[MUSIC]

Hello and welcome to Revolutionize Your Love Life.

Do you want to know more about love relationships?

What makes them work?

How to create the one of your best dreams?

Do you want to be in a really healthy,

juicy love relationship?

In these podcasts, we will give ideas and

practical advice to light your way.

Whether you're looking for a love partner,

already in a relationship, you wish could be better.

Or leaving one that has run its course.

There will be something to inspire, empower and support you.

Revolutionize Your Love Life is a fortnightly podcast

where you will access the knowledge and wisdom of love,

experts and relationship coaches from across the world

to help you find true fulfillment in love.

I am your host, Heather Garbett.

Welcome.

[LAUGH]

Hello.

I'm here today with Sandra Myarana.

She's going to talk to us about brain versus heart language

and so much more.

We're going to learn about self-love on the deepest level

for ourselves and in our relationships.

Sandra is a quiet powerhouse.

She's the mom you never knew you needed.

And she's one of those rare individuals who can speak to

your soul if you will listen.

A life story both past and present was filled with horror stories

and other dark experiences.

And yet she remains in her light.

For over 14 years, she's been working with troubled hearts,

men, women, couples, youth and children.

Her favorites are her little criminals.

The troubled youth are of lost connection to their own being.

And she excels at reintroducing them to themselves.

Of course, we adults also often have similar challenges.

And her work and experience in a practice that keeps her

schedule full months in advance speaks of the longing of people

to find peace within themselves.

This has led her to develop a heart-led nine month

program that allows people to just state,

to conceive a new vision of themselves, to be a new being

and to rebirth within their new selves.

Only a true divine feminine can nurture

this kind of transformation while she

grows herself in a role as a woman, mom, sister, partner

and a highly successful trauma therapist.

Welcome Sandra.

Thank you so much, Heather.

It's a pleasure to be here.

I want to joy to have you.

I should explain that Sandra and I met each other

through her doing conscious uncoupling with me.

And we formed such a power bond that we

wanted to do more work together.

And this is part of that.

I had no idea how much work was still left there.

And one of my main philosophies in my own practice

is I don't ask you to do that, which I haven't done.

And I had been in a 28-year marriage, 34-year relationship

that ended in COVID.

And I had work to do around that so that I could then

be able to extend that to my couples because prior to that,

I hadn't known what that was like and what you have to do

to dissolve your last relationship,

to come to peace with it, to get to forgiving both parts,

that the other person and yourself in that relationship,

to be able to come out a whole human being

and not be left in the broken state of it.

And my work with you is outstanding.

And the highlight was that I got this beautiful friendship

out of the deal.

Yeah.

And a wonderful new relationship.

That is delightful.

It is delightful.

Who knew?

Yeah, it's a joy to behold.

So could you tell me a little bit about how you got into this work

and what you'd experienced in your life?

I know that you've experienced a lot of pressure

and you've created some amazing diamonds.

Well, my journey started, again, in part of the broken,

unhealed parts of me, where I ended up at a counselor.

Her name is Denise, and she has been my counselor now

for since I was 30 years old, so 25 years.

And I went to her because I had been in a situation

where I actually harmed my firstborn child.

I didn't think that I had capacity

to do to my own children things that my mother had done to me.

And in my childhood, there had been terrible physical harm,

also later on the emotional and sexual

and all of the types of abuse.

But I had in a state of wanting to be perfect or appear

to be a perfect mother.

My son had come out of his room one morning

and had dishevelled with two different colored socks

and we were late and my perfect appearance of my life

was going to be broken down when we were late

and he was all dishevelled.

And I hadn't heard my husband come back home.

He had forgotten his briefcase.

And I was in the middle of holding my oldest child

and left 10 fingerprint marks in his arms

while I was probably berating him

and making him feel small.

And in that moment, my husband said to me,

like, you need to figure this out.

You need to go get help.

And he took the children and left for four days.

It was a long weekend and he left for that weekend

alone with myself.

And it was really in the face and the mirror of me being

the mother that I never knew that I could be.

And it was interesting because it was without any of the limitations

that my mother had had.

My mother had been a 16-year-old pregnant teen of me.

She had been kicked out of her home.

She had no financial resources.

And I was allowed to be a stay-at-home mom.

I had all of the--

had been planted in this beautiful garden

so I didn't know how I got there.

And that's when I went to see Denise and start my journey

there.

So that healing with her was a 12-year journey.

And six years into it, as we healed systematically,

PRH is where my designation is, what it's called.

And it's not a France.

It's the studies of persons and relationships human.

And at the end of the six years, she

said, I think you should entertain being formally

trained in this process.

And so you can't enter PRH in the formal accompaniment program

without having done this healing work first.

And it was the first type of therapy

that had ever held me and held space for me

and offered me a new life.

And so from there, I wanted to pay that forward

and extend that to people.

And yeah, I've never turned back.

It's been quite the journey.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

And it speaks to me, too, about how

we don't know what we carry from our early life.

It's just sort of normal within us.

And it's only when we see the mirror,

like the fingerprints and your husband's reaction.

Yes.

It becomes conscious.

Yes.

Bless you for seeing that and making that different forever.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that was the-- it was a pivotal moment,

because, like I said, I had the resources.

I wasn't in alcoholic.

I wasn't drinking.

There was no reason for my misbehavior there.

But again, one of the biggest misbehaviors

has turned into one of my blessings,

because it became a mission to change the generational trauma,

to end so many cycles that have been in my family

for a long period of time.

Yeah.

That is a beautiful mission.

I think one we're all on, one way or another,

consciously or unconsciously, trying

to heal the traumas of the past.

Yes.

Now, I want to focus, if we can, on the different inner

conversations and the different languages.

If you can explain to us a little bit about the languages

of the brain, the heart, the body and spirit,

what's the purpose of each one and how

do they integrate for health?

Shall we start with the brain?

Sure, we can start with the brain.

Our beautiful brain.

[LAUGHS]

It's both a miracle, and it does great things for us.

It helps us to breathe, and it digests our food,

and it helps us to continue to go one foot in front of the other.

It's our survival tool.

But it also has its limitations,

and it wants to protect us a lot.

And so our brain will tell us in moments of trauma

or in places that we're trying to grow in life.

You don't really need to look at that, Sandra.

That happened in the past.

You should probably just let that go and just march forward.

And so as children and as young until it's fully

developed at 25 to 30 years of age,

it serves only to protect us.

It does not need us to thrive.

It does not need us to actualize our being.

It does not need us to flourish in any way.

It is simply there for survival.

And so it has a little bit more power

in our adult intellectual life than I believe that it should get.

I have a philosophy where I break the brain, the heart, the body,

and our being, being our spirit and soul relationship

into 25% voting shares.

So even if your brain is like, I'm all in,

I think that you should not proceed with any of these things.

It only gets a 25% vote.

And so we have to learn to ask our body what its capacity is

to hear what our heart has to say and feel about the experience

and then what is good for our actual self

and why we came here to have this experience.

So I divided into voting shares,

and I have a decision-making process that says that.

So if every other aspect of yourself said, no, this isn't good,

but your brain said, yeah, full on, let's go, it doesn't win.

It's only a 25% voting share.

And I'll share an example afterwards that I

love to express the difference between the brain and our heart.

The brain in emotional content or psychological content

works as the narrator of our story, and it's linear.

It's a timeline, and it doesn't add the facts of our experience.

It just is the fact-keeper.

And then our body is the vessel that holds our story,

that carries our story, everything it carries,

all the light and all the happy experiences,

and then it carries the experiences of trauma

and what life has given to us to carry.

So it also gets a say, and it says, this is too exhausting.

I can't do this.

Or, yeah, you have enough in, you keep going.

But we do have to account for it and ask it permission

and recognize it as a great source of,

I may be able to do this intellectually,

but it's going to take too much energy.

This healing is going to be exhausting.

Yeah.

The body--

That's like my head is writing checks, my body count cash.

Yes.

Yes, exactly.

And the program that I created in 2023

that I just finished running is a heart-centered program.

And so I really wanted people to start

to learn how to listen to their heart

and to feel the emotions and really have

compassion for their story.

So the heart is where we feel things,

and it's where we become the character of our story.

And when I work with people in the situations, which mostly

unknown to me, I would become a trauma expert.

I don't think that I knew that at the time coming into it.

It's the place where I really learned

that our brain protects us from the feelings

and the emotions and the pain that happened in that moment.

And so when we allow ourselves to become the character

in the stories when the healing really begins to happen.

And I say alongside of that, the next most important thing,

besides acknowledging your heart and the person that

was in that story is being witnessed to it.

And I feel like that's really crucial.

And I express that often throughout my program

is that you can do the journaling that I ask you to do.

But without sharing the journaling,

you're not heard one by another human being.

And you don't hear yourself from the character point of view.

So it's remarkable because our brain will let us journal.

It will say, oh, she's doing a to-do list.

She's getting something out of the way for me

that I have less to hold on to.

So it will let you type on a laptop or pen to paper,

write out something and think that's awesome.

And it will allow that.

But I think there's magic in pen to paper, especially.

But when your heart gets to be involved in that process,

you tell a story as the character,

and you actually become in that moment.

So if there was a trauma that happened to me

when I was six years old and I'm writing about it,

my heart will take me back.

And that six-year-old girl will finally have a voice

and she'll speak it and she'll be able to feel it.

So when you hear your story because you've read it to me

out loud or someone safe and trusting in your life,

you're heard, which is essential, by another human being.

But you also hear your own story.

And my experience is for the first time

from a compassionate place within you.

And then you no longer are hard on yourself

or judgmental on yourself.

You can finally release that.

And the miracle of that in my courses

that I took was all in written analysis

and then all shared in the classroom.

Every single thing was shared.

There was a knowing for the first time

and many things were revealed to me

and I had written the journal entry

and I had reread the journal entry

and then we were always required to step away

for a lunch break or coffee break and come back to it.

And then we would have to share out loud.

And it was in those moments

with some of the hugest revelations

of what had really happened to me.

And I would say and take my breath taken back,

this is new for me.

And the first time that happened,

I'm like, how is it new for me?

I wrote it.

I reread it.

I've experienced it.

Why is this new for me?

Because our brain will shut that down for us

because it thinks that was too painful.

You weren't of wanted to have lived.

You couldn't have lived if I wouldn't have shut you down.

But now as the adult, we have capacity.

It's only the child that was in danger in those moments.

As the adult, we have to go back

and rescue our child.

- Yeah.

- They hold them, hear them.

- Yeah, and I love that

because you shift to a really wholesome parent

that is kind and compassionate

rather than the internalized parent

that the little child is used to experiencing.

So there's a necessity to build trust and connection

as you go back and visit her,

let her look into your eyes, let her come to you,

and let her sit on your lap

and feel the calm of your body

and the security of your tender loving hair.

- And that is where your body and your nervous system

will recalibrate because you can say,

"You're safe now, we made it."

- Yeah.

- I'm here.

I won't ever leave you again.

And it's there where we begin the journey of becoming whole,

not that we were ever broken.

We live in a broken world.

And I have a diagram that is an egg

and it is the representation in the PRH,

pedagogy is this shape of an egg.

I've made it a little bit simpler in that.

And I love that it turned out to be an egg,

but I'm like, it's ironic that we come from an egg

we're burst from an egg,

but an egg also has capacity.

It's a sealed unit and you can't get into it

any other way except when it's broken open.

And so I always speak to my clients.

You were not broken and this is an opportunity

for us to be broken open and for you

to actualize yourself finally.

But it does.

And so when our body has reached its capacity of trauma,

of information, of an unhappy life,

it breaks open and for us in disease,

in our autoimmune diseases, in our cancers

and all of the diseases,

but also in our mental illness.

I've spoken to my analogy only of depression being

that I'm at capacity, there is no more room.

I don't have room for anything else.

And so I have to dumb me down.

It's a protection that doesn't allow anything else in

if I don't get up in the morning,

if I don't participate in life, if I isolate, if I sleep,

nothing else can come in

because my body has said there is no more room,

but it is my brain that dummies down.

So even though it's not a cancer,

our brain is an organ and it will dumb me down.

And on the other end of that,

the anxiety is I am so full, there's no more room.

And it wants out.

And so it expresses itself with a racing heart

and all of the experiences that we have racing brain.

So our brain will either shut down in depression

or it will act out and behave its way out of our body

and in disease.

- Yeah, so on all of that shaking with fear

or the sense of overwhelm that comes with that,

can't take any more in it.

- Can't take any more in it.

- Yes.

- And I explain anxiety as well as like a fever.

A fever is a beautiful thing

that it tells us there's something in our body.

There's an infection.

And what we do or what in our world, the Western world

is we don't want to suffer the fever.

And so we take Tylenol or cold compresses

and we try to remove the fever,

but the fever if left and not in a really dangerous situation,

it is both the indicator of infection

and the cure for the infection.

If we let the fever run its course,

it will heat out the infection

and our suffering will be less.

The disease or the cold, the flu, whatever,

will take care of itself

because we're perfectly made that way.

Anxiety is like an emotional fever.

It says something is wrong and it needs to be expressed.

And again, with some of the other ways that are dealt with it,

we try to deal with the symptom of medication

or things that dummy it down,

but it needs to be released.

It needs to be expressed.

And if we allow it, then that's when the infection is healed.

When we let the heat take care of itself.

And in life and in growing in all things,

there's pain, it's the law of polarity.

There has to be pain, there has to be darkness,

to be light, there has to be heat to be cold.

But with the anxiety piece,

it's given to us and it needs to be expressed

on the other side of that.

And when we do that,

there's a, it also tells our body

to not be afraid the next time it happens,

that we don't have to fear it.

That's beautiful.

And I think about the things that come out in our bodies,

like shaking legs is often a desire to run.

Shaking arms is pulled back punches.

It's what we couldn't do at the time is in our bodies now.

- And you know, the load on our back,

the burdens that we've carried on our back

and the feeling of being kicked in the stomach

is because we've been betrayed

and we have been kicked in the stomach

and so we manifest that in our body

in the exact place where the emotional content was stored.

And in terms of emotions, what happens is,

if there's an incident, like I said,

just go back and I'm six years old

and there's something that's happened.

And I'm not guided by an adult.

I'm not allowed or languaged emotionally

what I've gone through and that did feel like a sucker punch

or something that suffocated me,

that like just took the air out of my,

we manifest that as adults, that's where our diseases

will also manifest.

So if we have IBS or stomach issues, it's from that.

But as that six year old, the next time I feel that same,

let's say the emotion we name that is betrayal,

as my adult, when I experience betrayal,

I actually go back and experience it as a six year old.

And it's interesting, especially with my couples

because they'll mirror to each other.

And then he's like a six year old misbehaving

and he's just grown man in front of me acting

like a six year old is because emotionally

on the point of betrayal, nobody walked him through that.

He did not process that to its end.

And so he will continue to go back and be a six year old

in the places of betrayal.

If there was a place where there was a broken promise

or a disappointment when he was 12 and then in his adult life,

he's disappointed, then he's a 12 year old.

So each trauma that's laid down at the very age

in which it happened, we respond in all of those

misdeveloped ages.

Yes, it's about coming back and being the adult in that.

Yeah, so tell me about the difference between

the language of the brain and the language of the heart.

You can in a nutshell.

I can.

The brain's language doesn't have emotional content.

So one of the easiest examples I can give is a client

that I had and he was speaking to me about pleading

his case with his partner.

And I joked with him and I said, pleading your case

were you in a court of law?

And he's like, yeah, we were pleading our cases.

And I reframed for him and said, sharing your story.

And he stopped.

And he's like, how is that different?

And I said, because pleading your case is about winning,

which is about survival, which is about your brain

and protection.

And sharing your story is about vulnerability

and expressing a part of yourself that needs to be heard.

Yeah.

And so that truly right there, so it's just language.

And I said, it is just language, but yes, it's crucial.

Our language is crucial in how we express it.

Because again, we go from the narrator to the character.

So the story that I like to share there is that

if you were in a car accident and you had to fill out

a police report, you would not share the emotions

in the police report.

In the police report, you would state the time of day,

the street and avenue you were on, the speed you were doing,

the car you were driving, and then the circumstance

in which a car turned left into you

into a part of your vehicle.

That would be what you would express in your police report.

But when you got home and wanted to share with your partner

that you were in this accident and there were sounds

and there were smells and there was chaos

and there was the bracing of the steering wheel

and there's where's the children and is everybody okay?

You don't express that in the police report.

And so that's again the difference

between the brain having that experience,

your body being in the experience

and then your character actually reliving it

so that it could be composted and heard and seen and believed,

which are basic emotional needs,

equal to in our body to food, water and shelter,

excuse me, food, water and oxygen,

is to be heard to be seen and to be believed.

And the believing is important

because it's to believe that that's what you were experiencing,

is to believe that it hurt you that badly

because every person's trauma is different.

And so if my trauma was rape

and people will always say,

well, I didn't have the same life as you,

but to be raped just to have something taken from you

without permission.

So we all have been raped in some regard

that someone took without asking

or took more than I was willing to give

in terms of energy or my brain or my body, et cetera.

And so it's super important to be able to be believed

that that was the worst thing that has happened to you

and not compare it to the worst thing

that has happened to somebody else

because again, what we take away in our brain takes away

is the compassion for what you went through.

- Yes, it's really, really important.

There aren't a sort of hierarchical lists,

there aren't hierarchical lists of trauma

because it's how we experienced it

and what on the outside looks like a disappointment

or a small invalidation from the inside can feel huge.

- Huge.

- And damaging for that.

- Yes, and forever damaging

and it can then affect

and this is where the generational trauma comes in

is if I don't do my work,

I transfer it to my children

and they might not even have the same anxiety that I had

but they lived with an unregulated mother

who didn't know what to do with her anxiety

who made the world feel unsafe

or it appears that I and in many cases was frozen

but weak versus frozen.

And so, you know, and there's the fight, flight

and freeze responses that we all have

and I've sent my children off to different therapists

and I've spoken to what would you like to have happened

for them and I said, well, they had an unregulated mother

so just go from there.

- Did you say a little bit before we go further

about what unregulated means?

'Cause I think it's coming into common parlance

but I don't think everybody knows what that means.

- Yeah, the unregulated for me,

you know, as a lived experience, I freeze.

This is what I do.

And I've just explained to a client whose partner freezes

'cause he doesn't have that experience.

He's a fighter and he's like a visceral fighter

and so he did not have capacity.

So legitimately in my freeze experience, I was,

oh hello, this is my third bird witch.

(laughs)

- Oh, I was so sweet.

And I know it's really interesting.

A number of people I know have had a lot of trauma

in their lives, love their dogs,

their creatures and I know your bird comes with you

wherever and your dogs are in the room.

- Yes, my, and my program online is my co-host

and he's usually traveling on top of my head.

My animals for me and my practice, they come

and on my website, it's a photo of my animals

and it says, you know, are you allergic to dogs, birds

or adult children because you'll experience them all here

in my home location.

They bring a lot of peace, they're good at reading energy

and you know, they get a full package when people come here

and have the experience of me.

If I start to get very animated or use my effort,

which is a great deal of my therapy language,

Miss Misha back there will get offended

and she'll leave the room.

- She's not into my swearing.

Yes, but, and he adores the camera too, actually.

He's not shy about that.

He likes to be the center of attention.

(laughs)

That's so sweet.

But he actually helps me regulate

because now I had to come out of myself

and be aware of my surroundings.

So the, the freeze in my experiences,

very solid in my body, I'm unable to move.

It's like my feet are planted.

My mind stops.

So if someone was talking to me,

it would appear like I was being disrespectful or obstinate.

I'm there, I'm present, I'm breathing,

I'm looking at you, but I, I'm not hearing anything

that you have to say.

And what's happened is I've reverted back to the little girl

in whatever mirrored situation has happened to me

where I'm not good enough, I was wrong.

I'm in trouble, I'm, I'm not gonna be able to live here anymore,

whatever the circumstance is.

And so I'm actually not present at all

in those circumstances.

So you're really triggered and you've got a look

on your face that is the, the physical manifestation

of la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la,

which looks very disrespectful.

It looks very-- Can you, can you, yeah,

can you talk about the other forms of reaction to trauma?

Because you mentioned fight, but there are some more,

can you say, about them?

So the fight is quite obvious, it's where it's,

it's outward, so where freeze is inward.

Fight is the expression outwardly,

so it's usually loud.

There's usually some physical manifestation again,

it needs to come out of our body,

it does need to come out of our body,

it just can't be at another human being.

But we have now, they're called rage rooms or rec rooms

where you can physically go and pay $40 to go in a room

and break things.

And I don't think that's inappropriate at all.

It's when you give your energy and your response

to somebody else that it's inappropriate,

it's a disproportionate reaction.

And it's a child responding and really

in those moments of the, of the fight as well,

they look very childlike, like temper tantrums.

But again, we're, we're very perfectly made

where children having, it's out their hands,

it's screaming, like this is so unfair,

I can't even breathe right now.

It's stamping up and down, stomping up and down.

And so in society, suddenly that became, and I understand

where it was inappropriate,

usually about school age to behave that way.

But we shouldn't have kibosh it.

We should have given it a space and a time

and allowed that to happen.

But when it's been suppressed,

it's even more of a disproportion as an adult.

And it looks very dangerous and it's very violent,

it can be very violent.

And it involves other people getting hurt.

So that's the inappropriateness of it.

- Yes.

And even if the person isn't hit,

putting your fish through a door feels like

it could be me next.

- Well, it's a threat that your brain is threat.

- Threat.

- Threat, I'm in danger.

- Yes.

And then the flight response is where you walk away.

Which again, triggers usually triggers

'cause we in relationship tend to invite people

into our lives that will mirror this.

So it's not a freeze and it's not aggressive.

It's like, I'm not doing this anymore.

So it's a walking away, it's leaving the room,

it's refusing to continue in the conversation.

And again, it's just on the other person.

And when we have people triggered,

we do not have adults triggered.

We have invited two children into whatever that relationship

is about, I like to speak to the physiology of one,

when we're triggered in any of those responses,

it invites cortisol and adrenaline

and really powerful hormones into the physiology of our body.

And once those are triggered,

they're like an Advil or Tylenol,

they last four to six hours.

And so in those moments, once triggered,

it's very difficult.

And you know, your sympathetic comparison,

but the nervous systems can't work at the same time.

So you can't ration your way through it.

And it's a good six hours

before you're coming back into yourself.

So I am where you're dysregulated.

So it's really important.

And I try to be the vitamin for people

where it's like, we can't let that happen.

And if that does happen,

that really you should have a rule within the relationship

that you wait a minimum of six hours

and probably an overnight experience of a good night's sleep

before you try to address what's happening in the relationship

and that what you should do immediately is go to a journal

and express it while it's raw and real

'cause your brain will also love to do that

and that will help with the regulation of that

and be able to express it in its rawness

but not in its emotional content to the other human being.

So, and that journaling is remarkable because it's real

and it's the adult speaking of the,

and then this and this and this and this

and this is where we go back

and this always happens and we never get resolved.

When we're doing the journaling in that moment,

the character gets to have a say

even though you couldn't speak to that character in that moment

but if you were to go back the next day

and resolve with that person and I ask them to read,

I ask people not to necessarily have conversations

but if they come with their journaling

because again, is that heard piece?

Conversations people, we get triggered by nuances,

they roll their eyes, they sigh,

they interrupt and we never get to finish

but nobody interrupts you when you're reading.

It's a really respectful tool.

And that even if you are, I'm hearing something

but then I don't comment on it, it can settle down too

and it stays in the process and it knows also

it's gonna have a turn to be able to read its work.

And at the end, it's like, well, what is the thing

that you needed to hear here?

Because it may be five pages of written work

but I'll say, and so what do you need me to know

from this work?

And it's a single sentence.

I feel so alone.

But it was five pages journaling to get to,

I just feel so alone.

Yes, to get to that clarity and the power of the feelings.

Yeah.

Yes, it's beautiful.

Can you speak a little about fawning?

'Cause that's sometimes spoken about

and I think it's really important, particularly for women.

Yes, because we're nurturers and caregivers and gatherers

so it's natural that we try to, you know,

just gather everybody all to come back together

in a nuance.

And so when my therapist,

I only found out I was a fawner

when I took on a somatic therapy after COVID

and I was finally using my voice.

So I was coming out of freeze

and I was trying to use my voice

but I wasn't impeccable with my words

and I was still terrified who was gonna hear me,

who was gonna believe me.

And I didn't trust myself in my words.

And so I call it tippy towing,

but it's like, oh, I'm so sorry to bother you

but I have this need or I have this boundary

and I was just hoping that you would attend to that for me.

And so I came to therapy with this,

this is what I said.

And it was apologizing for my existence.

And it was apologizing for my need.

And it was apologizing that I had a boundary

that I was hoping that you wouldn't,

but not imposing, I was just hoping you would respect that

for me.

And so I also believe that humans grow on a pendulum.

And so I was mute, literally mute.

And then I came out really bitchy and entitled

and you're gonna hear me and you're gonna see me

and you're gonna believe me.

And I've done my amendments to the service industry

where I would send back food that I would have never sent back

before or be rude to a cashier because I had to come out.

So here I died a death where I had something to say

and it was important to say,

and I curl up in the fetal position

and cry myself to sleep at night

because I hadn't been heard.

And then when I came out being a raging bitch,

I curled up in the fetal position in shame thinking,

like that's not who you are

and how dare you misbehave that way.

And then I found the balance.

And I think fawning is one of those things

where we're trying to find the balance.

I was grateful to finally be speaking,

but I wasn't speaking solidly and well

and in my actual myself of what I needed

and what I was prepared to receive.

And if you can't meet my need, that's okay,

but my need doesn't change because you can't need it.

- No, and it moves from that pleading my case

to stating my need.

- Yes.

- Yeah, beautiful.

So tell us a little bit more about the spirit

and the purpose we're here for

and how that fits within,

'cause I know that's part of your work too.

- Right, so the being for me is the thing

that is within us that's bigger than us.

It is all things goodness.

So it is light, it is love.

If you relate with God, it is the God that is within you

and your purpose and your potential all live in your being.

And in my egg diagram, it's at the bottom

because we have to survive first

and really we have to survive our childhood.

And then we do the separation, the umbilical cord cut.

I call it a vasectomy when it comes to trauma

where we cut ourselves off until we can come back to ourselves

and where we have the ability to affect change.

So children only suffer the consequences

of our adults behaviors.

We don't have ability to affect change as children,

so we're powerless.

And this is why I advocate hard for children.

But as adults, we do have the power to affect change,

but in our trauma, we don't use our power.

And so we have our egg, which is our body,

our brain is surviving, it gets us through,

we separate from ourselves

because this would be too painful to live

and it'd be too painful to be powerless for so long.

And at the bottom is our being.

And in our anatomy, it's where our intuition

and gut instinct comes where we actually feel that in our gut.

We know what's good for us or not.

And so that's where I would say the being is

and in my egg, it shows at the bottom there.

And it's as, it came here with a purpose.

It came here as light and love.

And then life happens to us

and all of our traumas build in that sensibility piece,

our heart center in the center of our body in the egg.

And it's a beautiful rose.

And then our trauma is all the weeds

in the clay garden without sunlight.

And so our being is, it's there,

it's to actualize and I speak really

with a lot of certainty around this.

Our being is whole and it is undamaged

by any trauma that happens to us.

It is perfectly maintained and always ready

to actualize itself.

To the very last moment or breath of our life,

we can actualize ourselves

and people think are trauma trumps and limits,

the capacity of who we can be.

And so when we have this expression,

and I'm just gonna actually get my diagram.

And so if you were to see this, you see my egg

and I work with people to name all of their traumas.

And here's my being down here.

And what I speak to is every time a trauma happens,

which is called a pocket of pain in my philosophy,

there's this bulletproof vest that comes down

and goes around my being.

And so you can see where here's my being

where it's this pink highlighted,

there's little bits of myself in this pink

around all of my traumas.

There's little pieces of us that have our moments

to actualize ourselves.

But my job is to take these traumas

and to physically move them, heal them out of our bodies.

And that's when the rose is gonna come.

Because right now it's like, if I come out,

I'm just gonna get mowed over.

So it's not safe for me to come and be amongst the weeds.

So we have to do enough of our work.

And but because this bulletproof vest has been there,

we are completely protected.

So in every moment we have the choice and opportunity

to become who we were meant to be

and to live out our purpose.

- Wow, that's beautiful, it's beautiful.

There's always hope and there's always movement

and there's always growth towards light.

- Yes, yes.

So we know that our body has had this experience

and even in diseases it would feel like

there's no repair there or no recovery there.

But as soon as we start to do this work

and for as much as trauma goes like this and a spiral,

once we start to do the healing work,

the blessing is tenfold and the potential is limitless.

- Beautiful.

You talk too, I mean, we're speaking earlier

about not being able to heal alone.

I wonder if you can say a bit more about that.

Can you think that's really key?

- Well, in relationships we are harmed.

It is in relationships that we are harmed.

So it is in relationships that we heal.

We cannot do this work alone.

Again, that would be a brain item where

if I'm angry, my brain will give me all the reasons

and it keeps me powerless,

but it will be all the reasons that I'm entitled to be angry,

which doesn't move me into the feeling of feeling.

So I'm angry and my brain's like,

yeah, you're angry like that guy cut you off

and he didn't even signal and all of the things you should be.

You had to slam on your brakes,

then your family was in danger.

Yeah, you should be, you should be mad.

But if you were to, when you unfold that

and again, do your journaling,

it's like nobody ever sees me.

My road rage analogy, which I'm not sure for you in the UK

if you have road rage.

- Yeah, we do, we do, believe it.

- Okay, so I take road rage as a real psychological example

where somebody cuts me off and you're yelling

and they can't hear you, but didn't you see me?

Don't I matter?

You endangered my life

or is where you're going so much more important than me.

It is this epidemic of not being seen,

not being believed that I get to take up this space

that I matter and I get to be in this lane

at this time doing this speed.

And it really is this, didn't you see me?

In the same example, if someone had turned, they signaled,

they got eye contact 99% of the time you're like,

"Please, please go ahead because I was considered."

So that goes off there on what that is,

but it is because we need to be heard and seen and believed

that it has to be witnessed.

And so my brain will only understand anger.

But when I again get home and speak of the story,

it was like I was so scared for the children.

I wasn't angry.

Our life was in danger

and the car would have been damaged, what's affects how we...

And so when you start to share it with another human being,

you go from angry to overwhelmed, to terrified, to injustice

and you start to really feel the things that were going on.

But it is in the face of witnessing that

because if we just talk about even happiness,

if your brain thinks you're happy,

it's like I'm just so lucky, I'm just such a good person,

only good things happen to me, and that's not the truth either.

And so our brain, like I said, it limits us.

It will only have the individual thought that it has

and it won't expand itself.

And again, generally it's inappropriate

because anger is very outward.

But if people are frustrated, it's very much slumped over

and it's an inward frustration.

But I find people use frustrated and anger as parallels

and they're not even close to one another.

So when somebody witnesses it, they can call to...

I'm very...

I'll say good at, but at least I speak truth.

And so I call people in their sessions out too.

Is that true?

Because I don't know that you're angry right now.

I think you're actually heartbroken.

And then a softness comes and a tear comes

and their voice quivers because anger for me also

isn't an emotion.

I don't use it as an emotion.

I use anger as the volume of the emotion that is unnamed.

Beautiful.

So I'm 10 out of 10 heartbroken.

And it's just the volume or the degree to which the pain exists.

And I use that as a philosophy as well,

that anger equals pain, misbehavior equals pain.

And the degree of your anger,

'cause that's what some of our prison systems are filled with,

the degree of the misbehavior and the degree of the anger

is the degree of the pain of being lost,

of being unsupported, of having been beaten as a child.

So I ask people to look also differently at anger.

And so if you're in a relationship or with a partner

with your children and they're angry,

it's to ask them what's hurting them, not what's your problem.

What's going on for you,

which is still would be a brain thing about tell me

about what happened.

I don't need to know what happened.

I need to know what's hurting.

I need to know what's hurting.

I need to know what's hurting.

And that's the brain language too.

What happened versus what's hurting?

What has, will give you the details.

What's hurting will allow you to express yourselves.

Yeah, I'm going to allow you to heal,

to be seen and heard and all of that.

It'd be heard and believed that that must be really hard for you.

Yeah, yeah, beautiful.

So tell us more about the Sandra Method

and how people can find you and do your course if they want to.

Sandra Method is Sandra Method.com.

And it's not the Sandra Method.com.

It's just Sandra Method.com.

Oh, beg your pardon.

No, I make that mistake all the time because I'll go,

yeah, just look up the Sandra Method.

But it's Sandra Method.com.

And I have joined partners with certified flourishing coaching

with a man who certified me 14 years ago

because my designation was not recognized in Canada.

I turned to a life coaching designation and A Brown is my coach,

my business mentor, and now a collaborator

and somebody who believes that I had something to offer

and said, I think you do things continuously.

And so he heard me and saw me and believed in me.

And I took him the picture of the egg to a meeting

that I drove three hours to get to.

And it took me two hours to explain my egg.

And he said, I think you have something.

And I turned that into a this nine month program.

And so you can find my trauma-informed life coaching program at.

I'm a certified flourishing coaching.

And it's beautiful.

I just ran my first class through.

I had eight students and to certify them.

And the philosophy was really that, again,

because I can't ask you to do what I hadn't done.

I want coaches to have some trauma background.

That was my one of my motives for that is that I want you to be able to say,

do this because I did it and I lived and I healed and I became this.

And so it is a certification program.

But at the end of it, what I've discovered is that it's really a nine month life course on healing.

It would be like a boot camp except nine months is a full-term baby being born.

But we heal nine of the relational subjects that we are all in.

So everything in life is in relation.

And so, you know, relationship with money, relationship with nature,

relationship with our body, everything is in relationship.

And so in my course, we touch nine of those topics.

And it gives you a really big tool box to be able to heal, you know,

any other relationship or relational items outside of the nine that we touch.

And again, it is because we are witness.

So what was fascinating is I didn't think that I'd be able to work in a group setting.

I'm very one on one.

But the element of being witnessed and for us to see that we are all more alike than we are different,

to start to understand how we compare our traumas and the relevancy of that,

how men and women relate with one another.

So in my first program, I had seven women and one man.

And I think that the change with him was actually the most that you could see.

If he was in kindergarten when he started, he was in grade 12 when he finished,

where my women were probably in grade six and finished in grade 12,

because we just had to have more emotional experiences or allow those things to happen.

So it can be used as either a coaching certification,

which will just add brilliance to your repertoire of being able to connect with people,

which is what all coaching and therapy is to do.

But now I would say it was this beautiful thing that it took me 12 years to do my healing journey.

And I've turned it into something that you get to touch on on all these aspects in nine months.

And the beginning of my class, the second night of my class,

you have to write your trauma story.

And the very nice last night of the class nine months later,

you write who you are different than you were nine months earlier.

And it was an hour and a half of my mouth open and tears and just profound.

I had no idea how life changing.

This would be as a healing program, never mind a life coach designation.

That's absolutely magnificent.

Thank you so much, Sandra.

Oh, wow. I can only encourage everybody who's a coach who's watching us and listening to us today to go and enroll.

Thank you so much.

I just have to say also the certification that you do.

Certification might be wrong where you did unconscious coupling with me.

I'm just uncoupling.

Thank you. Yes.

Conscious.

We all do unconscious coupling.

Oh, yes.

That's what I had done.

And then I came to you.

Yes, that work.

It expanded me in ways that I had no idea how to really show up in my relationship differently and not bring my marriage into my new relationship.

There was no room for that Sandra or that relationship in this.

And in that 12 weeks, you have the tools that I gained as a therapist, but as somebody who now is in a healthy relationship.

I can't even speak to its value.

Oh, thank you so much. I feel heard seen and believed as well.

Which is so important.

So thank you.

Thank you.

I'm just a great compliment to our programs for such a great compliment to one another.

I really, really are.

Thank you very much.

Shall we close now? Is that anything else?

Just thank you.

As someone else who believed in me and cheerleader me through as I was going through this.

You're so welcome.

So joy to be home.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Revolutionize Your Love Life.

I'd like to know what has been your biggest takeaway from this conversation.

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Thank you so much again for listening.

And we'll meet again on the next episode of Revolutionize Your Love Life.

You are good.

You are good for my heart.

[music fades out]

Stay safe.