28: Thriving after sexual trauma
===
[00:00:00]
Jo: Hello beautiful soul and welcome back to the podcast. I'm going to preface this episode with a trigger warning. Mom, if you're listening to this, this might not be the episode for you to listen to just going to throw that out there. so the trigger Warning [00:01:00] today is because we are talking about sexual abuse and trauma that I experienced in my life. All right. So if you are still here, even after that trigger warning, let's get into it. I was trying to figure out how I was even going to start this episode because it is pretty deep and it can be heavy and really activating for some people. And I think where I want to start today is with. The fact that one of my clients, the other day told me that I'm a powerful healer and I felt like that was a super big compliment. It made my heart just so warm and I felt so expansive and then my Nana's voice came into my mind. She had been reading my palms one day and she told me that I didn't have the markings of a healer. At first that stone, the little, you know, like I, all I wanted to do ever really was help people. And for her to tell me that I didn't have the markings of a healer, that I wasn't going to be a good healer. It was [00:02:00] kind of disappointing. You know, telling your kid or a teenager that healing is not the modality for them when they just want to help people is like kind of pulling the rug out from under you. And then it hit me. I am not a healer. I am a facilitator of healing, but I am not a healer. I am here to hold space and allow you, guide you, to heal yourself. That was pretty empowering for me to realize that I'm not here to heal you. Because there is nothing that I can do for you that you can't do for yourself and by me facilitating, by me allowing you the space to open up and to listen to what your subconscious needs and guiding you. You're the one who heals yourself. I'm not the healer. You're the healer. And that was pretty big for me. The reason why I bring this up in the light of this episode today is because not only have I [00:03:00] personally been through this kind of trauma, it's also a kind of trauma that many, many, many, many women have been through themselves. And by me being able to get through it. That means that you are able to get through it to you. And I know that sounds a little like, oh, well, if I can do it, you can too. Like, I'm not trying to be that person. But I am trying to provide a light at the end of the tunnel for anybody else who might be experiencing trauma. Or might be experiencing patterns and programs that were set up because of the trauma. I want you to know that you can be free of them. You 100% can be free of them. It is your choice and decision to heal. I cannot heal you for you. And. That brings me back to the, I am not a healer. I am just here to facilitate and hold space and guide you through your self healing. And I feel like that's really empowering. To take [00:04:00] your healing into your own hands, instead of just trying to go to somebody to heal you for you. Then you can take all of these skills and everything that you've learned and apply them to other areas of your life. So anyway. That was a long preface for this episode, so let's just go ahead and get into it because I want to share with you how this trauma that I experienced showed up or manifested itself throughout my life and how I went about healing it. So just to kind of set the stage so that, you know kind of a timeline of everything that I went through personally. We won't go into detail on any of these, because I don't want it to be that kind of episode. But what I will say is that my first sexual encounter was in third grade. This kept going for a while. And then in fourth grade, I think it was actually the summer between the fourth grade and fifth grade. I was molested by a man who we thought was a friend of my friend's parents. He had [00:05:00] his big 18 Wheeler truck parked in their yard. So we thought that they knew him, maybe they did. I'm not entirely sure. Maybe they didn't know him very well. It was me and my sister and our two friends. And the man asked us if we wanted to ride. We were curious little girls thinking that this man was a friend of my friends, parents. So we were like, yeah. Only one of my friends decided to stay back. And thank God she did because she ran inside and told her grandpa that we had all gotten in this truck with this man and who knows what would have happened if she hadn't stayed behind? But this man asked me if I wanted to drive and I was like, sure, like this is crazy. Sure. Let's do it. Well, one thing led to another and you can kind of guess what happened next. Luckily, our friends, grandfather was driving right behind this man. And this man noticed that we were being followed. So [00:06:00] he pulled over and we were all able to get out and go back home. But when I was asked if anything happened, I lied and said no, because I was scared that I would get an even more trouble if I said that something had happened, like how could I let something like that happen? I was already grounded for a month. I didn't want to be grounded any longer. So I lied and said, no. To this day. I don't think that my parents know that I lied. I don't think that they know what happened during that ride. So fast forward now to a party at one of my friend's houses. The last thing I remember was being handed another beer and starting to drink it. That was beer two. From there, I remember bits and pieces of it being in a very dark room. Wanting to tell people to stop doing what they were doing to me. And not being able to say anything. Not being able to move. Not being able to do anything and I [00:07:00] think, luckily for me, I don't remember all of it. But what I do remember was very hard for me to remember. And then the next morning when I woke up and came to, I was blamed for everything that had happened. So, I don't know specifics on who it was or what exactly happened, but I do know enough to know that. I was raped that night by multiple people and then blamed for it by my best friend at the time whose house it was in. So from that point forward, I kind of created the story in my head that if this was something that was going to be taken from me anyway, I may as well have some sort of control over it. I created this story that people were going to take from me what they wanted, no matter what. And because it was going to happen anyway, I needed to have some semblance of control. So, what did I do? I ended up going on [00:08:00] like this huge whore rampage. I'm not proud of it, but I do recognize that it was a way for me to cope at the time and because I didn't trust men in relationships. I have this pattern where I would start to push people away as soon as they started to get close to me. I never allowed them to fully love me. I never allowed myself to love anybody. And as soon as somebody got close, especially too close for my liking. I pushed them away. At the time when I was living these programs I didn't realize it. I didn't realize it until years later when I was like, all of my relationships end the same way. Why, what is wrong with me? Because at some point there's a common denominator and that common denominator was myself. So I really had to take a step back and look at what was going on with me. I hadn't put two and two together that it was my sexual trauma that was putting all of these patterns into place. [00:09:00] It wasn't until I discovered mindset work. I discovered mindset coaching. I discovered the coaching program that I went through. And started learning about the subconscious mind learning about all of our patterns that I started to put pieces together. And even still I had pushed all of this trauma so far down. I buried it. I dug holes that were like a thousand feet deep. Buried it down. Packed that dirt so good that you wouldn't even notice that it was there. It wasn't until I started healing other things in my life that some of these things started coming up to the surface to be healed because your subconscious mind will do that. It's like, oh, look at this. She is ready to heal things. Let's start bringing shit up. So the things that started coming up, I was like, holy fuck. One of them. I was like, did this even really happen? Did it really happen because I had pushed it down so far that I had forgotten about it [00:10:00] completely. I had no recollection of it until it came up again. And then more of those situations started bubbling to the surface where the same thing can happen over and over. And what I thought may have been a dream at first. There was now undeniable evidence in my memory. That it was all true. The subconscious mind is a very fascinating thing and it is so good at what it does, because it will repress memories to keep you safe. And at the time it repressed that memory to keep me safe. And there are still chunks of my childhood that I don't remember at all. I have no memory from. And that's because I'm not quite ready to heal that yet. So healing is done in layers, right? It's like peeling back the layers of an onion. You heal one layer. And you peel that one off. And then there's another layer to be healed and another layer to be healed. So it's an ongoing process. Once I started healing, these little pieces of me, this trauma that had come [00:11:00] up to the surface because it was ready to be healed. Once I started healing those pieces. The patterns that I was experiencing in my relationships started to dissolve. So now instead of having an unhealthy relationship to sex, instead of feeling like it was going to be taken from me anyway. Instead of feeling like I need to control aspects of it. I'm able to receive gracefully and gratefully and know, that it's a mutual relationship. It's not this give and take. It can be a beautiful co-creative process when done with the right person. And I no longer push people away when I feel like they're getting too close when they feel like they are starting to get to know me too well, as evidenced by my current relationship, my marriage with my husband. He knows me better than anybody I've ever known and it's a really beautiful thing to see the transition, see the [00:12:00] growth, the evolution as I have healed these parts of myself and as I've healed, All of the trauma that I had been through. The examples that I gave aren't a full picture of everything that I'd been through, but I wanted to spare some of the details because it's not a sob story. I don't speak on the sexual trauma that I experienced because I want sympathy. I speak on the sexual trauma that I experienced now to hopefully empower and inspire other women who have been through the same to keep going, to keep healing, to keep on with their journey because I experienced deep depression. I experienced deep suicidal ideations. There are many times where I did not want to be living on this planet anymore, where I thought for certain that the world would be better off without me. And there were many times where my kids were the only reason why I kept going. Where my mother was the only reason I kept going, because she had [00:13:00] already lost one child. I did not want her to have to lose another. And I was really hoping not to get super emotional during this episode. But the thing is I did not experience everything that I experienced to keep quiet about it. I am not here to pretend like everything was okay to pretend like everything still is okay. Because every day, Is a different challenge. Every day, there's a different pattern that comes up. Every day, there's something else to grow through, to learn from to nurture. As we are on this journey and everybody's story is different. Everybody goes through different hell's, but nobody's story is less important than somebody else's. And we're here now to not keep our stories quiet. Because if we keep our stories quiet, if I keep my story quiet, how can I help somebody else who has gone through something similar? So often we feel like our stories aren't important. We feel like [00:14:00] our stories don't hold merit or value or weight of any sort. We downplay our stories. We downplay our experiences and the thing is that's what makes us fucking human. That's what generates connection. That is what separates us from AI. And robots. We're here to make connection. We're here to help each other learn and grow. And if we don't share our stories, if we don't share our successes, if we don't share our struggles, how are we going to learn and grow? So I'm here to do that. I'm here to let you know that I've been through this shit. And. It's still a journey. I'm not here to tell you that, like I've come out on the other side and everything is great. 100% of the time. That's not how life works. I am here to tell you that I've healed from so much shit that my life now looks completely different than it did a couple years ago. I'm here now to tell you that I've healed [00:15:00] from so much shit. That my mindset. The way that I view life is completely different than what it was a couple of years ago. I'm here to tell you. That those negative spirals that you find yourself in where one thought leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to you you not wanting to be on this earth anymore. Those will start to diminish and eventually go away. The last negative spiral I had was insane. The way that I was in the shower and I noticed the negative spiral starting. And I literally took a step back and I was like, wait, That's not true. And it stopped. I'm here to tell you that your life can look so much different when you start to heal things, when you start to heal parts of yourself that you've suppressed for so long when you start to listen to and connect with your body, which most of us have cut off. ' cause we don't like to feel. We don't like to [00:16:00] feel the hard things we don't like to experience our emotions. And yet once you start to experience your emotions. Once you start to learn what your emotions are. I had no idea what some of my emotions were for the longest time. I'd feel things and even my ex-husband was like, what is going on with you? And I was like, I don't know. Like I have this feeling, but I don't know what it is. Going on this journey, identifying my emotions, identifying what's going on with my body and just reconnecting with it has changed my life so much. There's so much, so much that I want to share. There's so much that is here for us to learn and experience and grow through. Yet, we're not taught how to do that. Most of us don't have access to that and we're going to change that. The Rise Empire is changing that. I have such a huge vision for this [00:17:00] company and this company is going to change lives, it's going to change the world. And we're going to change the way that we function as a society that we interact with each other that we heal ourselves. Like I said at the beginning, I am not a healer. I'm a facilitator. I'm a guide. I hold space. And guide you to be able to heal yourself. I think that's a good place to end this episode. I went through this episode with absolutely no notes on what I was going to talk about just a general idea in my mind of where I wanted it to go. Did it go that way? Who knows. We'll find out. But I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you stuck with me to the end. I'm so glad that you made it out on the other side. If you have any questions or want to reach out and talk to me about anything. You can reach me to [email protected]. If you are interested in joining us for the next round of REIGN that starts September 4th. Go ahead and also email [00:18:00] me REIGN R E I G N at [email protected]. We can get you on the waiting list. REIGN will not only teach you how to design a life that you love, but also how to heal and change those subconscious programs that you have running your life right now. So that you can open yourself up to receiving and creating that life that you love to live. So that's it for today. I love you. And I will see you in the next one.
[00:19:00]
