Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name is Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True. I 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 docu-series, 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, have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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Today, my guest is Gabby Bernstein. Gabby is a number one New York Times bestselling author. She’s written nine books, including The Universe Has Your Back and a new book, Happy Days: The Guided Path from Trauma to Profound Freedom and Inner Peace. She’s an international speaker, host of the podcast Dear Gabby, and she claims her mission to help us crack open to a spiritual relationship of our own understanding so we can be aligned with our true purpose.
Gabby is a genuine explorer of spiritual and healing modalities, and through her explorations, she has found a pathway to recovery from addiction, the healing of trauma, and being very upfront and forward with her own devotional spiritual nature. Here, she shares with us how she found what it means to be led by the self, that mysterious center of our being that can witness everything that goes on in our life and can be a compassionate center connected with source energy. Here’s my conversation with Gabby Bernstein.
With that, let me welcome, friend, Gabby Bernstein. Gabby?
Gabby Bernstein: Hello, my friend. How are you? It’s so nice to be here.
TS: Yes. It’s great to be with you. Right here at the beginning, you share in the beginning of your book about how this is your most vulnerable book and how it actually came out from you as a risk. I wonder if you can talk a bit about the risk you feel you took to write Happy Days and why you felt it was the time to do so.
GB: Well, I’m not sure about you when you write a book, but whenever I write a book, the introduction’s the last thing that I write because… Does that happen for you? I don’t know. That’s my experience, because when I write a book, I go through this journey and then come out the other side and realize, OK. What just happened? So I wrote the introduction of the book at the last minute in response to some of the feedback I received from my publishers, and this is how it went. They said to me, “Gabby, we are nervous for you. You’re sharing one negative story after the next and we don’t feel like you’re showing your true strength.”
My immediate response was, “My ability to be this vulnerable is my true strength.” And with that conviction, I was able to stand my ground and say, “This material will be printed in this way, and it will be of high service to the world.” Often when we write about shame, it activates the shame in other people and it activates the fear in your publisher or your husband or whoever else might be out there. But to write this book and to vulnerably share my authentic truth, my journey of addiction recovery, trauma recovery, the decades of devotional, spiritual, and personal growth to get to where I am today, it took a lot.
Tami, I wouldn’t have been able to put my face on a cover of a book that said Happy Days: The Guided Path from Trauma to Profound Freedom and Inner Peace if I had not fully lived that. So as a result of having the bravery and the courage and the vulnerability to live to tell, I have committed to putting my face on the book, to standing behind every single word, and that conviction and that courage was necessary in order to put it into print.
TS: I wanted to ask you a question about sharing vulnerably, because I think sometimes it can get a little confusing, as in there’s a way that we’re really letting people see us and know us. And that’s so important, but there are other times when I can feel sometimes people are saying like, “I’m just being vulnerable,” but what they’re actually doing is—I don’t know what other words to use—puking out there a process in a certain kind of way. And I’m like, whoa! Is that really helpful right now? Did I need to know all that? What are you actually trying to do? So what do you think is clean vulnerability, if you will?
GB: Oh, what an awesome question. I’ve never been asked that before. That’s such a radical question. Great. Clean vulnerability, I think it’s extremely important for us to talk about clean vulnerability right now in this day and age when we all are the media, we all have access to these phones and devices where we can just spew, like you said. What is it? Puke out our vulnerability. So we all have that at our fingertips at any given moment where we can just let out.
I believe that oftentimes there’s an additional way that we spew, right? So there’s the puking out all of our ideas, like you mentioned, or all the things that we need to tell, and then there’s the vulnerability for the sake of being seen, because there’s many of us out there that have this deep longing and need to feel seen, to feel recognized. These days, a lot of people are doing that through their unclean vulnerability. So I want to define what I believe clean vulnerability is.
When we have the ability to share our truth and express our genuine experience without feeling triggered by it, with knowing in our heart that we have come through the other side of our experience and to live to tell that truth, we can trust that it will have an impact on others. Whereas in my book, Happy Days, there’s a chapter on shame, and I share about how I was talking. I agreed to lead a group. Let me back up a bit.
In the book, I talk about how I remembered being sexually abused. When I was 36 years old, I remembered childhood abuse in a dream. Shortly after that, I was asked to speak on a panel at Kripalu, lead a workshop with two other women, and it was on the topic of women’s empowerment and sexual abuse and things that other women had gone through, particularly sexual in nature. I agreed to do it.
In doing it, it was actually a disaster, because I was not grounded. I was actually extremely activated still at that time. It was actually there at that retreat that I started to recognize a lot of my own shame. So this was a really big sign for me that I was not in healthy vulnerability and, thankfully, I had the tools to pull back and reorganize and get regulated and really care for myself so that I wasn’t activating myself and re-traumatizing myself in front of a lot of other people.
So we have to become the witness. And I hope that people listening right now can not have to learn that the hard way like I did, where you can really recognize, OK. I have to do my own work first, make sure that I feel safe in my system, feel safe in my story. And when I speak on behalf of the parts of myself who have experienced trauma or the parts of myself who have experienced addiction or any extreme behavior, I’m speaking for them not as them. Because that can be really dangerous if we’re in that. I’m leaning into IFS here, which we can talk about as well, but if I’m in that activation while I’m sharing vulnerably, I’m going to trigger other people. Whereas if I’m in my grounded self and my adult resourced self, speaking about an experience in the pursuit of the service of others, that is clean vulnerability.
TS: Now, Gabby, let’s just back up for a moment, because you introduced IFS, which is Internal Family Systems, a therapeutic method developed by Dick Schwartz, and some of our listeners may not be familiar with it. It’s obviously been very, very important to you. When you talk about being aware of your parts, a part that feels shame or a part that feels traumatized, can you tell me what it’s like to be sitting in that seat of awareness of a part versus, “I went through this. This is me”?
GB: Yes. I’d love to demystify IFS for your folks that have not necessarily read your books that you’ve published for him, for Dick, and the great work that you share with IFS. So Internal Family Systems therapy, otherwise known as IFS, created by an incredible human, Dick Schwartz, who you and I are both friends with, is a very transformational therapy that can really heal you from the inside out. From my perspective, the way that I would demystify this for the average listener, for somebody who may not be aware of this process: it is a process of recognizing that we are not one mono human, but we have a lot of different parts of who we are, and these parts of us were established at a very young age.
So the two specific parts that we recognize, the parts that are almost inner personalities—so rather than thinking we’re one personality, we have a lot of different personalities inside of us. Maybe you found yourself saying things like, “Oh, there’s a part of me that gets really rageful when my husband speaks in that tone,” or, “There’s a part of me that wants to just retreat when I feel activated.” We all have these different moments where we can say things like that, noticing that that actually could potentially, opening your mind today, be an inner part of who you are.
So from an IFS perspective, there’s two types of parts. There are the exiled parts, which are the little children who experienced trauma, who experienced feelings of being inadequate, unlovable, experienced insecure attachment in any form. So in those moments in childhood when we start to recognize those experiences of trauma in whatever form, big T trauma or small t trauma, being bullied or being sexually abused. We’ve all had these moments of trauma. Those exiled parts immediately go under lock and key and we say, “Nope, I never want to feel that again.” So we put these little children under lock and key and we say, “I’m not going to go there and I’m going to build up all these protection mechanisms,” otherwise known as protector parts, to avoid ever having to face those impermissible feelings of fear, terror, inadequacy, and feelings of being unlovable.
Protectors could look like control. Protectors could look like being an overachiever, like if you felt like you’re unlovable, you could be a big-time overachiever. If you had a narcissist parent or a very insecure attachment style, you may have built up a protector part that wants to prove yourself to the world and be very successful out in the world so you could feel like you’re being seen, you’re being good enough, you have enough.
These protection mechanisms, otherwise known as protector parts, start to run the show. They have a very important role in our inner family system, but they can get very extreme. In my case, my protector parts became so extreme because I had this dissociated memory of trauma that I was working so hard to override that I became a cocaine addict. Now, actually, today, Tami, is my 17 years of sobriety today. October 2nd is my sober date. So I’ve been sober 17 years now.
TS: Congratulations.
GB: Thank you. Thank you. It’s really nice to celebrate that with you. I can really look now and say that the cocaine addict part of me is a part of me that I am grateful for, that I love, because she was doing whatever she could to keep me safe at that time. So that would be a very extreme part, those addict parts. They’re like firefighters. They swoop in to put down the fire, to put out the fire.
So for the viewer right now or the listener, consider that we have an inner family system. But what’s beautiful and what’s most hopeful and heart opening is that we also have this part of us, this ever-present energy within us, known as Self, with a capital S. Self is the undamaged, resourced, adult part of who we are, the energy of love. Often, in spiritual lexicon, we might say higher self or God, the spirit within us, the part of us that is totally undamaged and available to take care of these more extreme parts.
So now I can answer your question about what that feels like for me. I hope that in my explanation it helps people go deeper. So the more I practice IFS throughout my trauma recovery with my therapist and with Dick and getting more trained in the model, the more I could see the moments when my protector parts would get activated. So for example, when I feel out of control, I would get very activated. So I could start to become the witness of those moments instead of becoming the activated part.
So the more I was able to notice those moments of, OK. My team are not doing the work that we need to get done and I’m freaking out and I’m getting activated. And my protector wants to control, in those moments. I could then notice that protector and know more about it and start to become curious about that part of me. In that space of extending curiosity and compassion and bringing calm energy to that part, I started to extend with that Self energy. I started to allow that Self within me to become the internal parent that could guide that fear-based part, that super protector part to a more calm state.
So I can now, as a result of bringing more Self energy to those protection mechanisms, to those protectors, the protectors can actually do better work in the world. So my controller is still doing a great job, Tami. She’s keeping everything under control in the house. She’s got the toddler. She’s writing the books. She’s showing up here with you. She’s staying clean and sober. She’s doing great work, but she’s not in an extreme role anymore.
So as Dick said in his latest book, there’s no bad parts, and the more Self energy, the more compassion, courage—there’s these C qualities: calmness, connectedness, curiosity, creativity, and that commitment, that committed nature—the more we bring those C qualities to these protector parts, the more they can relax and they can actually do great work. My controller did some great work in the world even when she was extreme. She wrote nine books in 11 years. So she got busy. She was working hard, but now, Tami, I can write my next book, my tenth book, with the same deadline and the same commitment and the same conviction, but with a lot more ease, because that controller part is less extreme.
TS: Now, it’s interesting to me, Gabby, that you had Dick Schwartz write the forward to your book on trauma, Happy Days. And here right at the beginning of our conversation, we’ve entered the demystification of this approach of Internal Family Systems. You’re such a healing explorer. You, yourself, immersed yourself in so many different modalities. You write about Somatic Experiencing from Peter Levine as a way to approach trauma. You’ve worked with EFT and tapping, and yet IFS seems to have given you some particularly valuable lens that you’re emphasizing right now in your work. And I’m curious, when it comes specifically to healing trauma, how it is that IFS has been so important to you?
GB: Thank you so much for that question. So when I’m recognizing that Self energy, when I’m acquiring more and more of that Self energy—the biggest realization I’ve had through IFS is that the parent that I always needed when I experienced trauma, the parent that I needed when I was needing to come out of that trauma and heal, the parent that I needed when I was a cocaine addict, the parent that I needed in the controlling moments, the parent that I need even today when there’s things that come up in life is actually inside of me. That Self [is] that ability to self-soothe, to see my parts, to be present with my parts, to listen and be curious about those parts, and to know that I can in a steadiness create a calm, safe environment for all the parts of who I am and let that internal parent be the leader of all these different experiences that have happened inside of me.
That is the greatest gift I have ever been given. That is the full-blown knowing of what it means to be connected to God. That’s the full-blown knowing of what it means to be able to have that higher Self, that voice of love, be the loudest voice in the room. As spiritual students, that’s what we’re always aiming for, whether we realize that or not. We’re working to suspend our ego, fear-based belief systems and in turn rely on the voice of God, rely on the voice of a higher power.
So with IFS, I was able to really fast-track that connection, because it wasn’t about putting down the ego or shutting down the ego. It was about befriending those protector parts, connecting to, being curious about, and then really recognizing, I have a parent inside of me that’s there for me all the time, that no matter what happens in my life, I can turn to Self. I’m never alone.
TS: Now, Gabby, in a moment when someone finds themselves needing that loving parent, that loving, all-compassionate embrace and it’s not there, they don’t feel it. They feel identified with some, to use the language, exile or child part or needy part or desperate part or part in pain. What are your suggestions for how to invoke that inner loving parent to reparent ourselves, basically, right now in the moment?
GB: So the first step I would recommend is to do a heart hold and place your hand on your heart and your other hand on your belly, whichever hand feels best to you, right or left on your heart because if you have the awareness… So Tami, you know we can be so activated and so stuck in a protector part that we may not actually have the awareness of it until we wake up hungover, whatever happens. But the moment that you have that mustard seed of awareness, that little light entering in where you can say, Oh, I’m in a part of me, go right to that hold, and that hold will start to ground you and then bring some breath to it. In that place of that hold, with that breath, become a little curious. Start to turn your focus inward and just notice what you notice about what’s happening inside.
Notice what you’re feeling. Notice any colors or shapes. Notice any words that need to come forward. What you’re doing is you’re starting to just notice the part. You’re noticing the anxiety or you’re noticing the addiction or you’re noticing the fear, and you might start noticing other parts start to show up. Just keep getting curious about what’s happening inside.
Then you could even ask yourself, what do I know about this part of me? And listen, because profound statements will come forward. Keep breathing and stay connected and keep that heart hold. As you deepen that connection and that curiosity, and you strengthen that curiosity and you go a little further, just gently ask the part of you that’s so activated, what does it need? What do you need right now? Often, what will happen, nine times out of ten, the part will say something like, I need a hug, or, I need some fun, or, I need to play, or, I need to relax. I need to take a nap. I need a break.
So what’s happening in those moments is just like I am with my toddler when I’m co-regulating for my toddler—not with him, but for him. He’s in a tantrum, he’s in an activated part that he can’t get himself out of. So as his parent, I can ground him through breath and be present with him and then become curious, “What are you feeling? What goes on the inside? What are you noticing? Then what do we know about that? OK, let’s talk about it.”
I can even extend empathy, “Oh, one time that happened for mommy. I’ve been there, I know that.” Then I can get to the place or I can ask him what he needs, but you can’t connect to that part that is needy when they’re activated in the tantrum, in the adult tantrum, right? So the same way I would care for my toddler, I’m caring for my internal children with the same energy, with the same compassion, the same commitment, the same curiosity, the same calmness, the same courage.
So if I can continue to go in that dance of tapping into Self and then bringing Self to the child part and then seeing that it’s needing more Self energy and then bringing it back to that child part, I then let Self become the leader of my internal family system. When this clicks, listen, Tami, I’m going to be honest with your viewers.
TS: Thank you.
GB: I had been practicing IFS for almost a decade before it actually really clicked in for me. And the irony is, I actually didn’t even know that I was practicing IFS parts work with my therapist. I was very resistant to it. She’d consistently ask me like, “What part is there?” and I’d be like, “I don’t freaking know what part is there.” Then when I started, it was very interesting, I started reading Dick’s work, and I didn’t even realize that I’d been practicing IFS. I was listening to Dick and I started reading his work and I was like, “Oh, my God! That’s what I’ve been doing for a decade.”
So the greater understanding for me, thanks to the books and thanks to the audios, the greater understanding of the work for me actually let it all click in for me. So I really actually feel like it’s very valuable for someone to understand, to intellectualize it. For me, it was. For some people it might not be, but to get this idea that, oh, wait. I’ve got these people inside of me that I can tend to. It clicked and I just became… It’s like a muscle. I became more and more reliant on Self. The more I relied on Self, the easier it was for Self to show up for those parts and continue to and be the louder voice in the room.
TS: It sounds like there’s been also some informational process around your parenting of a toddler and the reparenting of yourself. That’s interesting to me.
GB: Yes. There’s a whole chapter in Happy Days called “Reparenting Yourself,” where I really lean on a lot of the work of Dan Siegel, Dr. Dan Siegel, incredible author and psychiatrist, I believe. Is he a psychiatrist? I think he is, or psychologist.
TS: Yes, he is.
GB: Yes, and his work is some of the most profound work I’ve found for parenting. What Dan references is the four S’s, to be seen, soothed, safe, and secure. When I was applying those principles with my child, particularly at the beginning of our COVID lockdown, I was seeing such miracles. When I would just help see him, help him feel safe, and soothe him with that safety, and then create the secure environment for him, miracles just started to unfold and that became the way that we related to each other and the way I related to him.
It was really clear to me. At the time, I was writing Happy Days, and I thought, wait. Hold on. Wait. I never got this. I wish I had this. And then I thought to myself, what if I gave this to myself? So in deepening my work with IFS and using the four S’s, I started to apply them to myself and I would be like, OK. When I asked, when I’d get curious about what I was feeling, seeing myself. When I was breathing in meditation or even a heart hold or any kind of somatic practice that would get me back into my body, I was soothing myself. In that soothing and being seen, I started to send safety because I could trust myself. And that allowed me to create a secure connection to Self, to that internal parent.
TS: You share in the book that you yourself, from your early childhood, had a type of disorganized attachment, which is the most difficult early relationship with our parenting. It’s one of the vulnerable things you share. You share a lot of vulnerable things in the book. We’re not going to be able to touch on all of them, but it was very powerful to me that you shared that without shame and that the process you’ve been through has brought you into a place of security or at least relative security with yourself, having this very difficult early attachment pattern in your family.
GB: Yes. I had one parent who is an anxious attachment style and another who was an avoidant attachment style. Then of course, experienced trauma that I’m still working through, frankly. I mean, I’ve come so far and I got to myself to a place where the shame wasn’t there, not completely abolished, but I was safe in the storyline in order to tell it. I would never have been able to write it if I hadn’t gotten there, but still working through that historical shame and all the work that goes into undoing those traumatic events.
So yes, I had a very insecure attachment style that, really, I can see now was running the show for many, many years. While I’m sober 17 years right now, my first drug was love. I was a super codependent love addict. When I decided to put down the boyfriend, I picked up the cocaine. So the first drug I tried to get off of was that incessant need to be in a relationship. I can now have full compassion and awareness and understanding for all those behaviors. I never felt safe. I never felt cared for. I had complete anxious attachment style. I think that your listeners may likely have an awareness of what attachment styles are, but anxious is what it sounds like, the folks that are clinging to relationships and getting into a relationship and maybe showing up with your luggage like, let’s move in. Let’s feel safe. Let’s get that connected.
An avoidant attachment style is the one where when things get too close, you want to run, you want to run. This is particularly in romantic relationships or even no, other relationships too, friendships, a lot of things like this.
Then there’s a secure attachment style where we have the secure parent or family member who created that safe space for us and practiced those four S’s, whether they realize it or not, and that person’s pretty confident in relationships and pretty confident in life. But what I want to share is that it’s extraordinary because I can take any attachment style quiz in the world and I can notice, oh, well, that’s how I used to be. That’s how I used to be. That’s how I used to be. That’s how I used to be, and then say, oh, I used to be anxious and avoidant and super insecure attachment style. And now I’m secure, and I don’t actually have any connection to those old behaviors except for memories. It’s pretty profound that we can actually heal our attachment style when we heal our trauma.
TS: Now, Gabby, a couple of times you’ve mentioned shame and working through shame as part of the process of healing from trauma. Tell me more about your experience of shame and what you’ve learned in terms of how to successfully work through it when it arises in our experience. I mean, this conversation is bringing up potentially a lot for people about their shame, about their early upbringing or their addictive patterns or many things.
GB: Shame, for me and I think for all humankind, is the most scary condition, the most scary feeling, emotion. We all have shame and we have a lot of different ways of avoiding it, running from it. So we can project it out. We can say, OK. Well, that’s not me. That’s somebody else. So and so did that. [We] can blame and shame others so we don’t have to face our own shame. Or we can attack ourselves, right?
So one of my mantras throughout the book is this storyline that I’m a piece of shit. That was my story. That was the story I had on repeat over and over and over again, so that shame—really attacking myself. Then another form of shame is avoiding it, just dissociating from it. Nope. I don’t even know that that’s even there. I had that big time. The dissociative part of myself, the dissociated part of myself that did not remember the sexual abuse until I was 36 years old, [it] was not in my memory. I had fragmented images and feelings and sensations and physical and biochemical issues as a result of it—anxiety disorder, gastrointestinal issues, insomnia, relationship issues, controlling, addiction, all of the above—but I did not remember it completely. My body remembered, my gut remembered. Everything in my physical experience remembered, but in my memory, it was tucked away.
That’s because of the shame, the shame response of dissociating, the shame response of saying, that is way too big to carry. I cannot go there. It was only when I started to heal from the trauma and do deeper work that I even realized I had shame. I was 36 years old. I’d probably written nine, maybe I’d written six, seven books at that point, and I only then could realize my shame.
It’s a very impermissible experience to try to tap into, and it’s not something that we should do quickly. It’s not something that we should rip the Band-Aid off of. Shame is something that we would want to touch into slowly, maybe even with the support of a therapist or a community like yours, and just very slowly touch into those feelings, because if they’re ripped off too quickly, it can be very uncomfortable for your internal system.
TS: What do you do now, Gabby, when you feel shame, when shame comes up in your experience?
GB: I go to Self. I return to that Self energy. So shame came up this morning for me. My son’s nanny has moved on to different family with a baby and we’re interviewing for different childcare. The controller came in this morning when a new nanny came in for an interview. I was like, “Oh, well, we found somebody full-time, but maybe we can work part-time.” I was very caffeinated and very controlling. My husband can get frustrated when I’m like that. When she was there in front of her, he was like, “What are you doing? What are you talking about? We might want to hire her part-time. Stop.” Shaming, feeling shame, whether he was shaming me or not, I felt shame. I felt like, uh-oh, Gabby, you’re back there. You went back.
So my former response would be to blame him, to shame him and say something like, “Well, you never got clear with me about what we want and you didn’t do this,” but instead, I was able to say, “All right. I hear you, and I recognize that I was trying to control the situation.” Well, first, I actually went to Self and I stepped away and I tuned into that Self part. And Self was like, yes, OK, I understand. I’ve got a lot of compassion for where you’re at right now. It’s scary to have these big things and big relationships like this change. Then from that place of Self, once I get grounded in that compassion towards the part and I went back to my husband, I was like, “All right. Well, I’m not going to blame you for that messy interview. I’m not going to blame myself. Let’s have an open dialogue about what we both want and what we’re looking for so we can be more clear the next time we interview somebody.” So that’s exactly what I do.
TS: It sounds like whether it’s reparenting ourselves or whether it’s reestablishing ourselves in this Self-led place so that we can accept and embrace our shameful experiences, that we need a lot of compassion. We need to really bring our compassion online toward all the parts of ourselves. I wonder if you can speak to that, Gabby.
GB: Yes. So once again, the qualities of Self, when you know that you’re connected to Self-energy, it’s because you’re noticing that you’re compassionate toward that part of you or that you’re willing to be curious about it or that there’s a creative idea and those C qualities—calmness, connectedness—but I find that compassion often, for me, is the first to come through. That’s not going to be the case for everybody else. People have a lot of different experiences with their parts and they may have a lot of anger and rage towards their parts. So it may be hard to connect to that Self energy of compassion.
So it may have to start with curiosity or start with calmness through breath or meditation, but for me, compassion is probably the biggest voice that comes through first for me because I believe I’ve practiced compassion toward myself even before I was realizing that I was doing IFS. I think I learned this in the 12-step program. I’ve had the same sponsor for most of my sobriety, and I could go to her with any problem or anything that I’ve done, and her first response would be, “I understand how you might have gotten there and that might have happened. Let’s work on forgiving yourself right now. Let’s say a prayer. Let’s ask for forgiveness.”
That practice of just consistently having somebody to be that connection for me and to, in many ways, be the Self energy for me until I could acquire enough of my own—she continued to help me just be compassionate towards the parts, even though I didn’t even know that was what was going on, and nor did she, actually. She was just helping me practice compassion.
TS: Now, Gabby, one of the most interesting sections of the book, Happy Days, and I want to make sure we talk about it, is a chapter you write called “Hiding Behind the Body.” This is where you’re very vulnerable about your own journey with some pretty severe physical challenges. You write about how your TMJ was so bad that it even caused broken teeth for you during a period of your life and very severe gastritis. Help me understand how you saw these physical challenges and your journey through trauma to being more Self-led.
GB: In my journey through trauma recovery, I became very aware that a lot of the physical issues that I’d had for decades were psychosomatic conditions. They were trauma responses. They were stress responses. So we often can witness people very stuck in the same perpetual gastro issues or chronic pain, in my case with the TMJ, or insomnia or back pain, neck pain, very common, headaches, migraines, even skin issues, which led me to explore more and become a student of the work of Dr. John Sarno. Sarno wrote the book Healing Back Pain, which is a huge, huge bestseller throughout the world. It helps people recognize that back pain and neck pain are psychosomatic conditions.
Then I became obsessed with one of his books called The Mind Body Prescription. That book really helped me witness my physical issues through the lens of awareness and understanding that these chronic physical conditions were absolutely happening to me. I had to take, at points in time, acid blockers to put out the fire. I didn’t avoid doctors, but I was only going to fully heal when I actually healed the root cause condition, which was the hypervigilance, the constant fear, the incessant anxiety as a result of living with PTSD.
So as a result of putting myself through a very steadfast journey of EMDR and Internal Family Systems and EFT and Somatic Experiencing, and devotionally showing up for my health and my recovery, I’ve gotten my nervous system back to a very common, centered place. I have absolutely no more gastrointestinal issues and have not for years. I have very little physical pain. [It] only gets activated when I’m exercising too much. I sleep through the night perfectly.
You know what? I still have some jaw stuff. There’s still a first responder. I most recently got a special retainer to actually… This is the first hour today that I won’t be wearing it. That helps me reset my jaw. The thing that I would say about that is that that assistance is there, but it’s not the solution. The assistance is actually helping me witness my body still responding to unresolved impermissible rage, fear, and anger.
So there’s still the final frontier, even when we start to get very healed. So as I start to notice, every time I see my jaw not connected in alignment with that retainer, I ask myself, what do you need to feel right now? So actually, it’s a really amazing tool. It’s almost like you’re getting a little notification every time you’re in a triggered place. Usually, it’s when I’m writing or typing or texting or in something where I’m in a very I’ve-got-to-get-it-done mode. So the work of Dr. Sarno is really expressed in that the physical symptoms that we have are the psychosomatic response to impermissible rage. So as I started to address those feelings of rage and fear and anxiety and terror, I began to let my body relax.
TS: OK. So let’s just talk about it in present tense. When you feel your jaw tighten up—and I have a tight jaw, it’s not gone to the level maybe of intense TMJ where I’m wearing anything, but I know there’s a lot of tension in there—and you ask yourself what’s the impermissible feeling, and it’s something, who knows what, what it might be, then what, Gabby?
GB: OK. So there’s two things that all happen right now. With this amazing little device that I have now, it’s really just almost like a little gentle reminder, OK. There’s a physical thing happening that’s reminding me that an emotional thing is occurring. And that’s a pretty neat way to meet the inner workings of how you are, because the TMJ, this is important, the TMJ is actually a protector part too. The physical, the gastrointestinal issues are a protector part too from a Sarno perspective, John Sarno perspective.
TS: So just can you explain that for people who are like, “I’m not following you, Gabby. I don’t get what you’re talking about”?
GB: That’s where I’m going. So from a Dr. Sarno perspective, we would use these physical issues like a gastro issue or a TMJ or a back pain as a way of taking our minds, our brain away from the focus of the trauma or the impermissible rage or whatever it is that we’re not ready to face, and then creating pain to have a focus to distract us from the inner feelings. Then it’s also physiological. So he would say how we would start directing so much attention and blood flow to those, and actually constriction to those areas, the jaw, the stomach, the back. The blood flow would not flow there, and therefore it would consistently stay in that truncated state of inflammation and pain.
The second that we start to repudiate that pain and notice, OK. Oh, I notice my jaw is clenched. Oh, that’s not my jaw, that’s my feelings I need to face. That’s something I should become curious about. That’s something I can bring to my therapy today. Very quickly you can actually feel the pain subside because you are realizing, you’re telling your brain, no, that is not my physical pain, that is an emotional disturbance.
Now, I want to go on the record, and I know that Sarno did too. He wouldn’t say, “Stop taking your medication,” or “Don’t go to your doctor.” He may be a little bit more bold than I would be even. He may even say, “Gabby, why are you even doing that retainer?” Truly, he probably would’ve said, but for me, I’m using it as a device for getting, well, there’s a lot of reasons, but I would never suggest somebody get off their medication or any of that. But I would suggest that they become the witness of the pain when it’s there, become curious about it. Just like in IFS, witness the part, become curious about the part, and in that place of curiosity, you’re extending Self energy to it, and then the part can start to relax. So this is how a physical issue is just another protector part. The same way when I’m trying to control everything, I’m trying to protect myself from feeling impermissible feelings, is the same way my stomach, when clenched, would be another way of protecting myself from feeling impermissible feelings.
TS: OK. So when it comes to especially back pain, tension, and jaw tension, in my own life, I’m with you, Gabby, in terms of really inquiring within and maybe doing some gentle release. I notice sometimes when I talk to people—let’s just take back pain—and I say something gentle even like, “Have you explored the notion that there could be—”
GB: Yes, freak out.
TS: Yes. They’re just like—
GB: “No way.”
TS: —bam, “I can’t believe you’re bringing this up and I’m not going to talk to you again. It’s a little extreme.” I’m curious about that because it’s one thing for us just to explore it in our own lives, but how do you have these conversations with people without getting that reaction?
GB: You don’t. Just like with IFS, if you don’t have buy-in, you can’t talk to the parts. So if someone’s unwilling or has zero desire to have any awareness about what the psychosomatic feelings could be behind their body, you can’t be suggestive. Maybe there’s a behind-the-scenes way to get into it. Like instead of associating it with the back pain, let’s say it’s a loved one, like my husband has back pain, and he is one of those people. He actually has some buy-in, right? We do IFS together, but when he’s talking about his back pain for many, many years he’d be like, “Screw you. I don’t want to talk about what’s happening to me emotionally.”
So now, I’ve gotten into the habit of instead of saying, “Oh, well, let’s sit down and talk to the part of you,” and he’d be like, “Screw you.” I’ll just be like, “Is there anything that’s on your mind that you want to get out? Would you love to talk to me about anything that might be just holding you back at this time?” Then he’ll start just talking like, “Oh, this happened with the contractor and then I have to do this,” and I’ll hold the space for him to release what’s inside.
As he starts to just be held in that conversation, not a conversation about how his back pain is the problem—it isn’t the problem—and his issues, but just letting him open up, the back pain can start to subside. So sometimes we have to be the Self energy for the other because he doesn’t have the buy-in, so he may not be able to say, “OK, I’m willing to do the work and start to connect to that compassionate part of me and get curious about this pain.” Most people can’t do that out of the gate.
So as the friend or the practitioner or the person like you or myself who have been around a lot of this work for many, many years, we could just get curious and become the Self energy in the room, “Hey, well, what’s going on for you lately? How have you been? I have a lot of compassion. I really, really understand. Things are really busy for you and that’s a lot.” “Oh, and the nanny just quit.” “Yes, that’s a lot. I know. I get it. I have a lot of compassion for you.”
Even in that place, Tami, of just extending that curiosity and that calm energy and that compassion, you’re co-regulating with the person. They start to pick up your Self energy and their system starts to relax, and in that relaxed place, their physical pain can begin to subside.
Now, we can’t be that for somebody all the time, but in the moment we can, in that moment, especially if it’s someone that you live with and you see them all the time, but you don’t want to be there. You don’t want them to be reliant on your energy, but just do remember the power of your energy and that if you bring Self with you, not only are you staying steady for you, but you’re also creating steadiness for the other person.
TS: It’s very helpful. Now, two final things I want to talk to you about, Gabby. One is when I first saw the title Happy Days, and then I saw, oh, we’re going to be journeying through trauma. I thought, what? I had this disconnect between the title and the journey that we take through these very difficult topics. You explain the title in the book and I wonder if you can share that with our listeners, and also how you make sense of this journey to Happy Days through such difficult material.
GB: It’s a very autobiographical title, and it’s something I had to really stick to. Once again, often the publisher doesn’t want what you want, and I stuck to it because I actually channeled it. It was in just a meditative state where I was trying to allow myself to open up to what this title would be. Then I heard, it’s your story. It’s about your story. I saw my whole family raising their glass in this visual meditation.
So what that represents to me is as a child around the table, instead of our family saying, “cheers,” we would all say, “happy days.” It was a bit eerie at the time, and it still is to me, because we weren’t very happy—or I know I was not very happy. And in fact, I was terrified. So this book is my journey to happy days. It’s to really be able to raise my glass of kombucha or water today on my 17-year anniversary and say, “Happy days. I am genuinely living happy days.”
I also loved the title too, Tami, because it was something hopeful. It wasn’t like fear. It was a hopeful title because this is a book about telling the story of what it means to live through trauma and recover and heal and live to say I can be in happy days. So yes, it can be confusing at first. I was excited to be, and I ended up putting that story at the very beginning to open up with it. It was actually originally at the end, but there were some compromises with my publishers.
TS: Well, let’s take a moment here. Happy days, Gabby.
GB: Happy days, my friend. Happy days.
TS: Happy days.
GB: Oh, beautiful. Thank you.
TS: Now, the last thing I want to talk to you about has to do with something you said in the very beginning when I was asking you about being vulnerable. You said, “Well, in the book I talk about recovery from addiction. I talk about the journey through trauma, and I also talk about my devotional spiritual nature.” What came up for me as so interesting is that to talk about one’s devotional spiritual nature requires a certain amount of courage and bravery, and in and of itself is a way of making ourselves vulnerable. So I’d love to hear your thoughts about that.
GB: I believe that my commitment to spirit, spirit of my own understanding, and my commitment to freedom, inner freedom, is what has been the greatest source of guidance throughout my entire recovery journey over the last 17 years, even before that. Because that spiritual connection—I believe in spirit guides, I believe in a God of my own understanding—and that connection is what led me to the books, to the teachers, to the therapist, to the IFS book when I was ready to understand more, to the Somatic Experiencing practitioners, to the EMDR therapist that saved my life, to just one step at a time, to the people. And it also is what gave me the courage to stay open and vulnerable and willing to heal.
What I’ve come to get closer to is that spiritual connection through my journey, because what I’m realizing now more than ever is that that spiritual connection of Self has always been inside of me. It’s been with me the whole time. The more well I become and the more connected I become, the more I know God—and with conviction, with full-bodied conviction.
So speaking fearlessly about my spiritual experience was how I first started my career. It’s what my first eight books are about, until I began to open up to what the psychology and physiology and all of the other experiences that we’re having in our human experience merged with that spiritual foundation. I believe that they’re interchangeable. I also believe that the therapies that I was guided to are very spiritual in nature, very, that they’re channeled material, in my opinion, and I can say that because I’m not a therapist, but they are very spiritual in nature. So without that faith, I wouldn’t be here right now.
TS: You write, Gabby, that we each have a spiritual guidance system and that we can develop a relationship with our spiritual guidance system by making a decision to let go and be guided. Then you continue, “Surrender requires acceptance of the past, presence in the moment, and faith in the future.” I wanted to end with you commenting on this notion of faith in the future. I think this is a time when a lot of people have concern about our collective future, our individual future. They don’t have faith in the future. What gives you faith in the future?
GB: Well, on October 2nd of 2005, exactly 17 years ago, around this exact time, I was sitting on the floor of my studio apartment in New York City, and I was staring at this stack of self-help books next to my bed—Wayne Dyer and Marianne Williamson and Deepak in A Course in Miracles—and I was looking at all these spiritual books. I was looking at that, and I had no idea of how I could get there, but I had hope and I had enough presence in that moment, hung over and on the floor, to ask for a prayer, to ask for a miracle.
I said, “God, universe, whosever out there, I need a miracle.” I heard an audible voice say to me, “Get sober and you will live a life beyond your wildest dreams.” So that voice is what gave me that faith that day.
So anyone that’s listening, we have these moments where we’re hitting a bottom in whatever form. Many people are hitting bottom right now, as you mentioned, as a result of just feeling hopeless and feeling helpless. Those moments where we hit bottom, Rumi has this beautiful quote, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” When we have those moments in life where we crack open to what is not working, when we give up, when we surrender to it completely through that desire to just know more, even slightly, then we are given the next right action and the inner guidance to take the steps forward.
So my suggestion to everybody watching and listening is that wherever you are in your own personal experience right now, whether it’s a big bottom or a low bottom or a high bottom, whatever it might be, just become willing to see it differently and to humbly get into any form of prayer that is your own, whether it’s, “I need a miracle,” or, “There has to be a better way,” or, “I welcome creative possibilities.” As we start to, even temporarily, once a day, just suspend our disbelief and get into that open heart and that open mind, our inner guidance system can get to work, and we can start to lean into a faith far beyond our logic and our mind. In that place of faith, then we can be given everything we need to start to let what is necessary unfold.
We are living in quite scary, uncertain times. It’s never been like this before, and I know you could say the same, and we’ve seen difficult things. We’ve never seen this before. That faith is required of us now in whatever form it comes. So my prayer is that this conversation opens people up to the possibility that there is an inner guidance system beyond your physical site that’s within you and around you and guiding you and protecting you, and that we all have access to it if we’re willing to open up to it.
TS: Thanks, Gabby, and thanks everybody for being with us here for this conversation. If you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after-the-show Q&A conversations with featured presenters and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes, and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
