Importance of Trauma-Aware Relationships

I follow The Holistic Psychologist on Facebook, and she recently shared something that really resonated with me. If you are interested in psychology, trauma awareness, and/or self-healing, you should definitely go check out her page! I am always finding great information there and this likely won’t be the last time it sparks a post of my own.

The post that inspired today’s message was based on her own experience with trauma. It hones in on a time in her journey when she was unaware of how her unresolved trauma was impacting her relationships. She talks about betraying herself and her needs, denying parts of who she was for her partners.

She also talks about setting unrealistic expectations that places pressure on the other person in the relationship. Believing that another person will and SHOULD meet our needs, understand our emotions, and make us feel a certain way. The idea that someone else will “complete” us because of the narratives we’ve grown up with in movies, TV, and books focused on the fairytale romance.

I’ll let you go read the post for yourself in full if you’re interested in the non-paraphrased version. Essentially she was revealing her own experience as a means to share what she’s learned since. That understanding your partner’s trauma is a love language because it enables healing.

This entire post resonated with me because I have come to learn the same. When I started my self-healing process, I was emotionally involved with someone… it was complicated. That ‘situationship’ for lack of a better term, basically served as a mirror for the things that I hadn’t healed. Looking back through my relationship history, I can see the same mirrors sprinkled over pretty well every experience. The difference in this case was that I was ready and willing to face the trauma and actively work on healing.

The mirrors that I experienced in this time actually helped me understand a lot about myself, and for that I will always be grateful. I came to understand that same concept of “blaming” others for the way that I felt or for not meeting my needs and expectations. I learned that my feelings, needs, and expectations are my responsibility to manage, understand, and communicate.

To be clear, this does not apply to abuse and is in no way meant in a victim-blaming way. I’m talking about projections and triggers from childhood that come up, and taking accountability for acknowledging the true origins. This is what helps us process and take our power back.

During this time I was practicing an exercise that my therapist referred to as “the power of noticing”. This exercise is pretty simple – all you do is stop and reflect any time you have an emotional response. I found that when I reflected on something that brought up a strong triggered emotional reaction, I realized it was linked to something much deeper. That is the goal of the exercise. You try to trace the emotional reactions back as far as you can, and your memory recall usually helps you trace it all the way back to childhood.

What this meant for me was that I often gained the understanding that I was responding to a situation with him in the present that unconsciously reminded me of something I had felt in the past. It is easy to see now how dangerous that is in relationships. It leads to many assumptions and overreactions, which is what causes problems. You unconsciously treat them as though they are the ones that caused you pain, when that hadn’t been their intent at all.

If the other person doesn’t understand where the triggers are coming from in order to be patient and understanding with you, they can start thinking you’re too sensitive, crazy, etc. I’ve realized how important it is to be able to talk about those triggers and the trauma they are linked to so your partner can understand and support you through them. This makes vulnerability and authentic communication an integral part of the success of a relationship.

Reality is viewed from the lens of our own experience. That is why there is that old saying “there are three sides to every story: your side, their side, and the truth”. This isn’t to say that either party is necessarily lying about their experience, that said, each person viewed the same event very differently because of their past experiences.

I’ll give you an example from a book I read recently titled The Completion Process by Teal Swan. This contained many examples, but one really stuck with me on this topic. Imagine a married couple:

The husband takes off his wedding band and jumps into the shower. He gets out, forgets to put the ring back on, gets ready for work, and heads off. The wife comes into the bathroom to find the wedding ring on the sink, and she has a meltdown. Now with no context, to most people this would seem like a gross overreaction, right?

Well, in her previous marriage, this woman had come home to find her husband’s ring left on the sink with a note. He left her. The ring on the sink became an unconscious trigger that brought up her abandonment wound. In his mind, he simply forgot to put the ring on and it should be no big deal. In her mind, she linked the ring on the sink with the idea that he didn’t love her anymore and he was about to leave her. Two very different perspectives on the same event.

She didn’t make this association consciously, rather her mind and nervous system made that association for her based on that past trauma in an attempt to protect her. That is what happens with trauma – it puts us into a survival mindset, which is what brings on those triggers. When our brain and nervous system experiences something that is linked with a past trauma, it sends off warning bells in our mind like “oh no, it’s about to happen again.” That unconscious thought process often is what results in these emotional outbursts.

Because of all of the trauma I’ve uncovered in my process, I had started to think that I needed to stay single indefinitely until I felt that I had fully healed. I didn’t see how it would be possible to have a healthy relationship if those triggers were going to keep coming up and causing problems. I saw the triggers as an unhealed part of me, something that needed to be fixed before anyone could love me.

Now I understand that you can still have a healthy relationship and be loved while working on yourself. I understand that relationships are opportunities for growth and healing together. There will always be triggers that may come up, likely for both partners, and now I know that is okay. We can witness the trigger, process the emotional response, and communicate that to our partner so they will understand.

The key to all of this working is in having a partner that is willing to do the same work. So unlike my original belief, you don’t have to be fully healed to have a strong healthy relationship. Rather, you have to both be willing to work through one another’s “stuff” together. With this new mindset, I will most definitely be carrying this with me into any and all future relationships.

In closing, I leave you with the quote from the original post:

Understanding your partner’s trauma is a love language.

The Holistic Psychologist

Finding someone to be there when things are good is easy, but things won’t always be sunshine and rainbows. Instead, look for the person willing to listen to the painful parts of your past, make an effort to understand your trauma, and be there to support you through it. Be willing to do the same for your partner. This requires vulnerability and trust on both sides, and it will set a solid foundation for a loving and healthy partnership.

With love and light,

Jessica

Why Do You Attract Emotionally Unavailable Partners?

I came across a video earlier and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. It was someone sharing something that they learned about themselves on their healing journey. It got me reflecting a lot about myself, and I realized that I could relate to that message.

If you consistently attract people into your life that are emotionally unavailable, you might want to stick around 😉

I think most of us that decide to enter therapy do so because of a specific person(s) or event that we feel has caused us a tremendous amount of pain. I know for me, it was because I kept getting hurt by men I cared about in a similar way. I would get really emotionally invested long before it made logical sense to do so. I poured my all into it waiting for them to see my value and meet me halfway, and I would get ghosted or abandoned every time. I recognized a pattern, and I knew that I needed to break it before I could have a healthy relationship.

The thing that nobody told me before I went into therapy was that in this process, you actually learn a lot about yourself, your thought and behaviour patterns, and where they originated. I honestly don’t know what I thought it was like before, but I didn’t expect it to be as self-reflective as it was. So you know that whole comedy skit often played out in movies about therapy being a joke because all they want to do is talk about your childhood….. yeah that’s not so funny, and it actually holds a lot of weight. Sometimes facing that can be difficult because it forces you to see parts of yourself, what many call the shadow parts, that you don’t really like. In fact, it can be downright painful to acknowledge and accept those parts of yourself.

Therapy helped me realized that I was raised by two emotionally unavailable and unhealed parents, and let’s face it… who hasn’t been these days? It is passed down generation to generation until someone realizes and decides to break the cycle. As I peeled back those layers in my own family history, I uncovered many things about myself and how I interact with others that was learned from the unhealed behaviour patterns of my parents. Some of the things that drove me insane in others were things that I realized that I did myself at times. I was more triggered by those things in others because it would shine light on the shameful shadow part of myself that I couldn’t face.

Now here’s the kicker. I’m warning you now that this might be uncomfortable.

Please don’t shoot the messenger!

When I went into therapy and started my healing journey, I knew I had a pattern of attracting emotionally unavailable men. What I didn’t know was WHY this was happening to me so much. All I knew was that it is extremely frustrating and painful to give so much of yourself to them, opening up to them, being vulnerable with them, sharing your feelings and emotions with them, and getting nothing back FROM them when it comes to those things or being ghosted without a word. With that in mind, it can be easy to blame them and paint them as the problem when you are doing all of those things without reciprocation or if they bail on you out of nowhere. Then therapy has you look inward.

What I have realized when it comes to my situation is that I, too, was emotionally unavailable. Those who are emotionally unavailable often find themselves attracted to one another. That was in part why I was continuously going through that pattern with emotionally unavailable men.

Let me explain.

I learned that emotional unavailability doesn’t always present as a lack of emotion. Instead, it can also present as pouring ourselves endlessly into those who are unwilling or incapable of pouring back into us – OR – avoiding or pushing away the people who might actually treat us well. With that frame of mind, it makes sense how two emotionally unavailable people on opposite sides of the spectrum would end up together. One refuses to open up emotionally or commit, while the other gives and gives while accommodating the lack of reciprocation.

What does this mean for you?

If you relate to that pattern that I was talking about, take a look at your own cycles. Do you give your all emotionally for extended periods of time without getting the reciprocation? Do you fall hard and fast before they’ve actually shown you anything on an emotional level? Do you push away people that you know could be really good for you? If so, you could be emotionally unavailable.

I know that isn’t an easy thing to face. The good news is, it’s not permanent. You CAN become emotionally available. However, it is going to take some work. You have to do some self-reflection and really dig into your patterns and behaviours. Trace them back to their origins. Stop avoiding or distracting yourself from feeling and give yourself permission to actually FEEL your feelings.

Awareness is power.

Understanding is power.

Once you become consciously aware of these patterns that you have that are resulting in self-sabotage, you begin to really understand them. Once you understand them, you can recognize the beginning of a repeated cycle and consciously choose not to repeat it. Finally, when you make that choice you are able to face the potential pain that could come with it because you’ve allowed yourself to feel fully.

THAT is when you know you are truly healing. To be clear, it doesn’t mean the choice will be easy. For example, when I started to heal I had to cut contact with the man I’d poured myself into for 9 months with no emotional reciprocation. It was extremely painful, but it also felt empowering to choose myself for a change. When he came back, I was thrilled to see some changed behaviour and decided to give it another shot. That only lasted for about a week or two. When I insisted that we connect on a deeper level, he became Casper the friendly ghost once again. Insisting on that need was extremely painful too because it meant I had to be ready to live with the outcome… even if that meant never hearing from him again. It was hard, but it was a choice I had to make to prevent myself from repeating the pattern.

It won’t always be easy to walk away, but at least with the new awareness and understanding that you will gain, you’ll have that choice. You’ll start recognizing it much sooner when you’re letting people give you bread crumbs when you’re giving the entire loaf. Then you can make a different choice and set those healthy boundaries. Unlike the advice I often see shared, my advice is not to just cut these people off if you really care about them. Instead, give them a choice and let them make it for themselves. Tell them what you need to continue, and let them decide if they are willing or able to meet that need.

We have to realize that we can’t force people to open up emotionally before they are ready, but that doesn’t mean we have to continue to suffer waiting for something that may never happen. I feel it is also important to share that this advice includes ourselves. This isn’t a linear process, and you may sometimes feel overwhelmed by a discovery that you make. You may even feel a need to take short breaks from time to time. TAKE THEM. Trust your intuition and allow yourself the time you need to work through one thing before continuing on your journey.

If you can relate to any of this, I would love to hear from you! Drop a comment or send me a note in the contact area.

With love and light,

Jessica

The Secret to Happiness

This weekend I sat in on the virtual World Summit, hosted by Dean Graziosi and Tony Robbins. Every time I hear Tony speak, I am completely mesmerized. He speaks right into your soul with so much love and passion, you can’t look away.

Yesterday he reinforced a message that he shared at the Unleash the Power Within conference that I attended in June. He shared the key to happiness and fulfillment along with 5 keys for leading an extraordinary life. I want to pass that along for you. I’ll also share a tool that you can use in the morning that primes you to have a great day.

If you’ve ever listened to Tony speak before, you may be aware of his CANI mindset. Tony believes that Constant And Never-Ending Improvement is a must. He studied under Jim Rohn who had a similar philosophy and said, “leaders are readers”. The challenge was that you should be reading (or listening) to something that teaches you something new or challenges your mind every single day for at least 30 minutes.

Now can you guess what the secret to happiness might be based on that preface?

Tony says the secret to happiness and fulfilment is PROGRESS. You ever notice how you achieve something you were so excited to achieve, maybe get a promotion or a new job, and then shortly thereafter the excitement starts to lull? If you stay still at the same level for too long, you’re likely to grow bored and unhappy until you push to a new level and feel the excitement and the drive that comes from being challenged to grow. When we’re learning, we’re happy.

If you commit to doing the uncomfortable action every day, making consistent progress, you’re very likely going to be happier and stronger. Much like putting money away each week will compound over time into bigger savings, those small daily actions investing in yourself will compound in a similar way. You might not see it right away, though in time your mindset will be shaped in a more positive and healthy way and you’ll wake up feeling different.. better. You may even wake up one day to find yourself living the life you currently only dream of having.

5 KEYS FOR LIVING AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE:

  1. Every day you MUST strengthen your mind. This means filling your mind with what will serve you, make you think and grow, and not the BS that comes at you every day in the news or on social media. You have to stand guard at the door to your mind and first feed it with something stronger than the fear-based garbage you will see coming at you later.
  2. Feed, strengthen, and train your body. Become mentally and emotionally fit. To be clear, this is not the same as emotional intelligence. This means creating mental discipline and keeping commitments to yourself. Commit to doing something to train your body every single day for at least 10 minutes a day. Make the goal to get the blood pumping and oxygen flowing, not a specific amount of time to be moving.
  3. Find a role model, or many role models. Find people that are doing what you want to be doing, have what you want to have, and pay attention to what they do. These people don’t have to be perfect, and you can have different models for different facets of life. Maybe you have one role model for business and another for relationships. Maybe you have a totally different role model for health and fitness. Role models are key because they make the impossible possible. They show you it CAN be done. All you have to do is find out what they are doing or have done to be successful in that area, and then start doing those things yourself.
  4. Proximity is POWER. Make it your mission to regularly put yourself in close proximity with people doing what you want to do and succeeding. This is easier in the land of social media. If you make it a point to put yourself in environments where you can interact with others doing what you want to do, eventually an opportunity will present that could change your life. An added benefit is that if you surround yourself with people that are successful, you will learn and grow as a person yourself and start leveling up.
  5. GIVE more than you expect to RECEIVE. Tony says the secret to happiness is progress, and the secret to living is giving. Contribution makes us feel alive. It makes us feel good to give unconditionally, no strings, no expectations of getting anything back. If we put our focus into helping others and giving or serving freely, we won’t have to worry about receiving. What we give freely we get back multiplied. We build good karma that the universe will return to us in our time of need.

Implementing these keys has the potential to make big shifts in your life. I can personally testify to that effect. Since UPW and enrolling in Mastery University and the Neuroencoding Certification with Joseph McClendon the 3rd, I’ve been learning every day. I have put myself within close proximity to people doing what I want to do and being successful, and as a result I’ve had an opportunity present where I was able to speak on a podcast for the first time. I’ve been sharing what I learn freely and feeling more fulfillment knowing I am helping and inspiring others. I’ve been eating better and moving my body, resulting in feeling healthier and happier. This stuff works.

I promised to give you a tool you can use, and I want to deliver. This is an exercise that we did live at UPW with Tony, and it was POWERFUL. This exercise connects you emotionally to that which you are already grateful for as well as what you hope to have in the future. It is a priming exercise and a great way to start your day in a positive frame of mind.

Try it out and let me know how you feel!

With love and light,

Jessica

Owning Your Emotions

If you really want to challenge yourself, I highly encourage reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson 😅 His no BS approach pulls NO punches, as you can see from the photo I took. It can be difficult to get through because your ego can get a little bruised haha.

When you are out of touch with your self awareness you often don’t take ownership of your emotions. You tend to have knee jerk emotional reactions to what others say or do that triggers you, and you make them the responsible party for causing you to feel that way. What most people don’t realize is that they are unconsciously associating whatever was said or done with something from their past that caused them to feel this way. In essence, they have triggered an old wound that resulted in a knee-jerk reaction.

This approach often comes from a place of victim mentality, where you expect people to never say or do things that trigger you. To be clear, I am in no way downplaying the experience of anyone that has truly been victimized! I am simply referring to things like minor disagreements or misunderstandings due to the implied

meanings we place on things from our past experiences. In allowing these unconscious triggers to provoke reactions in us and placing blame on the other person for “causing” this feeling, it is placing a burden on other people to save you from yourself.

Conversely, through our life experiences many of us develop an unconscious belief that love is conditional. You may have been made to feel like you are responsible for the happiness of other people, and you take that on. You try to do whatever you can to save others from themselves. This can present as the chronic people-pleasers, who try to give and give to those around them because they believe that is what will get them the love and respect that they crave.

Somehow in my past I’ve managed to take on the persona of both described. The yin and the yang – the victim and the saver. I’ve traced this back to all kinds of relationships I’ve had, including friends, family, and love interests/partners. Both of these personas come from a place from wanting to be loved and have connection, though it never works because the kind of love and connection that we really need is unconditional.

What I have learned through my own journey is that the best thing we can do is focus on ourselves and our own betterment. Building self awareness and emotional intelligence through reflection and learning. What Mark says is so true – we have to take responsibility for our own emotions and actions in order to have a healthy relationship with anyone else.

I think it is important for you to know that you don’t have to be “healed” to be loved. Nor do you need to fully love yourself before someone else can love you, as is often said. You do, however, have to be willing to work on yourself and your relationships. I believe that the key to having a strong relationship or friendship that can thrive long-term is for both parties to be willing to grow TOGETHER.

It’s not about finding a relationship with no conflict. It’s not about finding people that never trigger any of your automatic reactions. It about finding the relationships where both parties feel loved and fully supported to be vulnerable. Being able to communicate how you feel without judgment and have support working through those triggers. That is what I’ll be waiting for in my love life and friend circles!

If you’ve read this book, I would love to hear your thoughts! Drop a comment and let me know what insights you liked most from the book. Did any of this resonate with you?

With love and light,

Jessica

What it Means to Rationalize

I was listening to expert insights recently and I heard a really interesting concept I thought I’d share: When we rationalize, what we are actually doing is telling ourselves RATIONAL LIES 💥

For context, it was talking about how humans are emotional beings that typically make decisions based on emotions. We then use logic to back up those decisions (rationalizing).

The point being made here is that we need to train ourselves to respond rather than to react. It’s not about not feeling emotion, but rather being in control of them so you are better able to relate with others in business and in life. I’ve never heard it put this way before!

Now that I think about it, it’s totally true. We usually rationalize doing things we know that we shouldn’t do, or not doing things we know that we SHOULD do. In the process, we abandon ourselves and what we know to be true. No wonder so many of us struggle with self doubt! We literally give ourselves excuses to do things we shouldn’t do or avoid things we should be doing, and often we will feel guilty about it later.

Example: You’re trying to lose weight and someone offers you some kind of junk food. You really want the food even though you know it doesn’t align with your new lifestyle change, and you rationalize having it by being like “well I’ve been good all week so far, once meal isn’t going to kill me”. What usually happens though is we feel bad after eating it, we recognize we shouldn’t have done it, and for anyone who’s ever had an eating disorder – you likely punish yourself subconsciously by eating more junk food and ruining your progress. I’ve been there many times.

What is happening unconsciously when we do this is we are lying to ourselves, and because we ARE ourselves, we know it is a lie. What happens if a friend or loved one consistently lies to you? You’re going to lose trust in that person. The same is true for ourselves, and I think that is why many of us struggle with self doubt, indecision, and willpower. We have lied to ourselves so many times that we lost faith in our own ability to keep a promise to ourselves.

The good news is, this can be changed. If we become aware of this, all it takes is acknowledging when this is happening. I will literally talk to myself in my head as though I am talking to another person. “No Jessica you don’t need that, you want it for comfort. You’ve worked so hard, you don’t want to throw it all away now.” That is just one example, and the purpose is to give you back your self-confidence. In creating successful situations where you kept a promise to yourself, that is a natural by-product.

Can you think of a situation in which you rationalized? Let me know in the comments! I would love to hear your thoughts or learn of any successes you have in shifting these mindsets.

With love and light,

Jessica

Tony Robbins’ UPW

In June 2021 I attended Tony Robbins’ Unleash the Power Within conference and it completely shifted my perspective on what I thought I wanted. It was truly a life-changing experience for me that I think every human needs to experience for themselves at least once! If you’ve followed me for a while, you may have seen my old blog (fitnessbeautytravel) where I focused on my makeup and fitness business aspirations. I originally signed up for UPW because I had this dream in mind for my makeup business, and thought I needed a little push to get it going.

I went into UPW thinking I would gain clarity and break through the things that were holding me back professionally, and I came out with much more than I bargained for! My entire young adult life I have struggled with indecision when it comes to the path I’m meant to take. I loved health and fitness, I loved psychology and helping others, and I loved doing makeup and seeing the looks on happy faces afterward. I always felt like I had to choose ONE passion, and I struggled with that because I didn’t want to make the wrong choice. This resulted in several periods where I would have false starts career-wise. I would get all amped up about a new direction, then self-sabotage because I wasn’t sure it was the right thing for me.

What I’ve learned is that I don’t HAVE to choose just one of my passions to do for the rest of my life or even for this next chapter. All of these passions have a common thread. Though I love all of those things, they are just passions. I explained this to Joseph McClendon the 3rd, and he shared a perspective that Tony had shared with him. There is a difference between a passion and a purpose. A passion is something you love, a purpose is something that drives you. For me, the common thread among all of my passions is looking, feeling, and being my best – mentally, physically, and emotionally. What DRIVES me is sharing what I learn along the way to help others to do the same for themselves. Making a positive impact on others, in the world.

I had felt anxious about “giving up” my makeup focus because I worked incredibly hard to earn my certification and license to practice. Joseph said – “sometimes when we lose our dream, we find our destiny” – CHILLS! I know now that this is who I am and who I want to be. If you knew me in the past, you would have witnessed a few other periods of my life were I was super focused on all of this too. Inevitably something in life would happen and I would fall right back to comfortable patterns. What this means is that this version of me has always been there, in the back of my mind, waiting for me to push through the BS and fear of failure and make 💩 happen. I’ve come close a few times.

To ensure that this cycle doesn’t repeat, I’ve invested in Tony’s Mastery University program so I can keep moving forward with full immersion. I was so excited to see my swag box come in with a beautiful journal to document my growth! While I wait (rather impatiently😂) for Date with Destiny in December, I’ll be continuing to work on my Neuroencoding Method of Coaching certification with Joseph McClendon the 3rd.

I’m so excited to see what the next few years bring! No looking back now! Thank you so much for joining me for this crazy ride. I can’t wait to settle into this next chapter of my life where I will be able to share all that I’ve learned with you.

With love and light,

Jessica

Going Through a Rebirth

The intention for this morning’s KINRGY workout was “rebirth” and I was reminded of the lifecycle of a butterfly. This is such a powerful concept!

We start out as caterpillars, growing and evolving, stumbling our way through life. Then as life unfolds, we learn through (sometimes painful) experiences, we often create these little cocoons for ourselves in comfort zones. We fill these comfort zones with distractions, vices, etc. We talk ourselves into staying where we are when we’re afraid of going after what we really want in case we’ll fail.

At a certain point, we decide to face our fears and push through the uncertainty. Deciding to keep moving forward despite the pain it might bring. We start to transform from the inside and grow into our true potential. We become the beautiful butterfly we were always meant to be 🦋

To become the butterfly, the caterpillar first has to liquify the old version of themselves. It has to break free from that cocoon. This is so in line with a healing journey because it requires going inward and becoming aware of all that you tried to repress. It means feeling the pain and emotions you tried to ignore for so long.

Instead of trying to hide from the fire you decided to walk right through it, and it is through withstanding that fire that we come out the other side reborn. Remember this the next time you’re in the struggle. This process can be difficult and sometimes you need to take a step back to process and rest. Don’t let that become permanent or go back to old ways.

Always keep moving forward because you DESERVE to get to the other side of this pain and have a normal and happy life 💖

With love and light,

Jessica