Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 26: Zeal & Zest

Author Note: If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

Today is our last Wellspring Wednesday for Season One. While it has been an honor for the last six months to share internal resources, self-care advice, and education about your trauma care — this week, I had the idea to share one of my own internal strengths. Zest and Zeal. What do I mean by that?

What I mean is walking my own tumultuous trauma recovery road (and still journeying), I have found my passion in advocating for others through this podcast, coaching, and being a light for trauma survivors around the globe. Having come to a place in my own recovery where I have done the work and will not stop doing the work, I found my home as a trauma recovery coach. This summer, I’ll complete my Advanced certification with the IAOTRC. By September, I’ll have completed the IFS Institutes’ Online Training Circle when I’ll be able to officially call myself an “IFS-Informed, Trauma-Trained, Advanced Recovery Coach”. I literally couldn’t be more thrilled to have found this zeal of working with other trauma survivors in their healing. I love that I am able to talk to strangers that I meet daily via work and travel about their traumas and wounds and that I can support them in finding a good regimen of care for themselves. Gaining more knowledge as I continue self-study, I am working on developing a program for “trauma prevention” by educating people on fetal stress, infant attachment, and how important a healthy foundation of life is for raising healthy humans in later years. I’m also currently obsessed with Epigenetics and Fetal/Maternal Microchimerism. More on that topic to come soon enough!

My current work receiving IFS coaching and becoming an IFS informed Coach is at the heart of everything I do and love. Inner Child Healing is SO possible, and I have fallen in love with IFS with a special sort of zest. I’ve had been years of reading and studying IFS, but now experiencing healing myself and helping guide others in their inner realm is magical. Doing IFS sessions with my clients literally feeds my soul!

I don’t say all this to be boastful, but to help others in finding their zest for life and what they can be truly zealous about. For a couple decades, I had heard so many times, “Sara, you should become a life coach.” Something about it never stuck even though it seemed really cool and a pretty good fit for my personality. The day I heard the term “Trauma Recovery Coach” that fateful day on Guy MacPherson’s podcast, my heart exploded, and I knew I had to chase it. Sitting in the right place at the right time is really possible. Chasing your dreams, finding your zeal, and moving toward your best reality is all possible. True, deep, long lasting trauma recovery (while it’s an ongoing process) is truly possible. There is nothing else I could be more zestful for — to help others hear that, believe it, and actualize it for themselves.

If you are ready to add some support to your journey, reach out. Let’s see what resources I can connect you with or find out if coaching is a next great step in your healing journey. I am here ready, working on myself, and waiting for whoever wants to cross my path next. Until next season’s Wellspring Wednesdays return — stay healthy, dig into your own Wellspring, and have a ton of great moments!

***Don’t miss out on a special discount on the final episode of Season One of Trauma Survivorhood’s Full Circle Friday called “Zig Zag” which launches on July 1st! Have a great summer!

Wellspring Wednesdays|Week 9: Inner Child

*Author Note* If you prefer to listen or watch instead of or along with -
 Check out the YouTube video and/or the Podcast audio.

This episode has a lot of references to season 1/episodes: #11 on week 4 entitled Developmental Trauma and #20 on week 7 entitled Good Enough. It may be helpful to read/watch/listen to those along with this.

For starters, everyone has an inner child no matter their trauma status. This is the internal self that has stored memories from conception through birth into all your developmental years. There’s not actually a child in there (unless you’re pregnant, congrats). This colloquial term is used to talk about the kid we are were at one time. Infant’s brains start developing in the womb, and every interaction and word is recorded and stored internally like a computer hard drive. Even when you erase the memory and empty the trash can, a good hacker can recover all that stuff. If it crossed the path of the computer, it’s still in there somewhere, even if you can’t find it easily. The inner child is you when you were developing. A vast majority of adult responses, reactions, patterns, behaviors, and beliefs were all formed in the developmental years of their child. That inner child is still at work encouraging you to do the same behaviors and tactics it used as a child.

That inner child has a heap of issues too. If you weren’t heard or believed when you were young, your inner child still carries the pain of being invisible. If your inner child used dissociation during sexual violence, it could keep you disconnected well into your adult years. When the inner child is bullied or mocked, it will continue that pattern of self-criticism — even though it may be things you’d never say out loud though your inner voice says harsh words all day long to you.

When we discussed Developmental Trauma weeks ago, I was serious when I said how devastating it is to endure trauma in your early-age years. Back then, anything that happened to you was because you were not in control of your circumstances. As a child, without the freedom to just leave an abusive situation, this left an impact that can barely be described in words. As a kid, you also couldn’t grapple with everything going on. You simple didn’t understand. You also have an innate sense of love for your caregivers — so it’s very common for a trauma survivor to turn on themselves rather than their abusive caregivers because it’s too hard to comprehend why the adults in your life are hurting you. You surmise that YOU must be the problem; you must be bad. You can carry that burden for your whole life.

When I spoke on “Good Enough Parents”, I talked at length about healing the inner child. This is what the psychology world calls “Inner Child Work”. That thing that I called really really hard work, but also the most beautiful. That. Inner Child healing is about mourning for the childhood that you had — good or bad. Sometimes non-trauma survivors feel like they missed out on much, or they just simply miss being a kid so much. It’s okay to feel this way. A lot of people wish they could return to childhood and fix all the things that happened. They say things like “I’d go back and tell that little girl that she is worth more than gold and not to let anyone tell her otherwise.”

Well, my friends, you can do just that. With Inner Child Work — you can grieve what happened to you, what you lost, what you miss now, what didn’t happen to you, and more. Then, you can actually go back and find the scenes that star the little hurt inner child, and you can rescue them, tell them you are grown now, and are safe. You can tell them they are worth gold, and you can tell them perhaps that as an adult you no longer talk to that abusive stepfather or maybe even that he died. The inner child is actually listening to you. You can visit them, spend time listening to them, let them know you are grown and healing now. This is real. This isn’t just woo-woo; it’s not even a little woo. It’s science; psychology at its finest to be honest. It’s that powerful, in my opinion.

You can also, in present time at the age you are now, write down things that need healing — like the things that didn’t happen that should have when you were a kid. Maybe you never learned how to ride a bike or how to save money. Maybe you never learned how to set boundaries. Back then, maybe you weren’t told “my body my choice”. If you were told you are ugly over and over, you can begin doing some mirror work and learning to find your true beauty now. You can start working on those things right now, and that is part of your inner child healing.

This isn’t going to reverse all the trauma and abuse and damage that you went through. Those years may be marred with horrible things, and there’s nothing that can you back those moments. This is not about undoing; it’s about uncovering what can be healed now to get moving forward. You won’t forget what happened to you, but you can recover from the pain and addictions and patterns and behaviors now that are only making your current present circumstances worse. You can make a shift, start the inner child work, and find your true self again.

On this week’s Full Circle Friday being released in a few days, we are going to learn about IFS and how having conversations with your inner world, your inner self, and your inner child is especially magical in healing developmental trauma. In the meantime, take a moment to try to connect to your inner child. Ask it some questions. Stay curious. Don’t judge what comes up. Just observe and be ready to hear whatever it wants to share with you. Be inquisitive and not pushy.

A lot of what I do with clients with developmental trauma is inner child work — finding the roots of where behaviors and feelings about themselves started and then working on healing through what we discover. If you are interested to learn more, I encourage you to schedule a Complimentary Discovery Call with me to see if coaching is right for you.