Trauma, Pain, and Recovery: A Personal Story of Resilience and Hope

Have you ever felt consumed by pain so intense that it feels like a constant cloud over your life? This episode is a heartfelt confession of my personal journey through that storm. I open up about the trauma of my son's motorcycle accident, and the aftermath - the pain, the fear, and the emotional upheaval. Despite all this, I managed to pull through and maintain a regular work schedule, a testament to the resilience that comes from years of facing adversity.

Pain, I've learned, can wear many faces. It can morph into hate, depression, anxiety, loneliness, blame, or even physical illness. We explore these pain forms, their manifestation, and most importantly, how to observe, understand, and calm them. It's okay to be in pain, and it's okay to seek help. The journey to healing starts with acknowledging your pain, treating it, and finding joy even in the darkest corners of life. 

As this episode concludes, I share my future podcast plans and the importance of taking things slow. Healing is a journey, not a destination, and every step, no matter how small, counts. I look forward to sharing my journey with you every week, hoping that it will strike a chord with somebody out there going through a similar fight. This podcast isn't just about me or my story, but about all of us and our collective journey towards healing.

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This podcast is not meant to take the place of therapy, to diagnose or treat anyone. I have had therapy as recently as 2021 and found it very helpful. I am not a doctor. My only degree is in computers. I am simply sharing tools I have used to help myself grow to become an emotionally healthy person and sharing stories about my journey. Please seek medical help, as I did, if you are unable to cope with life and all that it brings.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to the Hidden Healing Podcast. Thank you for stopping by to take a listen. I have a few questions for you. Did you grow up with a lot of adverse childhood experiences? Do you live in the toxic stress of fight or flight, feeling constantly triggered by things that make you feel unsafe? Well, you're in the right place. Listen in as I share stories and lessons from my journey in healing from complex PTSD. Listening to this podcast will help you learn to retrain your nervous system so that you feel safe and experience fewer triggers, and learn how over functioning no longer serves you and how the key to healing lies in your identity and your somatic recovery. I hope you enjoy this episode.

Speaker 1: 0:58

It has been a hot minute, but I'm so glad to be back. So we've had so much happening since the end of September. I indeed did batch all of September's podcast, which means that I recorded them all at one time and then just drift them out throughout the month. But then what happened was at the end of September I think it was the 21st my son was in a motorcycle crash and it was pretty bad and it has been a pretty stressful month. So I want to say it's exactly one month of the day today, which is crazy if you think about it. He is okay, he is walking, he is up and around, but he does have a cast on his wrist and he does have a few new metal pieces in his femur on his leg, and so to say that that was traumatic for the whole family would be an understatement. It would probably be.

Speaker 1: 2:01

It was crazy time and although it is mostly past, it is still like crawling out of the hole. You know what I mean. And especially when you have grown up with a life of a lot of adverse experiences, it is so easy to get triggered again, to be in that place where it's hard to cope and it's hard to do all the things. But I have withdrawn socially. I have withdrawn in a lot of different ways, but I have kept myself going in a lot of good ways, which is something different. So we did spend four nights in the hospital and then we had to bring my son home. It is really interesting when I think back about it, because the first day at work was really hard and I didn't know if I'd be okay and I didn't know if I would panic and jump off the phones, because what if my son needed me and a couple of times I did jump off the phones and go help him with something. But I want to say, by day three of my eight hour shift I realized that I could do it, that I would be okay, and that just the fact that he was home and I was home helped me to not feel out of control and helped me to feel like, if anything was to happen, I would be okay.

Speaker 1: 3:21

Rory is a very healthy young man who only knows how to push his physical, mental limits, and so he is up and around and trying to do all the things to become whole and healthy again. I haven't had to miss any work and I have been able to feel safe and okay working every single day. So it's been interesting because I have worked three solid weeks of every day, which is I have mentioned before that I used to work three-twelve doing home health care, so I got really used to that over the last 10 years, just, you know, having a really long shift and then being home for a lot of the time, so that becomes really easy to get used to, and working five-eight hour days is really something that you have to adjust to. So it's the end of my week three, and let me tell you how tired I was. By Friday night I was so ready to get off the phones and probably around 7 pm, which would mean I had five hours left I was like getting really antsy. But really when you're troubleshooting computers, it's easy to get wrapped up in that and what's going on in 20-minute increments, and so that has been really helpful, that my job really keeps my mind going.

Speaker 1: 4:45

I think that one of the big lessons that I learned out of this is again how to take care of myself even during stressful times, and that is something that I have had to learn over the probably the last five years. I've been learning that lesson again and again and again, and each time it just keeps getting better. So I remember, probably like three years ago, I created a worksheet of sorts and it was called a personal crisis plan, and the personal crisis plan literally is a sheet of paper. It's laid out so beautifully and then it has places for you to put the steps that you take, the things that you do, the people that you reach out to when you feel like you're drowning in your stress or in depression or anything like that. And it was really interesting because I remember when I made that document, I needed it for me and I had to write down to see what I do so that I could remember every time I would get in a hole to do these steps, and it's you know, three years later maybe, I think, and I was looking at that document just because of something else I'm doing and I had it pulled up and I was happy because I didn't have to reach out and look at that document and I didn't have to try to figure that out, because I have done this again and again and again and it's almost like I know how to take care of myself now during stressful times. That's impressive. I think that's impressive anyways, and something I'm celebrating.

Speaker 1: 6:20

I hope my hope and dreams for everyone, every human being, especially every woman, every mother, everyone who has to take care of people is that you learn how to take care of yourself, because it's nearly impossible to take care of other people 100% or to any big, big degree and Be and be happy and be healthy and behold, if you're not taking care of yourself. You should enjoy life. Even if you have something hard, which is part of the human condition you should still have some joy and some pleasures in life that you look forward to that aren't unhealthy, like food, alcohol, drugs, you know those kind of things. This time of year is really beautiful in West Virginia and it always reminds me of Stopping to be present. I say always. I'm saying always.

Speaker 1: 7:19

In the last two years, for me, physical presence in nature is something that I've never been able to calm down enough to enjoy. In this last two years I've really learned how to do that, and you know we go camping every summer for a couple weeks or depending, and I've had to teach myself this last probably two or three years how to be present when I'm in the outdoors. And in West Virginia right now we get the full-fall colors and it's probably been about, I want to say, like four or five years since they really we've really had the privilege of seeing all these deep, bright colors, because it seems like the last few years that the leaves so it's just got like a really cold snap and the leaves just like fell off before they really turned, and so Looking around just reminds us to be present. And so today that's what I want to talk about, because presence is the thing that calms our soul, you know, when we are just super wound up, like today, I was super wound up and Presence is the thing that stops that. When you feel like you can't breathe, when you feel like it's all Go into pot, when you feel like there's nothing good. If you could stop and be present, that is what is going to ground you and make you feel okay. And it is easy this time of year to step outside in West Virginia, hopefully, where you are too and look around and just see the trees and as you look up Our physiology, the way we move our body, is a really important deal about how we feel as well. So if you could walk outside and look up at trees, at the sky, at the vastness, that is one of the ways that you can ground yourself and calm down, and this is actually something that Way.

Speaker 1: 9:20

I don't remember how long ago, what it was, was it like 2010 or something like that where Oprah had Eckhart Tolle on her show, he had written a book and she I don't know if it was 2010, it might have been 2000, but she talked about. She had Eckhart Tolle on and they talked about the pain body, an emotional pain, body and what that is. And today I experienced that, where I wasn't grounded, where I Was, just a bunch of negative energy, that feeling like I, like nothing, could feel good, nothing was good, everything was negative. I was trying to get everyone around me to hear me and hear by negativity and it. It felt very ugly and I didn't know what to do with it. I went and laid down and took a nap. That was a good move.

Speaker 1: 10:10

Another good move is moving your body, but that's something that I think it's also part of the human condition is having this pain body, and what that is is a way to describe a Group of negative energies that we have. So a lot of what we deal with, a lot of what we see when we are living our life, has to do with past events, right, so that's a come. No two people see the same thing. They could see the exact same event happen or have the same thing happen to them, but it's not the same experience, because we are taking everything from the time we were born To right now, when we're experiencing that thing and seeing it. So we're passing it through a bunch of filters like think about. I Always think about rose colored glasses when, when I'm talking about this concept, because when you look through rose colored glasses.

Speaker 1: 11:09

It's easy to understand because I mean, I've heard that my whole life, right, it means that you look at things in a positive way Based on your experiences, right? So someone else who had a bunch of adverse childhood experiences may look at things in a negative way. So I've grown up with a lot of adverse childhood experiences and I became a very negative person to be around and I had this, this pain body in me all the time. That was just inconsolable and I didn't know what to do with all this energy and so I just became that negative person. And now I've long worked on it and now I consider myself a realist, which is like a step up, still working on the positivity, but definitely consider myself a realist, which is a big improvement.

Speaker 1: 12:01

And so again I do want to talk about the pain body. It's not because there's not a literal body inside of us. Obviously it's an accumulation of a bunch of negative energy, maybe things that we didn't process, and sometimes, when things become uncomfortable or this, this pain gets activated inside of us. We get this ugliness that feels like it's it's from outside of us. It doesn't feel like necessarily it's us, but we feel like I don't know it was like today. What happened was I was talking with a friend. I feel like, possibly pain, body was passed, like someone else, was uncomfortable, and I listened and then, even though she walked away feeling better, perhaps I walked away feeling that, that ugliness that she was possibly feeling. And that's not to blame anybody we are responsible for what we feel and what we see and but it's it's that native energy and sometimes we're looking to relieve someone.

Speaker 1: 13:02

Also, the concept of kicking the cat right, I don't know if you've heard that, but, like you know, when someone gets angry and the mom gets angry and yells at the child, and the child gets angry and Picks on his big brother who yells at the dad, and the dad gets mad and kicks the cat, something like that, and it's that passing of that irritation or pain. And so it's an important concept for anyone healing from complex trauma, because it's a whole nother aspect of a way that we can look at the things that having Adverse childhood experiences, having complex trauma in our lives, has Really created and it's like a distortion of the way things should really be. And so this is not a new idea. It's something that other people have described in different ways. Some people call it a shadow. The apostle Paul from the Bible called it the flesh.

Speaker 1: 14:00

There's other people who have coined different terms for this psychological Energy that happens inside us, that overcomes us or overcomes our, our thinking, in our and ourself, and it helps us feel really dysregulated and fall into just negative energy and Kind of like if you walk in a room it's negative. So there are some things about the pain body that are important to know. It can take on many forms. It can be many different types of energy. So hate, hurt, depression, anxiety, despair, loneliness, blame, even physical illness can Be an expression of this or can be expressed in a pain body. It can also, even though it's not active right now, sometimes it is underline and can Become very activated in a quick way.

Speaker 1: 14:58

I think of it a lot like being triggered. Sometimes I feel like it's like a more dull energy, like if you're triggered by something that someone does that is past through a filter of past experience that you've had and then it puts you on high alert and it makes you like quick React. I feel like that is the description of like, when you're triggered by something and you react. A pain body I feel like is more of an overall like. It's a calmer event. It is Doesn't have to be big and dramatic. It doesn't have to be acute right now. It can. It can linger and you know, it can be like a Like a rain cloud over your whole day, over your whole energy and over your whole thoughts. And so these pain bodies, they really can take over your mind and thinking and Way that you start reacting.

Speaker 1: 15:55

So pain bodies are something that we can look at and and take just a look at ourselves and see if that you know in a moment when something's going on, if that is involving one of these pain bodies. So here's some things about pain bodies is that If you observe it, if you stop and you take a moment and you feel it and you kind of see it and you can see it happening, which is really hard and takes a lot of Intention to stop and look at that, but if you can, you can help it calm down. You can calm that energy down. So there's Ways to observe it. Just watch out for, if you're feeling general and happiness, whether it is like pain in your body.

Speaker 1: 16:45

You wake up one day and I do this sometimes and I never think about it, but I wake up some days and I have a lot of pain in my body, like my arm, you know, not necessarily like muscles, but even my skin will will just really hurt and I feel pain in my back and my spine. Sometimes I describe it like my spine hurts and so it can look like that. It can look like irritation and patience, and so if you can kind of notice when you feel that way and just think about it for a minute and see and observe if Maybe you're overly attached to that pain, if there's any kind of Need payoff that you derive from being unhappy, is there something that you're getting from this unhappiness? And today I was. I was super overwhelmed. I Didn't know what to do with my day. I have so many things on my list. How do you pick one right? So the fact that I had this pain body was really Serving me, because I got to stop and take a nap and I got to Complain and you know it did make me feel better to to complain and to do all this. It's just like little energy, negative energy, is leaking out all over me like Imagine me walking with you know, like I have Screws in my joint, like tin man and I'm just leaking oil everywhere you know. Observe yourself and see if you have a compulsion to talk about whatever is going on or you just can't stop thinking about it, and that is another clue. Focus attention on the negative feelings that you have and just accept that it's there. You don't have to make it good or make it bad, you just have to look at it and see it. Don't judge it, because when you start judging it you go down a negative cycle. So the whole idea is just stay present. Stay present and notice and Just observe it and see what happens inside of you.

Speaker 1: 18:45

There's a beautiful poem that Oprah shared when she talked about the pain body and I read it when I was doing research and I thought it was beautiful. It says Stand still, the trees ahead and bushes beside. You are not lost. Wherever you are is called here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger, must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breeds Listen, it answers. I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again, sane here. No true trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Ren. If what a tree or bush does is lost on you. You are surely lost. Stand still, the forest knows where you are. You must let it find you. That is written by David Wegener and it's called lost and it really does describe presence and and brings nature into that present so that you can kind of feel it in that poem.

Speaker 1: 19:54

I'm not really really into poems, but I just thought that was really beautiful and definitely tied into what we're talking about and learning how to be here, because where you are right now is here and if you can stop and observe what's actually happening right here, it helps us calm our nervous systems and, as people who have complex trauma issues, people who are healing from that, people who can easily be triggered, presence is the answer to everything. It's the answer to learning about yourself, learning about what you like and what you don't like, and learning about the things that bring you pleasure. It's the answer to relationships. It's all presence, because when we can stop and observe what's actually happening instead of what we're perceiving, what things are happening, and then we're making it mean this or it mean that, you know, instead of that, if we can actually be present, we can start healing and we can start seeing what really is. So that's my thoughts for today.

Speaker 1: 20:59

November is upon us. It's so crazy to me that November is here and we are two months left in the year, and this year has been incredibly filled with a lot of stuff for me, and it has left me with a lot of questions, you know, because healing complex trauma is like that's my jam right, that's what I do, that's what I think about all the time. It's how, even like, even though we shouldn't identify as things, I identify as someone who is healing from complex trauma. So, like all this stuff happening around me, and I'm asking myself questions like is this my fault? Is this the consequences of things that I've done? Is this me bringing more trauma into my life? Or this has unhealed me? You know, with all these things that just keep happening again, and I know the truth. I know the truth is that when you have four kids, that's four other humans, that you have to consider everything and they're all individuals with their own lives and they all affects me until, honestly, until they move out, until they're all the way grown and they move out.

Speaker 1: 22:20

So I know a lot of it has to do with that and that I can see my progress when I see myself not go down a dark hole and, to be honest, when we were in the hospital and Rory was in so much pain, it was a really hard time for me and I had a lot of healing to do, but I was able to stop and take 15 minutes and cry and allow myself to really feel what I was feeling and then, you know, go on a drive to get food and have a good good cry while I sang, and to every time I was walking down the hall to dance and shake and do all the things so that I could remove all of that negative energy from my body. Because I knew that I was headed for a long road with this recovery and if I didn't start doing it in the moment, in the moment this was all happening, that I could find myself in a dark hole. That was different for me. So I think I could go back to my home and I could do it, but I was in a dark hole and that was different for me. So I think that I did really good this time and it just brings me hope because so many people are suffering because we don't know. We haven't been taught how to do that. We haven't been taught how to stop and feel whatever is going on and whatever is reality right now. Just observe what's happening and be present, and so processing trauma is a part of that. Processing trauma in real time is important, so that we don't just store it all up and then end up, you know, sick with emotion and unable to cope with everyday life and unable to, you know, leave our beds on some days or unable to do things that normal, functioning people do like wake up for a job every day and show up on time to a job or to appointments or have relationships with other people and so we want these healthy things that will bring us joy, and stopping and processing trauma is a part of that. So I think that I am on a good road, but at the same time, my whole plan for the month of October's podcast episodes were shot, and I feel like I know that they're still in me. I just have to figure them all out.

Speaker 1: 24:43

But the good news is that, being present, when I thought about what I could say and what I would talk about on this podcast, I thought about sharing my story of what was going on and how I was dealing with it, and I said I don't need to know more than that right now. I can do that. I don't have to have a plan for the full month, let's just get one done. So that's what I did. I hope that you guys please forgive me, first of all, for being out you know, not here for a full month because I really am committed to this podcast and to sharing my story and sharing what goes on in my life and sharing all my lessons that I'm learning so that you guys can learn that as well. But also I want to thank you for being here and knowing that people were waiting, knowing that people are interested in learning this and that they feel like this podcast is a help, is a big encouragement to me, and I do appreciate that much.

Speaker 1: 25:40

I do as well want to mention that if anybody would like a copy of that crisis planner, you can reach out to me on Instagram and at Clear Concepts with Celeste, or you can reach out to me on Facebook under my messenger and let me know and I'll be happy to get that to you.

Speaker 1: 26:02

It really did help me in the beginning when I was learning how to work through crisis without getting stuck in a dark hole, and I'm happy to share that with anyone who would like it, and I am planning on seeing you guys all of the month of November. So please, please, keep your eye out. There will be new episodes and I am taking it slowly. Right now, I have the podcast up as coming out every other week, and so I give myself the grace of that, but also my plan is to have one every week. So I look forward to seeing you guys all again. Please, if you have anything to say, have any questions, please reach out to me and I will be happy to talk, even have a chat, with you or anything like that. Alright, thanks for listening and I will talk to you later.