
It's a mess, you know, wondering, who am I and what am I doing here?
When you start to ask those really, really deep questions, you're going to get some really,
(07:56):
really deep answers and you need to buckle up.
It's because the answer that you end up getting is you don't have to try and be anything.
You already are enough.
Like, I realized that from the moment I was born that everyone in the room was like, is
she breathing?
Yes.
(08:17):
Yay.
Like the whole, you know, the crowd erupts.
She's breathing.
And that's where our value lies.
It doesn't get any better or worse throughout life.
The fact is that we are.
We are here.
We're viable.
We're living human beings.
And when you realize that you don't have to be anything to anybody else, then you can
(08:40):
start to actually unfold all your gifts and talents for the right reasons.
We're not efforting and trying and looking for validation and, you know, fearing judgment
and criticism, we're just in this really unique, peaceful space of being unapologetically
yourself.
When you deal with and have a client that comes to you with all of this baggage, like,
(09:07):
you're just trying to reduce them back to the simplest thing.
How do you dismantle all of what they have known as their identity, their whole life?
It's trying so hard.
A really good question.
Again, we're just, we're pulling everything back.
Who are you before you were conditioned to believe you are who you are now?
(09:29):
Like comprehend that one.
If you just take all the conditioning, like our parents did the best they could with what
they had to work with, but they were just trying to sift and sort through their own pain,
their own fears, their own worries about am I giving my child enough or am I enough to
give anything to my child?
They were trying to guide us with that kind of conditioning and if we could just pull it
(09:55):
all away.
It's like, okay, but who are you without all that stuff?
Without all those false beliefs that make us worry and look out at the world with fearful
eyes.
Who is that person, you know, and what it really boils down to is we're just love and
light.
That's it.
Like it's not more than that.
It's not less than that.
It's just love and light.
(10:16):
The eternal, infinite wisdom, infinite intelligence, infinite emotional connection that we
are.
So when we scale that back, then we have to look at everything else because false beliefs
that we think are true are making us feel less than.
(10:37):
So negative emotion is on the side of false beliefs that are not true, but we're acting
as if they are positive emotions are the love and light that we are.
Those are those hold a lot of truth.
So I use truth, love and light synonymously.
So before operating in truth and you know, you hear out there in the world my truth.
(11:00):
This is my truth.
It's like, well, you can have your truth because if, you know, if you think it's true, you're
right.
And if you think it's not true, you're right.
So either way, you're right.
But if it's not working for you, it's not serving you well, it's not helping you grow.
If it's not, you know, helping you with your expansion because that's the only reason we're
here is for that expansion, that further light knowledge that we came here to get.
(11:26):
Right.
If we're not doing that, then our belief systems that we think are true, your truth is
not actually helping you because it's, it's got an absence of truth to it.
It has an absence of love, love, truth, light, they're all the same.
So if there's an absence of love because it's a fear-based thought, we're going to struggle.
(11:48):
It doesn't get better.
And that's how we know it's like, man, I keep doing the same thing over and over and over.
And what's going on?
It's because you're operating from a false belief that you think it's true.
I'm interested to know your take on, I mean, something that you just so eloquently said
was, you know, life being, part of life being an exploration of understanding, you know,
(12:13):
these elements.
And I'm wondering what you think the role is of the wide spectrum of emotions that humans
have to play with.
So you know, what I think of what it means to be human and when people fall into fear-based
decision-making or sadness or, I mean, the hundreds of emotions that people can feel, what role
(12:39):
do you think that plays in human exploration of self?
It's, it's where your growth lies.
It's just, it's everything.
So you've never had an emotion you can't name.
We were given these emotions to experience them because there's, there's got to be opposition
and all things.
That's how we grow.
We experience the contrast.
We know what we don't want.
(13:00):
And then our job is to recognize what we don't want and move into what we do want.
Now the way we recognize what we don't want is the way it makes us feel.
That's the very first thing that we'll notice because like I mentioned before, 5% of your brain
is conscious.
The rest is, is in your body.
You've done something over and over.
You've thought a thought that has put the emotion in your body so many times.
(13:23):
It's like driving the car, but you don't remember going from point A to point B because
you just, you don't have to remember the blinkers and the pedals and the steering wheel and
the turn.
We don't have to remember all of that anymore because we've done it so many times.
It's in the body.
We're just driving, right?
And we can think about the grocery list and we can think about the other things.
That's how we've trained our body.
That was what our childhood was made of was all the practicing of thoughts based on the
(13:48):
information coming in.
And we created this database that just operates automatically without our thought being in
the conscious mind.
So if it's locked in the body, your body is just going to respond without the conscious brain
recognizing that it started with a thought.
The thought was either assigned to fear or love on some level.
(14:10):
It could be in a high grade fear or it could have been a low grade fear, same with love,
right?
Or, you know, on the low scales more towards neutral between love and fear.
It could be right in there.
But most of the time we're not like, whoa, I can think about the thoughts I'm thinking
about.
What was I think about?
Gee, I don't know because it's just going through your brain.
(14:30):
You know, you're having, you know, 100 every nanosecond and we're just not aware of what
we're thinking about.
But it is 100% linked to the conditioning of our childhood and what we were taught to
think about.
So when you can find the emotions and the most powerful emotions we have are triggers.
We call them triggers.
(14:51):
It's when your nervous system has been activated.
We can just, they're just tapping on our shoulders going, you're irritated again.
You're feeling bitter.
You know, they got a little anger under there.
Those are your greatest teachers because if you can figure out the thoughts you were thinking
about before that emotion tapped you on the shoulders and like, man, that person is so
(15:16):
annoying to you, right?
It's just whispering to you that you're annoyed again.
If you can take annoyance and go, wait, what?
Oh, what was I thinking about that person?
Now here's what's interesting.
This is, this just came in.
So undiluted love is the absence of judgment.
(15:38):
If we're having a thought that triggers something in the body that has a sense of flavoring
or a hint of the past, it's going to come up as though it is a hint of the past.
It's going to come up as though it is a threat to you.
And so that's why we have the negative emotion.
This is a threat to me.
That threat has judgment added to it because without judgment undiluted love is just unconditional
(16:05):
love.
It's like, you don't have to change so I can be happy.
You can be you.
I can be me.
We're not divided.
We're all connected.
Like it would change everything in our viewpoints on political events or the economy or our bank
account or anything that makes us get a little crazy in the emotional scale.
(16:27):
If there was no judgment about whether it was right or wrong, good or bad, we could be
at peace.
But if there's negative emotion there, it is trying to get your attention so you can
go back and find that part of you that got lost in the past in a loop of false beliefs or
(16:48):
the lack of love, lack of light, lack of truth.
Does that make sense?
So if I know this goes really, really deep, but if you're going into your past, you may
not have a memory, but your nervous system remembers it.
That's why it came up to your attention.
Taped you on the shoulders like this is irritating us.
This is frustrating us.
(17:10):
This makes us sad.
This makes us scared.
Our fear is high.
If we can tap into that, we can go back and grab that little part of us that was a child
in our conditioning, tucker under our arm and just say, you're with me now.
You're safe.
And that is the nervous system work that you changing how your body feels and responds
(17:31):
to certain things that are going on in your environment.
And if it activates your nervous system, it's going to bring in those negative emotions.
Those negative emotions are little pieces of you that got lost in the past.
We bring you into the present and we do nervous system work to help you feel safe and secure
in the here and now because you're not back there anymore.
(17:51):
It's just your body is a database of everything that's ever happened.
It's not programmed to know what's coming.
It hasn't been into the future yet.
Does that?
That was kind of a roundabout way of answering that.
There's so much to unpack there.
Did it bring up questions for you?
Well, I was going to say that that's some of the most powerful therapy that I've ever
(18:13):
done is a therapist who helped me go back into specific memories as a child.
And then I became the parent that I needed at the time in the ways that I needed it.
And that kind of healing in my nervous system that I bring to present day, it's been some
of the most helpful therapy I've done to date.
(18:35):
So I really resonate with what you're saying.
Yeah, it actually puts the power back in your court.
Like a lot of people feel powerless.
They feel helpless to change the environment that there is, things that aren't making them
happy.
And if you can, if you can tap into your nervous system and whenever I say nervous system,
I tap right here, I just below my collarbone.
(18:56):
Have you ever done the EFD tapping?
Yeah, it's all the emotional freedom tapping.
It just helps you get in touch with little you, the little you that got stuck in the past
before your little brain was developed enough to handle an adult situation that you were
not being offered guidance for.
Right?
So you tap here, you're like, hey, hey, whatever that is, this irritating you right now, it's
(19:22):
going to be okay because you're not back there.
I'm right here.
I'm with you.
It's the adult you, the adult brain that can help the little underdeveloped brain grow
up.
She can now develop into a more deliberately and intentional adult.
Does that make sense?
(19:42):
So do you get, you're getting all those little pieces that got left behind of you and bring
them into the wholeness of who you are?
This makes me kind of sad that how many years that we spent being educated in our childhood
never are we given any of these directions about how to be the best of what we are meant
(20:06):
to be and how to walk that path.
So the things that we learn in school to help us in an economic world, how do we handle
those things through the gifts that we have naturally that nature has given us?
Yeah, I appreciate that, Chris, you know, because it does feel a little bit like time has
been lost if we had known these things back then.
(20:29):
We could have been so much better now.
But I truly am a big believer in everything happens in its perfect timing that we are not
introduced to these ideas until we're ready to receive them.
So like you Heather, you're younger than I am.
I received these just a couple of years ago, right?
You received them before you got to my age.
(20:51):
So even that idea of being able to grab it when you hear it and if it resonates, it's
the right timing for you.
So also, our gifts and talents are there.
And if we're busy just swinging swords and control zillas, just burning down buildings
(21:12):
as she's trying to navigate life, we're going to be a little bit distracted, kind of busy
and we're not really going to get to the good stuff of how we can empower ourselves and feel
real peace and harmony with the flow of life, right?
We're not going to get into that yet if we're out there being super distracted.
But the gifts and talents are there.
(21:33):
And as soon as we remove the distraction, those gifts and talents just come to the surface
where we actually can rise to the full potential.
I call it how we fulfill the measure of our creation.
Like we were all created for our purpose, we're here to help lift each other up, right?
And so if you stay there, it's in that low place, that low frequency of my life sucks and
(21:58):
I didn't find out about this stuff until too late in life.
And those things that bring our vibration down, that's just you waiting for you to step
up and get behind yourself, get full support from yourself and give yourself permission
to get rid of those unhelpful stories and then take this new information and run with
(22:23):
it.
Because it's not hard stuff to figure out.
It makes so much sense.
The thoughts that we have trigger the nervous system, right, at the base of your school and
that nervous system sends hormonal signals out throughout the body and the bodies receiving
signals that this is safe or this is not safe.
If it's not safe, meaning we feel like there's a chance of abandonment or rejection or criticism
(22:48):
or judgment, if we're sensing that something like that is going to harm us, there's probably
a part of our nervous system that remembers the first time that ever happened back in our
childhood when we were two or three years old and our nervous system responds as if it's
a, you know, as if we're two or three all over again, right, and it receives these signals.
(23:14):
So when you can really tap into how to change your thoughts so your nervous system is sending
out all as well, you are safe, kind of hormonal signals, then we can be in this place of parasympathetic
nervous system, rest and digest, right.
And if we are in that space, we're not really swinging our swords anymore or burning down
(23:37):
buildings, you know, we're literally just in the boat flowing downstream, super easy,
don't even have to pat.
I like the sound of that.
Great picture.
Going in that flow already where you're supposed to be.
Yeah, but that's the hardest part, right, because people, they get in their boat, the boat,
(24:01):
they were taught to hop into and they turn around backwards and they grab the paddle and
they try and paddle upstream against the current in a wind storm because they're working harder
and trying harder to be validated.
See me look at me work hard, look at me be successful, look at me trying to get your validation
and it is for nothing because it's no one else's job to validate you, but you, right, it's
(24:26):
your job to say, hey girl, you're doing it, right.
It's your job to be that support system for you now that we're adults, right.
If you didn't get it in your childhood, it's your job now to go, you know what, though,
I'm doing pretty good.
I like the direction I'm going, but if we're always like, man, I suck, this is hard, I don't
(24:48):
know.
It's going to be a lot harder because that is an upstream thought versus turning around
in the boat, set the paddle down, let the stream, like the water never flows upstream.
The water always goes downhill.
It knows the way it's going to go.
The current can take you where you want to go and you don't have to work at it, but we're
(25:12):
accustomed to paddling really hard in the wrong direction.
We love to ask our guests if there is one of the names in our show that you have a story
or a visceral response or something that moves you when you hear it or all three to whatever
is going downstream in the boat for you of the virgin, the beauty and the bitch.
(25:37):
I love the idea of beauty because it is who you become on the journey.
That's the beauty.
It has nothing to do with what you look like.
It's who you're being in the moment, right.
Tomorrow's not here.
Yesterday's gone.
It's who are you being today right now that you love the most, right.
There's so much beauty in that.
(25:59):
One of my favorite soap boxes to climb on top of is that when we get better, everybody
else gets better, but it's not just random everybody else.
It's those people within our circle of influence.
It's especially within our family line, especially because when you get better and you feel
better and you're healthier and your boundaries are in place and you've got emotional awareness
(26:25):
of how to bring yourself back into a good and safe emotional state.
Everybody else is like, "What are you doing?"
That looks amazing.
I want to be able to do that too, right.
Then they come along for the ride, not because you did it for their sake, you did it for
you, but there's so much beauty in your change, your increased health and wellness, you know,
(26:49):
mental and emotionally.
It's just a phenomenal ripple effect that you see in families where children are like,
"Wow, mom used to struggle, but now she's different.
She's better and we like it because she's not in pain anymore."
That concept is profound because it says that beauty is contagious and that has nothing
(27:12):
to do with the way you look.
Beauty is contagious if you're beautiful from the inside.
Right.
We're just here to lift each other up.
That is a great picture.
I hear you and I want a piece of your action.
I want to work with you or I want to connect with you.
(27:32):
How do I go about doing that?
Yeah, you just hop on my website and grab the contact form at Teresa4.life.
That's Teresa, no H-T-E-R-E-S-A, Ford isn't Chevy.
Ford is a post-achievy, yes, that's life.
(27:56):
I cannot really say to you how grateful we are to have had this opportunity to not talk
to you just once but talk to you twice.
If we talk to you 20 times, I believe we would still be learning something profound and
new.
I hope we do get a chance to do this again.
It was so fun, my pleasure.
(28:17):
Thank you so much.
It round two was just as wonderful.
So I'm really grateful for this extra time with you.
Thank you for doing that and it's a joy to have you in the show.
Thank you.
It's been a lot of fun.
And you have been listening to the Virgin, the beauty and the bitch.
Find us like us.
(28:38):
Share us.
Please reach out to us.
Bring your friends.
Come on back.
To become a partner in the VBB community, we invite you to find us at virginbeautybitch.com.
Like us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
And share us with people who are defiantly different.
(29:01):
Like you.
Until next time, thanks for listening.
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