Life Reentry: Exiting the Waiting Room
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello friends, my name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after show community question and answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Christina Rasmussen. Originally from Greece, Christina is an acclaimed grief educator. She’s the founder of The Life Reentry Institute, where she’s helped countless people break out of what she has named “the waiting room of grief” in order to rebuild their lives through her life reentry model. She herself suffered the tragic loss of her husband when he was just 35 years old, and she became the author of a book that’s a step-by-step guide to life after loss called Second Firsts. She also wrote a book called Where Did You Go?: A Life-Changing Journey to Connect with Those We’ve Lost. And now just recently, she’s created a new book with Sounds True that’s on the topic of Invisible Loss: Recognizing and Healing the Unacknowledged Heartbreak of Everyday Grief. Christina, welcome.
Christina Rasmussen: I’m so happy to be here right now Tami, can I just say this? Your voice is so soothing and we have never met before, but it feels like we have inside my soul, my heart. So I am so looking forward to this conversation. It’s going to be great.
TS: Likewise. As a way for me to get to know you better and a way for our audience, for people who are meeting you for the first time, share a little bit about how being a grief educator became this life focus for you and the birth of your first book, Second Firsts.
CR: Most people are very surprised to hear that I chose grief as a profession prior to the loss of my first husband, did my master’s thesis in England as I was doing the counseling program on the stages of bereavement, and I wanted to specialize in grief. I wanted to have a grief therapy practice. And at the time, Tami, my professor in the UK said to me, “You are such a happy person. Why would you want to dedicate your life to this?” And I said to her then not knowing what was going to happen in my life that I could not imagine losing someone I love because I love people so much, I wouldn’t be able to overcome it, and I would love to know how to help others go through that very hard period in their lives. At the time, I had no idea that later on, my 31-year-old husband was going to be diagnosed with colon cancer. It was terminal, and he passed away at age 35.
Before all this happened, I used to sit with a dying in hospice. I used to volunteer for their families to go home and shower and have something to eat and I would sit with their family members. I facilitated support groups, groups where spouses lost their partners before any of this happened in my life. And I remember my first husband would pick me up in the evenings from these groups and I would say to him, and he was in Houston, Texas at the time, how grateful am I to have each other and to be so healthy and alive? And then everything changed. He was diagnosed in 2003 and I wish it was me. I wish it was me dying. And I mean it. I felt the pain of losing him was worse than my own death.
At the time of the diagnosis, the girls were nine months old and two and a half years old. And when he passed away after a three and a half year journey of fighting for his life, we went on so many adventures to save him. In 2006, they were four and six years old, and when I experienced this tragic grief, I couldn’t believe how different, unexpected and surprising it was in comparison to the academics, to the theory that I learned over the years. It was nothing like it. It was so much worse and devastating and I felt like I couldn’t… My body, never mind my mind, physically, I didn’t think I could survive it. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t cry. And I talk about that over the years, that I spent the first few months not able to shed tears, and I could scream, I could write, but I couldn’t cry for something so devastating for me.
And that’s when this chapter of my life began. And actually, and I’ll go forward 20 years, 21 years since the diagnosis to the birth of this book, Invisible Loss, I told myself as I was counting down the days of this book being born, that I was ending a very, very long and big chapter of my life with the birth of this book. So we are about a week in and I am very reflective of this journey that I was on, first choosing grief as my profession, then grief choosing me as an experiencer of grief, and then resigning from my corporate job because I didn’t want to have anything to do with grief after he died. I couldn’t imagine myself being a teacher or having a practice. And I remember saying to myself, if I ever make it back to feeling alive, I’m going to go back and get everyone else who’s over there in so much pain, because that’s when I knew millions of people are suffering at such a devastating way that I couldn’t imagine it.
And then in 2010, four years after his loss, I resigned from the corporate world that I was working for the health insurance for the kids, and started writing just a few sentences at first. As people can hear, this is my second language. So being an author of three books in the US maybe was more of a fantasy for me. And I remember I studied this Facebook page. At the time, I called it Second Firsts, before the book was born. And I started writing just a few sentences and then more and more. And then Tami, so many people joined that I was shocked by it and the journey to getting people back to life started in 2010.
TS: Now you mentioned that with Invisible Loss, this marks a bookend, if you will. It marks a completion and a birth of something new. You’re working now with people, not necessarily on the loss of someone dear to them, but on something much more subtle. Talk to us about that and why this new phase of your work is so important to you, why you’re so passionate about it.
CR: Around 2014, ’15, I was in my classes, my life-reentry classes. Every class had 200 people, 150 people from all over the world, multiple classes like that. And I remember seeing something and noticing something that I couldn’t quite understand at first because as you mentioned in your introduction, I coined the term the waiting room. This is a place between the life we live behind because of an event, something that happened to us that changed the course of our life. So it’s between that life and the life that we could have. And we go in that place in between thinking that’s our second life, that’s our new chapter, but it isn’t. It’s just a place of stagnation until we feel better. And when we stay there, we keep staying there and we keep habitually becoming more like that survivor mindset I talk about in the book. And I realized millions of people live in that place in between.
So in my classes, as I was making a new discovery, I could see people step out of the waiting room after devastating loss, find their way to a new chapter in their life, and then Tami, something would pull them back. And it wasn’t the tragedy. At first, I was like, as we all think about the sentence that we’ve been taught over the years, time heals all wounds. Grief never goes away. I’m thinking this tragedy is the reason why everyone is coming back for recovery, coming back to the safe place, and then again, it’s very hard to go out. And I remember saying to myself, it’s got to be something else. There’s something else going on here that the tragedy’s masking is shadowing. And that’s when I started calling it Invisible Loss.
And in all these conversations I’ve been having during the release of the book, I try to be very clear to everyone, it’s almost like educating people for this new way to look at grief, it is not a secondary loss. It is not a loss after divorce, it’s not a loss of a relationship, it’s not a loss of a pet, it’s not like those things that we are already accepting as grief in our society. An invisible loss is very subtle. It comes from an unacknowledged form of a moment of impact that came into our lives that impacted us so dramatically, and we kind of lost that perception of self. We lost our belief in ourselves. We started to doubt who we are, especially if we’ve been publicly rejected.
And one of the main invisible losses I saw over the years, Tami, was being in a classroom setting where the teacher would scold the child publicly, or in a meeting room with our peers at work in a work setting where you feel embarrassed and ashamed because you feel like you don’t know enough, you’re not seen as the smart and the special person that you feel like you are, that moment is a moment of impact that actually takes us away from the connection of what I call the original self, the part of us that knows who we are, knows our gifts and our ways of being, and we start to doubt and question our abilities and our skills and we start to live life from that waiting room, and making choice based on our fears and our doubts and not our gifts or skills that we deeply know that we have.
And that loss, to me, however subtle is a very catastrophic experience because we are here to live the right life for us. But imagine the majority of us are slightly living the wrong life, even just a little bit. And it’s based on decisions that we make when we don’t believe that we can actually become who we know we can be because of the way the world around us sees us. So we have many moments of impact that translate to invisible losses and translate to a primary invisible loss that takes place much earlier. And it begins when we experience our first us versus them. When we are disconnected from the world, when the world is starting to see us as less than… When our parents, when friends, when the people in our lives are looking at us, Tami, and they don’t think we have what it takes or that our expression of self is inadequate, is not good enough. And that’s where we experience our first invisible loss, which is the invisible loss of that original self.
TS: Okay, let’s say someone’s listening and they’re like, “I want to track the invisible loss or losses in my own life.” You mentioned this notion of a primary invisible loss. So I’d like to know, what’s the primary invisible loss? So maybe you can also help us understand there are lots of invisible losses, there’s a primary one, and most importantly, “How do I discover this for myself?” Says the listener.
CR: Yes. In our book, Invisible Loss, first of all, I want to say it took me about three different rounds of writing. And for some reason, I thought it was going to be, not easy, but I’ve written two other books, and surely the third book, I shouldn’t have any problems with it. It was the hardest book to write, to be able to articulate what that invisible loss is and to help the reader to track down… There’s two exercises as the book begins, and I call them the tracking exercises. There’s the tracking of the primary invisible loss and the tracking of a current present experience of an invisible loss. And there’s an early exercise in the book and it asks you, “If you were to write a little bit of your life story, here’s a few prompts to begin.” And you can start by saying, “Even though my parents were great, I didn’t feel happy.” “Even though I had a great childhood, I actually felt this way.”
We are being taught to celebrate our lives and be grateful for all these great things that we have because we’re not homeless, because we’re not starving, because we’re not experiencing devastating moments like other nations, other parts of the world experience. But yet this poverty is inner, it’s within ourselves, the poverty of survival. We are actually hungry and afraid within ourselves every day. And we cannot look at that if we’re looking at our life thinking, “I have nothing to complain about. I have nothing. Look at that person that just was diagnosed with cancer. Look at the person that lost their spouse or their child. I have nothing to complain.” Actually, that is wrong. And I think this modern era, this phase in our lives, it’s time that we’re looking at ourselves through the lenses of a wealthy inner world versus a poor inner world. And we need to start by looking at the places in our lives where we pull back, where we procrastinate, where we stop sharing ourselves.
It could be, there’s an example in the book about your father, for example, dating a new person and you feel like you’re happy for him, but every time he invites you for a Sunday dinner, you struggle to say yes and you don’t know why. You love your father, you have a good relationship with your dad, but there’s something that is holding you back and you keep postponing it, and you keep changing the plans. And even when you make it to that dinner, you’re sitting at the dinner table just nodding or saying what you think needs to be said to make them happy. There’s an invisible loss there, and in the book, there’s questions that you’re being asked to find, to nail it down, to track it. Every person, depending on their circumstances, have different invisible losses and moments of impact. And why this is so hard to find, and this is so hard to articulate because it doesn’t sound like a very solid experience. Can I give an example?
TS: Please, yeah.
CR: And it’s talking about my own personal invisible losses versus my tragic losses. It’s much harder to do. We’re more ashamed and we worry about how we’re being perceived when we are sharing an invisible loss. When I share about the tragedies of my life, I know there’s a lot of empathy and support in our culture when we hear something like this, but when we hear about a devastating experience that doesn’t have the traditional elements of tragedy, we don’t behave in the way that we need to to create a healing environment in our world. So I’m going to share this example. It’s always hard. No matter how many times I share this, it’s always hard.
Tami, I was invited to this dinner experience, dinner event in New York City with some fellow authors 2014, nearly 10 years ago now, 2015. I was very excited to be invited at this dinner with fellow authors and how great. And now I get invited this and we are in this event and we’re all waiting for all of us to take the elevator down to go to the dinner. And I’m sitting in this corner and some people over there and over there, and all of a sudden, there’s one of the people. The person who invited me is walking towards me, looks me in the eye and says, “Christina, you can’t come to the dinner. I have to uninvite you.” I stood there Tami and I was like, what is she saying to me right now? What is going on? She said, “I’m so sorry. I can’t say more, but I made a mistake. I didn’t know there was no…” I don’t even know what she was saying. There was an excuse, a reason.
I am someone who’s experienced a lot of tragedy. I’m a tough cookie. I am tough as nails. I can go through anything in my life, and I’m feeling I’m starting to shake and I have to walk with all of them to the elevator, take that elevator down, sit in that small elevator with everyone in silence and get down to the ground floor. They turned right. I turned left, and I cried my eyes out. I went to my hotel room and cried. And I was ashamed and I felt so impacted by this. It took me a long time to even talk about it or share it, but that was a moment of impact that felt like a loss of myself because all of a sudden, this group of peers that are respected did not see me worthy enough to be a part of that dinner.
In my survivor self mindset is saying, “Well, you’re not worthy enough. Who do you think you are sitting here thinking that you’re the same as all the others?” And I put myself in that waiting room and I actually felt like for a while not worthy of these kind of invitations. And as I shared this story in these conversations or in groups, there are so many hands that go up and tell me they share their own version of this when they’re being abandoned, they’re not being asked to the party, they’re not being asked to come with the inner circle with the people.
And it was devastating even for me who… The reason why I’m saying even for me is because I went through so much tragedy in my life. I had to tell my kids their father passed away. I had to hold them when they were crying, really hard moments. And for me to burst into tears for something like this. And then we started seeing it in my classroom. So many people had so many experiences that completely and utterly devastated them, but they couldn’t articulate and they couldn’t share it with the world.
TS: So I think I can understand and appreciate these times of feeling rejected, times of being left out that happened in our adult life. Is a primary invisible loss something that happened to us early, and how do we identify that primary invisible loss? I think the exercise you gave, “My parents were wonderful, they loved me, and…” That’s really helpful. But then is there one thing we’re supposed to zero in on, or maybe there are many things that happened in our childhood?
CR: Yes, as you are reading the book, you will zero in in one experience, because whatever comes to your mind by tracking it down… And the questions that I’m asking you in the book is, when did you first feel like you were being scolded by expressing yourself? When was the first time that you felt separated by the world around you? When did you feel like you were doing things wrongly? And there’s a whole list of questions from that point on, you start to see yourself as a child not worthy and not good enough. There was someone I was talking to yesterday in an interview and his story, and he shares this with the world, he said that his teacher stepped in, he was five years old, and his teacher stepped in when other kids were bullying him and making fun of him, the teacher stepped in to defend him and to save him from this bullying. But she said, “Don’t tease the kid with a broken brain.” And the way he saw himself from that moment on was that his brain was broken.
There are comments that are being made early on in our life. Actually, Jennifer Aniston shared, very recently, a moment that she experienced at 11 years old at a dinner table when a grown up turned around and said, “I don’t think this is for you. I think you need to step away.” And she will never forget it. And for her to be sharing this now, these are the moments as children that adults don’t think that children mind. Because we won’t see it. We will not see the tragedy taking place. We will not see them trying to survive their next experience. We will see them play. We will see them having fun. And in the book, I talk about the survivor self and the first time you meet the survivor self as a child. And it comes to your play tent, it comes to your space on the floor when you’re playing with the dolls and it’s trying to protect you from more pain and loss and from more rejection, whether it’s from your friends or from conversations that are taking place in your home.
Another example would be, there’s a story I talk about, a name, Peter, where his father growing up would reward him only when he would take care of the dishes and put them away. So he always felt that that was his gift, to take care of the practical thing. So as he grew up and got jobs, he was the guy at work that just took care of all the practical things. He was not the leader, he was not the strategist, not because he couldn’t do it, but because that’s the way he perceived himself from very, very young. The people in our lives hold this mirror and the way they are reflecting us in that mirror, we actually take on that identity and we let go of the original self-identity and who we are because we are so afraid of being rejected by those people again.
TS: A couple times you’ve mentioned this notion of the survivor self. So just to connect a few things here, how is the survivor self the result of these invisible losses and sense of rejection that we had early on?
CR: That’s a really good question. Over the years doing this work, it became very clear from really early that everyone was surviving something. They would use the word, “I’m just surviving.” And I used to say to myself, gosh, we shouldn’t be surviving. But yet again, in our culture, in our society, when someone overcomes cancer, we call ourselves breast cancer survivor. And it’s a positive thing. When someone overcomes something, they survive this and survive that. But if we stay in that survival mode, we actually are not thriving. We’re not living. So every person has three narrators, three personas within themselves. One is that survivor self, which occupies, I would say around 85% of our thoughts, behavior, actions, because we are made to survive our life because of these earlier losses, these moments of impact.
There’s another narrator, another part of us that are called the watcher self. The watcher self is the witness. And I remember writing this part of the book and it was only written once. This is the only part that I feel like I didn’t have to write a million times. And the watcher self is the part of us that have been with us all along and knows that original self and remembers your skills and remembers your abilities and remembers your specialness and has all the wisdom you need. But because we are in survival mode, we shut down that watcher self, we shut down that witness in us. And then there’s a 5% that I call the thriver self, and actually Tami, some people don’t even remember themselves as children thriving because their memories of survival were so important and their brain was actually shutting down, was not going into the thriver memories out of fear that they would be hurt and rejected again.
So they would remember the hard memories so they can protect themselves better. Remember when you went out in the street and played, you got hurt, don’t go again. So when we visit only those survivor-based memories, we actually… There’s so much study and research that’s being done on this. We, I want to say delete. We actually can’t remember a thriving moment. We can’t remember our kid-like self. So these are the three parts, these three narrators, these three aspects of us that I want everyone to get to know so they can reframe, rewrite, rewire their brain to decrease that survivor mindset, increase that witness, watcher self, and slowly experience moments of thriving again.
The first time someone raised their hand and said in class, in front of everyone, this is the first time I’ve ever seen it, someone said, “Christina, I’m sorry.” We were doing this exercise, I call it the Thriver Bridge to the Past and it’s in the book. And this person’s raised his hand and said, “I’m sorry, Christina. I don’t remember any thriver memories, nothing. I only remember my survivor self that I had to survive my life at home, my life at school, my life in the neighborhood, my life everywhere.” I don’t remember ever thriving. And that was the first time I realized that for some people, there is no memory of that at all. And it was quite fascinating. And as the years went by, more and more people, I would actually acknowledge that to every class and say, “You may not remember and it’s okay, and please raise your hand.” And when that happens, we actually start to build a new thriver self from scratch at age 40, at age 50, at age 60, however old you are, we start to create thriver memories slowly from here.
TS: Now these percentages you’re giving, the 85, 10, five, are you giving those percentages saying that that’s what most of us experienced when we were young? And when we do the work on understanding and releasing invisible loss, do those numbers change? What’s possible?
CR: Yes. So these numbers actually are from the thousands of individuals I work with. This is, I believe, the majority of us without doing not only this work, but any work, any work that lights you up. The Life Reentry model is the work I created into the world. But I believe there’s many different ways and the many different teachers, and I always say to people, find the teacher that speaks to you and you connect with that teacher ultimately to get that thriver self back out into the world. So a lot of people living life today as a 30, 40, as adults have these percentages unless they work on it. As children, we slowly got to these percentages, and if we do the work…
And let me say, I had to do this work. I had to exit a waiting room that I was not even aware in December all the way to here. And it was one of the most invisible waiting rooms I experienced. And I’ve done this work on myself many times in many different ways. And I was surprised the more intelligent we are, the more successful we are, actually the higher survival self we may have. Fame, success, riches, wealth, your home looking like the most pristine home in the neighborhood, actually most of the times hides a very big survivor self that you are surviving from every single day of your life. And it’s been quite the journey to see this in people.
I remember there was an executive in my classes once, he came in and he was angry at first, he was just very angry. And as he was doing the work, it changed him in ways he didn’t expect his relationship with his mother, his relationship with his peers at work, that he had absolutely no idea. He hadn’t lost anyone. There was no death in his family. He had no idea what was going on inside of him. Sometimes, someone listening to this conversation, all they have to hear is this conversation to become aware there’s a waiting room in their life. They could be having a great life, a great work experience. They could be in a great relationship, but their work could be suffering.
They could be healthy and strong, working out every day, but they struggle speaking up and sharing their thoughts. We live in a world where most people don’t interact in honest ways, not because they’re lying or they’re not good people, it’s just because they’re trying to modify themselves to make sure that whatever it is I’m saying in this conversation, Tami, my survivor self, do you know what she’s saying to me right now? “You better say the things you need to say to make sure that Tami likes what you’re saying.”
TS: You’re doing great, Christina. I’m loving what you’re saying.
CR: Thank you so much.
TS: I have more questions, but yes.
CR: Thank you. But this is what happens the first time we go on a date.
TS: Sure.
CR: When we go in a job interview, we’re not asking ourselves in that moment in time, “Is this right for me? Am I having a good experience for myself?” And I say, what if this is my last conversation I have on this planet, on this earth, in this lifetime? And if I spent it trying to please the other person on the other side, what a regret that would be, Tami.
TS: Now you mentioned that you left a certain waiting room, so obviously, we have lots of waiting rooms in our life, in different parts of our lives. What was that in December? What was the quote unquote, “waiting room” that you left?
CR: Yes. I’m so glad I’m having this conversation with you, Tami, because this is connected to the work we’re doing together, and I love having this conversation with you. In December, I said to myself, my gosh, I need to start getting ready for this new book. And the year before this book came to be, I was writing the book, but I was also changing my life dramatically. I’m not allowed to say more than that there’s been clinical trials that have been amazing, and we are waiting. I can’t speak about the results and I don’t know most of them, but there will be scientific papers being read by the scientists that got funded to study live reentry.
So in December and in the year before that, I had started to slow down a little bit in all the teaching I was doing because I was getting burned out. I was doing so much and I had said yes to a dream of mine that I had since I was five or six years old, to study art in my spare time in my little small part of the world. And I went back to school while I was doing everything else to do my MFA in painting. And I was experiencing, Tami, these most wonderful moments in my life. Saying yes to what I’ve always wanted to do, it just blew me away. The experience has been extraordinary. And I was getting closer to the release of this book.
And for my end, December was going to be when I started having the meetings, hiring the team and doing all the things, and Tami, I started having panic attacks. This is my third book. This is not my first rodeo. I’ve done this. I’ve done this two other times really well. Very proud of the work I’ve done in the world. But all of a sudden I was having these panic attacks. I thought I was having a heart attack. I thought I was done. I thought, “Let’s go to the hospital. What is this?” They were catastrophic. And I sat down, I spoke to my kids and my husband, Eric, and I was like, “What is this? I can’t do this.” And I started doing the work. I started asking questions to myself like, “You have a good life. You have a great life, but blah, blah, blah, blah.” I started doing a lot of cleanses.
The cleanse is one of the very first steps of the mental stacking practice that this book helps you create in your life. I started writing the cleanses. I was looking for my fear patterns and my survivor self and what the survivor self was saying, because Tami, we can’t hear it. You can’t just say, “Oh, let me see what my survivor self is saying. What am I afraid of?” The first thing that pops up may not be exactly what’s going on because I was living a great life and I was petrified at the same time, and I couldn’t see why. So I started doing these cleanses and I started looking for my patterns of fear. And there it was. I was so afraid that if I stepped back into the work in this way, I will lose the joy and happiness I was experiencing in the other parts of my life.
And as I was stacking, I was doing the metal stacking and the reframes and the watcher self and the thriver, I said to myself, “The only way forward, the only way out of this waiting room without my life changing was to literally have fun and enjoy every conversation I was going to be a part of.” And there’s a lot of interviews and a lot of conversations. I’m very grateful for them, that I was going to be in this experience like this and I was going to enjoy myself. And I had to find my thriver self in this part of the world and in this part of my life. And in this part of my life, my thriver was afraid. And I discovered that anything that had to do with self-worth in academia, in seeing myself as a teacher, I actually was lacking, and my survivor self had taken over that part.
And why that invisible loss that I experienced in 2014 where I was uninvited to the party, to the dinner party was so catastrophic for me, because I didn’t feel I was worthy of the title of being an author, of being a teacher, of being the person to help so many others. I couldn’t believe it. And deep, deep down, I obviously was not trusting myself in that role. So I had to learn to trust my skills. To get close to that original self, I had to work through some childhood memories in those cleanses, in the mental stacks, and to trust that whatever comes out of my mouth when I am stepping in the public arena comes from the real me and the part of me that is here to thrive and have fun and believe in the extraordinary work that I have here for everyone. And I’m proud and honored to be on this path. And I don’t know if you can tell Tami, I am having a great time.
TS: All right, very good. Well, I want to clarify a couple of things for our listeners, and I want to make sure that they understand what you mean by engaging in cleanses and what you engage in mental stacks. We’re going to get there in just a moment. But first of all, how does someone listening identify, I’m in the waiting room, quote unquote, “in this part of my life. Here’s how I know. Here are the telltale signs.”
CR: Yeah, it looks different for many people. One of the ways that I describe the physical manifestations of the waiting room is that you could have moments of nausea, heart palpitations when you’re about to step into a meeting, you may feel unwell when you’re entering a room, when you’re meeting a friend. There’s the physical manifestation of this. Another way it appears in the cognitive arena of your life is that when you don’t feel worthy enough, when you’re feeling… Imagine being with a friend and every time you are with this friend, you don’t like yourself as much, you are feeling less than, that relationship is in the waiting room. That relationship is not for you. It is not the way that you show up in the world.
And it could be a relationship with a sibling that’s very hard to let go because they’re a family member. It could be a relationship with your mother that’s like this. So after you tell yourself the truth of where in your life you’re pulling away, you’re not feeling like yourself, you don’t feel seen, you don’t feel understood, they don’t know you. You feel like the other person, the other people, the moments you’re with them, you’re feeling being left out. You are at a dinner with three girlfriends, they’re all laughing, but you’re not a part of that experience. Do you know how many people feel that?
TS: Okay, so that’s kind of like these situational waiting rooms. But what if someone has this thing of I feel like I’m living my life in the waiting room, meaning I still haven’t started writing that book I really want to write, or I’ve never learned this musical instrument and I really wish I had and I want to, or whatever it might be, so the unrealized dreams?
CR: Yes. And these are actually easier to discover. Two things popped up in my head when you asked this question. Two things. One is actually a lot of people have not realized their childhood dreams or the fantasies, the fantasy of me being an artist or doing something they love. There’s so many people and the only way to doing it is taking very, very strategic and small steps out of the life they’re living. And I don’t believe in jumping and the net will appear. I don’t believe in large heroic steps out of your life. Do not do that. It doesn’t work. If it works for you, great. I just don’t think it has to be so scary. And the other thing that popped up in my head, Tami, is, and I will trust, that question is, is there the part of your life that is in the waiting room?
TS: Yeah, I mean I think as I read Invisible Loss, I could feel that. And I think the book brings that up for anyone who engages deeply, what is unrealized, unactualized in me that I have a dream to actualize? For sure.
CR: When you felt that, and I hope it’s okay for me to ask this question.
TS: Sure.
CR: Do I have permission?
TS: You do have my permission. Thank you for asking.
CR: Actually, it’s very personal. I feel like when someone is saying, I feel that maybe there is something in my life that I haven’t expressed yet or realized, it’s a very intimate and personal space. And why I do think we need to always ask permission to enter because you and everyone else who has that feeling, they’ve protected that place inside of them. Especially someone who like yourself has made so many dreams come true. You’ve done so many things in your life, and yet if there is something that you’re holding within yourself that hasn’t happened yet, it is the most sacred intimate space within you. And I feel that when I say this, how does it land when I say this to you, Tami?
TS: It feels accurate, Christina.
CR: And why stepping out of that waiting room needs to be done very carefully. And a lot of the times, I say to people, when you decide with yourself to step out, I wouldn’t actually share it with anyone in the beginning because we are surrounded, Tami, by a number of other survivor selves around us that look like our friends, that they don’t want us to change our life, because according to them, our life to them looks great. And I call it the collective survivor voice. So when we are attempting to change a part of our life to realize a dream that is so personal and dear and close to our heart, dare I say, we need to try and keep it a secret in the beginning until we get our thrive and watch ourselves stronger at a higher percentage.
So there’s a phase in the book, in the life reentry model that I call the divergent phase. And I saw the divergent phase throughout the years. When we start to get stronger and stronger in that intimate realization of a dream and we start to take actions that are more public in our life, we experience pushback. And if we’re not strong enough in our thriver and watcher self, that survivor self will make friends with all the other survivor selves and will push us back into that waiting room. So it’s a very important first step, is to keep this close to your heart, that decision that you’ve made and to trust your path to get you out. And it’s going to take a little bit of time. When I signed up for the school, my art school, I didn’t tell anyone, Tami. I told no one that I went back to school to study art. I was actually worried as to what would my community think?
And it was thinking back to this now, and when I shared, it was very different to what my survivor self was saying, my survivor self said to me, “Don’t you dare tell anyone about this. They’re not going to be able to still see you as the teacher of this work. What are you doing learning how to paint? That’s not serious. What do you think you’re doing?” So I hid it and I took one class at a time, and about six months in, I actually shared it for the first time.
And Tami, the response was so extraordinary because our actions and the way we live our life is actually more important even than the books we write. Because the way I live my life is the example and the inspiration for so many people to actually say yes. I wrote a blog once called The Forbidden Path. That was my art. I didn’t tell them what The Forbidden Path was, but that was the forbidden path for me for many reasons. And that was a waiting room that was there for me for many, many years that I actually exited when I stepped into the art world and without destroying this part of my world that I’m very proud of. And that was a balancing act there.
TS: Now I mentioned that you would clarify for us what it means to use these practices that you teach, cleansing and mental stacking.
CR: I’m glad you’re keeping me in line, Tami.
TS: I am.
CR: Varying off into the world of… I forget about my question. So there’s a practice that I call mental stacking, and there are layers to it. Imagine that you wake up in the morning and you have some thoughts which are very similar to the thoughts you had before, the day before, the day before, the day before, and so on. Imagine if we never cleaned our bathroom or never showered or never brushed our teeth, what would happen? I see this practice mental stacking as brushing our teeth every morning, as having a shower every day. And it is a layer of cleanse. So the very first step that we do is we grab a pen and a piece of paper, or if we want to do a verbal cleanse and we have a really good friend that we feel like we can be honest, then we share this cleanse.
A cleanse is the unfiltered stream of conscious that your thoughts coming through as they are without you changing them in any way. It’s almost like we’re glimpsing inside our mind. We have to see what’s there. So you can write three sentences, you can write five sentences, you can write 10, you can write a whole paragraph, a whole page. It doesn’t matter how long it is, or short, that’s the first layer. And I always say to people, if you have two minutes and no more, just use two minutes to write this. The second layer is that we have to find the pattern of fear within that cleanse. Most of the times, we hear people say, “Just write it all out, release it, cleanse it, take it out of your mind.” That’s great and that’s wonderful, but we don’t do anything with that, more than that.
So imagine you’re reading back that paragraph that you just shared with yourself about whatever it is. For example, if I was to share my thoughts with you right now, it would be, “I hope I’m articulating this well, I hope I’m sharing, I’m responding to the question, I hope,” everything. So I would be writing this out and then I would look to find the pattern. So cleanse, layer one, survivor pattern, layer two. And that’s very tricky, that second layer, because we have to read what we wrote and find our fear. And it’s hiding. So if I said in my cleanse, “I hope I’m making sense, I hope I’m clear, I hope I’m answering the question,” the pattern that I think is there is that fear of not articulating this well enough, that I’m afraid of this, and I’m giving this a very basic example. So I take that I’m afraid of not articulating this well enough. I’m afraid of not doing a good job.
And the next layer, layer three, and actually a lot of people can do this in five or 10 minutes maximum, I don’t want people to do more than that. And the third layer is take that pattern and that is going to feel unnatural and change it and reframe it and use watcher self to come in and say, “What did you know about yourself Christina? What is the thing that you know about yourself?” Is that I’m the expert of this work. That there’s nobody else in this world that knows life reentry better in the whole entire universe. So I take that reframe and say, not only I’m not afraid of being wrong, I’m actually feeling great and excited to be able to articulate this as well as I do. And even if you don’t feel that this is right, it’s correct, it’s very important to reframe it, to write it from there.
And then the next step is to take action from that reframe. Because we’re used to taking action from the survivor self every day. We’re not taking action from the wise part of us, from the reframe. We’re not taking action from the original self. We’re taking action from the place, from the waiting room, from inside the waiting room. And we’re making decisions based on our fears and not on our skills and our abilities. And that’s the very first basic stack that can be done in five, 10 minutes a day. And no more than that. And imagine if your action for the day comes from that wise inner guide versus that fearful part of you, your day’s going to feel and look different and it’s hard to get there. And that’s why the book guides you slowly through that practice. And by the end of it, you can do it inside your mind. You don’t have to write it, you can do it like this. You can do it in many different ways.
TS: Let me ask you what maybe is a little bit of an odd question, Christina, but as I was studying up for this conversation with you, I understood, I was like, oh, okay, so her first book had to do with everything she learned about re-entering after losing her husband, the depth of that kind of loss. And then 20 some odd years later, we have this book on invisible loss because Christina really saw how even these people she worked with, who re-entered life after the loss of someone they loved, had something else inside that was keeping them stuck in a survivor mode, more to be done. But in between these two books, you wrote a book on being in connection with those that have departed, being in communication. And I wanted to hear about that and how that informs your life and has informed this re-entry model?
CR: So the Where Did You Go? book, dare I say, the work in that book and the temple work… So when you go through the book, there’s an experience you have. You go to this internal temple where you not only meet the people you lost, what we discovered over the years is that we also meet our guides and ethereal figures that guide us along the way. I had this obsession after he passed, I wanted to understand death, Tami, desperately. I said to myself, I don’t know what I believe. I don’t know what happens. I had experiences, I saw death. I saw him pass away, and he’s here one moment and gone the next. And I didn’t know where he went. I grew up as a Greek Orthodox. Everyone in Greece is a Greek Orthodox. So very Christian, very religious world, part of the world.
And I couldn’t understand the world of God I was a part of growing up and how that translated today. So I went on this journey and studied quantum mechanics and really learned what the non-physical world is made of. And then I started running these pilot groups with people, and I started seeing the most incredible things would take place in these journeys, these temple journeys in the Where Did You Go? book. The experience of Where Did You Go? is a more spiritual, enlightened and awakened state. I would say that from my two books, that book is a higher level experience, and the Life Reentry is more grounded, basic transformation of our life that is required to step on the right path of where our life is. But the Where Did You Go? work, the temple journeys that I call is at a much higher level of existence and connection to not only the people we’ve lost but our higher selves to be able to become the observers of our reality from outside of it. And it’s fascinating and extraordinary. Yeah.
TS: But specifically Christina, what did you about being in communication with your husband who passed and is that an alive channel for you? What is that like? How did these kinds of communications inform even your writing of Invisible Loss?
CR: Yeah, thank you for asking this. I haven’t been asked this question for a while. The very first thing I discovered was that the place of death is the place of creativity and creation. Actually, that was a mind-blowing discovery that where we go when we die and when we exit this physical experience to connect with those with love, it’s the most positive and extraordinary feeling. It’s where we go and create. And that’s why within that practice, I created the Temple of the Universes where we go and create. People will write to me and say, “Christina, your Where Did You Go? book is a manifestation tool in disguise.” And I said, this is what people are shocked by the most, is that I went there to find death and meet my loved one, and I discovered life. I discovered creation, I discovered I could see the future. And many other people had those discoveries.
And yes, I connected with my husband, but most people would start with that. And would you believe they would move forward to other types of connections in that practice? The other ways to connect with the non-physical world that exists around us, that we can’t see it, we can’t experience it when we are really grounded in this life. So I discovered many things. I discovered parts of my future. I saw physical places that I got to visit later on. Before I created the temple practice, the Life Reentry work definitely came from…
I mean, I remember the day that the whole process came to me. And that’s years ago now, I knew this was something important that day. I mean, I got up, went downstairs, and this is before anyone knew anything about me. I knew, and that was I was connecting to that place. But with the practice of the temple, you actually are more consciously elevating your life experience to connect directly, not only with those who pass but our guides. And it’s not a place to be be afraid of. People always ask me that question, “But isn’t there dark forces there?” Not if you go in such an innocent way of wanting to create your life from there and to connect with a non-physical world.
TS: I’m curious about your experience with it because when I encountered the model, your life reentry model for engaging the thriver self, you have so much original language, and really the model itself has quite a lot of originality too.
CR: Thank you for saying that.
TS: Not that it doesn’t reverberate with other systems and other approaches, but it also has this sense of freshness to it. And I was curious about your own origin within it, which brings me just to the last thing I’d like to talk about, which is how you understand this notion of our quote, unquote, “original self” that we’re recovering through this work with Invisible Loss, this notion that we have an original self?
CR: Yes. So when I was writing this book and I was thinking about this, I’m like, “This is not the authentic, it is not the real, it’s the original.” And the original self is the self that begun with us, was born, but was never allowed to evolve to the real you. That self got interrupted, that original self. So we evolved through the survivor self. And I am sorry to sound, not pessimistic or negative, but most of us are evolving from our survival mindset every day. This work, the Life Reentry work helps you connect to original self that you left behind due to a moment of impact and invisible loss, whether primary or later on, and reclaim it, and start looking at your life from that original self place so then you can evolve further. Because if we’re not experiencing life through that original self, it’s going to stay kid-like, it’s going to stay hidden, it’s going to stay in that primary way of being in the OG, in the original sense of self.
And I want to respond to something you said just before this about the way the language is presented in my work. I’m a very visual person. So whether I’m seeing outside of this physical reality, I saw the waiting room, I see the waiting room. For me, Tami, I saw people experiencing tragedy, loss, and going into that place in between, I saw it. So yes, people have said, “You are obviously tapping into something.” I saw the map out, the visual manifestation of everything. As I’m sitting here with you, I’m seeing my thoughts, I’m seeing everything. I’m not just thinking it. So I’ve been like this for a long time, but I only realized it in the last few years when I kind of took a glimpse, took a snapshot of myself and looked at the work.
And it was a very visual work that people… This is the number one thing people say, “Yes, I may have heard how the brain is able to change and neuroplasticity and new habits, but nobody has ever expressed it this way. Now I know where I’m at, I can see my waiting room, I can see where I’ve been, and I can see where I need to go. And I can see the survivor self and I can see the thriver.” And actually, with this model, you differentiate, you pull yourself out. It’s not your fault that this has happened, you haven’t done anything wrong. It is the survivor self that is experiencing life through you and you need to switch gears and change it.
So everything’s visual for me and has always been like this, but you don’t know it until you witness yourself from the outside. And I think you are that way as well, Tami. You are a witness and an observer of others. And that’s why these are the questions you’re asking me because you can see from a vantage point that is allowing that insight that you are having when we’re having this conversation.
TS: And I think my goal for myself and our listeners is to help us connect more and live from that original self. And just to end on the note of the survivor self, I really do think people can easily connect with that and know and start to see their fear-based patterns, and when they’re going into self-protection, I think people can connect to that awareness pattern of watching and observing. And then we can see ourselves thriving, taking actions that are, “I’m going to go ahead and do this X, Y, Z thing, a little bit each day. And look, it’s happening.” How do all three of those selves relate to this thing we’re calling the original self?
CR: The integration phase at the end of this model is very important, because we can never get rid of the survivor self. And actually being in a state of thriving all the time, imagine that Tami, that’s a lot.
TS: Sounds exhausting.
CR: I’m exhausted just thinking about myself thriving, like painting 24/7. It’s not fun. So we integrate the three selves like this and every time we are stepping into an action, I call those actions plug-ins, a plug, again, visual. I remember the first time I saw this. I’m in the waiting room and I want to plug into my new life. And the action step has a 5% risk, and no more than that. You can’t feel as if you’re afraid. So when we step out of the waiting room, that’s when we connect to that original self, that within that original self you will carry the survivor, watcher and thriver. But the expression, imagine this is the first time I’m going to use this metaphor, a recipe for a soup. Like all of a sudden, you’re putting in ingredients that are right for your taste buds, that are right for you.
The main ingredients are there, but it starts to taste slightly different and that’s closer to yourself, to the original you. And once you step into that self, I am the original me, I am me here, but also I’m evolving every time I’m stepping into that self to a more courageous version, to even be even more direct and honest and not be afraid to speak my mind and share my thoughts and have my accent and be in this way of moving my hands around, people can’t see that, and have this animated version of me because that is who I am. Whether I like it or whether anyone likes it, I accept myself in this version. It’s unique for everyone. Your original self is yours and only yours.
TS: And we celebrate right here, right now, your original self, Christina Rasmussen and the book, Invisible Loss: Recognizing and Healing the Unacknowledged Heartbreak of Everyday Grief. It’s really like a workbook, this book, and it’s an inner workbook that invites you in to go through this step-by-step recovery and reentry model that Christina brings forward in Invisible Loss. Christina Rasmussen, thank you so much for being here with us on Insights at the Edge.
CR: Tami, thank you so much for having me. This was really great. Thank you.
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