Lindsey's Journey of Healing and Resilience - Overcoming Trauma and Finding Authenticity
Oct 19, 2023
Britt Robisheaux
Sensitivity Warning:This episode may not be suitable for everyone. It contains a personal story of trauma and alcohol overuse. Skip this one if that feels too heavy for you. Your story is important, your life is important, and if you need help, please reach out to RAINN.ORG.
In this Can We Start Over podcast episode, Lindsey shares her journey with trauma and healing.
Inspired by a friend, she decided to record this vulnerable and sensitive solo episode to lay out her experiences, what happened to her, and the steps she took to heal.
Lindsey discusses the importance of integrating and sharing these experiences to live authentically.
Lindsey expresses her gratitude to those who listen and hopes her story can guide others on their healing journeys.
She shares her childhood trauma, her unhealthy relationship with alcohol in her teenage and early adult years, and the turning point when she realized the need for deep healing.
Lindsey talks about the impact of trauma on her parenting and her decision to make significant changes in her life, including meditation, journaling, therapy, spiritual practice & somatic work.
She also discusses her experience with rapid-resolution therapy & a plant medicine ceremony that helped release the weight and shame.
Lindsey's story is one of resilience, growth, and the power of healing.
CONNECT WITH US! We'd love to hear from you! What do you want to hear more about? What do you love? Have a topic request or a guest suggestion? Please shoot us an email or DM on Instagram.
Sensitivity Warning:This episode may not be suitable for everyone. It contains a personal story of trauma and alcohol overuse. Skip this one if that feels too heavy for you. Your story is important, your life is important, and if you need help, please reach out to RAINN.ORG.
In this Can We Start Over podcast episode, Lindsey shares her journey with trauma and healing.
Inspired by a friend, she decided to record this vulnerable and sensitive solo episode to lay out her experiences, what happened to her, and the steps she took to heal.
Lindsey discusses the importance of integrating and sharing these experiences to live authentically.
Lindsey expresses her gratitude to those who listen and hopes her story can guide others on their healing journeys.
She shares her childhood trauma, her unhealthy relationship with alcohol in her teenage and early adult years, and the turning point when she realized the need for deep healing.
Lindsey talks about the impact of trauma on her parenting and her decision to make significant changes in her life, including meditation, journaling, therapy, spiritual practice & somatic work.
She also discusses her experience with rapid-resolution therapy & a plant medicine ceremony that helped release the weight and shame.
Lindsey's story is one of resilience, growth, and the power of healing.
CONNECT WITH US! We'd love to hear from you! What do you want to hear more about? What do you love? Have a topic request or a guest suggestion? Please shoot us an email or DM on Instagram.
Hi, everyone. This is another episode of the Can We Start Over podcast. My name is Lindsay, and what you are hearing today It's a solo episode with just me. I realized that we've talked a lot about mine and Brit's past experiences, but I haven't really shared my personal journey with trauma and healing. And I was inspired to record this episode kind of last minute. I was inspired by a friend. Leo Max, who's a hypnotherapist. If you're interested, you should definitely check him out. But something that was said in a group that if I'm not integrating these experiences and sharing them, then I'm not really like living my My full body authenticity and that really hit me, I was like, what are you not saying? So I wanted to record an episode that just kind of lays it all out, like here's what I've experienced, this is what happened to me and path and the steps that I took to heal. So it's a vulnerable one. It's a sensitive one, and it's one that if you. If you don't want to hear about sexual trauma or alcohol abuse, then you should skip this one. And no worries if that's you. And if you are ready to listen to it, then I thank you so much for hearing me. And hopefully this guides even just one person on their own healing journey. All right, let's do it. Okay, hi, welcome friends. I'm glad to be here with you today. This is a bit of a last minute episode because I got the hit, intuitive hit, urge, download, whatever, the call to record this last night. And so I wanted to make sure that it was fresh and that it was real because this is a real one. I'm going to share my trauma and healing journey and so this episode might not be for everyone, but this episode is for me, because as much as, as much healing work as I have done in the last five years, and as far as I am on the path, and like, honestly, how good I feel, I realized that there's something that happens when we don't fully integrate the painful experiences of our life as part of who we are, and then hold them as. being that this bad, like bad things can happen and we can heal around them, but maybe we still keep them at arm's length. Maybe they're still just like over there and we don't have to talk about. our pain, our trauma all the time. I think that like gets us in a loop. But what I realized what I was doing because I have done so much healing work around my past, but there, but I still haven't really told the story. And so I'm just like keeping it out of arm's length where I'm like, okay, I've healed that, but it's not really part of who I am. And that is true that the things that happened to us, they aren't who we are. But if I want to be fully integrated, like I'm going to alchemize every experience and make it part of my truth, even the shit that was hard, even the shit that was painful. And that's what I'm here to do right now. Because I started as a kid telling myself that something wasn't that bad and it wasn't a big deal. That it wasn't that bad because something worse happened to someone else. So I've been, I had told myself this story since I was nine years old. And what happened to me then is that a neighbor, an adult neighbor, touched me inappropriately in a very obvious and inappropriate way. way that made me freeze. I didn't know what to do. My friend was there, and it was obvious. It was horrible. It was completely inappropriate. And immediately when I left, my friend, who was also a child, said, um, what just happened? And I, I shut it down. I was like, nothing happened. Because in even that poor, sweet, lindsey, child's mind, I was telling myself two things. I was telling myself that wasn't really a big deal because horrible things happen to people. And that wasn't horrible. That was, you know, that was nothing that was outside. That was daytime. So I was telling myself that wasn't a big deal while also telling myself, you can never tell anyone about this. And you can imagine being nine, that push pull that is created inside of me at that time, that I think happens to so many of us, this push pull of, it's not that bad. And, It's so bad I can't speak it and how we live in this half truth and for me it just created this path forward where I couldn't be authentic. You know, I couldn't be authentic with my friends, with my family because I was holding both of these things thinking, oh, that wasn't really a big deal while still thinking about it like 15 years later. So that was like the start of my. trauma journey, if you will. And sweet little Lindsay didn't tell anyone. She tried to forget about it, but it was always there. And looking back, I think that caused a lot of choices that sweet little Lindsay made as a teen and into early 20s. You know, I really... had a reckless, unhealthy relationship with alcohol from a young age. I think because I was trying to like escape the weight of that push pull and pull myself out of that energy. Because alcohol was this way that You're free and you have fun and you connect with people and then you can be the real you. Even though the real me on alcohol wasn't really the full me, of course, it's like some numbed version. So I did that for a while. Teens into 20s, I really just used alcohol in An unhealthy way in a way that was another push pull because I regularly would get blackout drunk, not know what happened. So I had shame around it, a lot of shame, while also being like, there's no problem with alcohol because one, this is completely normal for the people I'm around. There's actual real alcoholics out there that are like drinking before work. So I had compartmentalized, it's the way we compartmentalize, I compartmentalized my childhood trauma by being like, it wasn't even that big of a deal, but also don't tell anyone about it, because then they're gonna think you're bad and dirty. And then drinking. It's not even that big of a deal. It's not like you're drinking in the morning, but also holds an immense amount of shame around it because you can't remember what happened last night and because now you feel like garbage. And in my early 20s, another thing that happened is one of my family members experienced a big trauma that, that re traumatized me because it brought up these, this memory of, again, this thing that I told myself wasn't a big deal, while also telling myself, You can never tell anyone about that. As a young person in their very early 20s who recklessly used alcohol, I also got pregnant twice and had two abortions with my long term boyfriend at the time when I was 20 and 21. And it's such a simple experience, but for some reason, I don't know if it's being a girl from Texas. Or being, or just trying to really live up to that good girl image. I felt like I could not tell anyone. So it's another way that I was holding this push pull where I'm someone who's so pro choice and like would take anyone to get any procedure that they needed. I like advocate for abortions. People should have abortions when they need to and want to. And yet I couldn't say that I had done it because something in me said, Oh, but you can't tell anyone because that's shameful. And it wasn't an easy choice. And I did have to deal with, you know, I had to, I had to do some healing around that. It was hard, but I carried that shame by not saying anything, by not owning it. It made it 10 times worse. So, I lived in this state of hyper achievement, of hyper release, hyper unhealthy release. So I'm going to drink to excess. I'm going to like get loud and wild and crazy and be the wild one. I'm going to like be really reckless. And then also I'm going to work really hard. And it was like these hyper opposites that were. My only way of release because at the time I had no idea about healing trauma no idea about Regulating myself or caring for myself in any real way, and I will say that that hyper Achievement it did cause a lot of amazing things to happen in my life, and I and that's how Our bodies are so wise and like we are so wise that we do the thing that will just get us, keep us going because we don't have another way and that's what I learned. Part of my healing journey has been parts work because I could. Part, you know, at some point I would've been like, oh, that hyper achievement was horrible and a lot of parts, a lot of it didn't feel good. But really, I'm so grateful to that part of me that decided my outlet was, okay, I'm gonna like create this business and work really hard and, and push myself to the edge because that. was what I knew how to do. And so all I can do is just love that part of me. Just like I can love the little Lindsey, I can love the 15 year old Lindsey, I can love the 22 year old Lindsey, I can love all of them. But as I'm going down this road of hyper achievement in my now mid 20s, late 20s, I was still having this really unhealthy relationship with alcohol. At that time, then we, me and Britt got married. We were just kind of like, going with the flow, but not really. We were, we were create, we were forcing the flow of a lot of work, a fair amount of partying, and it just continued on in this life that I honestly thought was normal. Like, I thought that this is the way you release with alcohol, and you never talk about anything bad that's happened. Unless you're going to like blow up on someone, which I did do and then smash cut to me at 30 years old. At 30, I've had a business for now six years. We own a home. Me and Brit have been married for six years. Like things are feeling like, Oh, I've got this while still partying. But, you know. Again, at this rate that I, that I feel is very normal at that time, and I was like in great shape. It's, it's looking back, I don't want to downplay it, but there, I like hit this, Huge upper limit. Because at that point, everything in my life on paper was going right. But there was this swirling undercurrent of all this unresolved stuff from my childhood, not just the, the. experience, the sexual experience with the adult, but then the other just dysfunctional family experiences, the experience in my early 20s with my family member, the experience with alcohol. So there's like this swirling soup of pain and shame. And so outwardly, when I'm 30. Things look good. And I think I feel great. I'm very, I like, look great. I have great clothes. I have a good job that's a business that I own. I own a home. And yet, at 30, I got blackout drunk, yet again. But this time, I was in Las Vegas. And this is the part that, this is a major part of the story that I haven't fully integrated as part of my story because I haven't shared it with that many people. So I was in Vegas with friends. I got blackout drunk and I don't remember what happened, but I ended up in some hotel room that was not mine. Again, I, I, I don't think anything happened, and it could be so much worse. So immediately, I. But I put it in this box of like, oh, that wasn't a big deal because you made it back and you were safe and, uh, you don't think anything, you know, you could have been, you could have died, but you didn't. So I put it in this box of not that big of a deal while also being like, no one can ever know about this. So what I do remember is I was at the club with my friends. I was drinking. I got extremely drunk. I completely black out and then I have a memory, a very vague memory that I even questioned if it was real, but I know it was real of just like coming to in this hotel room and knowing I don't know where I am and I got to get the fuck out of here. And so I did that. I vaguely remember going to the front desk and saying I don't know where I am, I need a cab. They told me to go outside, I got a cab, I vaguely, almost like a dream, remember making it back to the hotel. And then I just really remember waking up in the hotel, in my, in my hotel room, like me and my friends. And so, part of me was like, did that happen or did that not happen? But that's the thing about when you know something happened that was painful is that you know because the weight of the shame was crippling. And I carried that weight. I carried that weight and shame of. I should know better. It's, it's doubled shame because not only is there a certain amount of shame when you just use alcohol inappropriately, but now, did I just fuck up my marriage? Did I just fuck up my friendships because I'm so careless? I'm old enough to know better and I'm a business owner and I'm a married person and that weight of shame doubled with the weight of not dealing with trauma tripled with the weight of now I'm in a hyper achievement mode was just crushing me and masking all this old pain. So then why I call it an upper limit. Is that then I created things were going really well and almost to a point of like, Oh, this is better than, than I could have imagined my life would turn out. So I created a deeper well of shame. And I'm not saying that to be like, I created that we create the bad things that happened to us. You can take that or leave that. I, I have no skin in that game. But. It feels like an upper limit because on the outside things look so good, and yet on the inside there was this bubbling pain that then I unconsciously chose to dive in deeper. And the thing about that experience in Vegas. It so mirrored what happened when I was a kid because I could tell myself those two things. I could tell myself that was not a big deal. Nothing really happened. You don't even really know what happened. While also telling myself no one can ever know about this and the immense pressure that that causes. And I just kind of held on to that for a while, you know, I, I did talk to Brit about it. That was really hard, but it was a huge weight off. I needed to tell him I'd never had like any kind of anything I'd never told him before. And so I did tell him. And then. Um, I just kind of worked through it in the best way that I knew how, but that wasn't really any way, you know, I, I did go to therapy at that time. I went to talk therapy, it did help and really, really, you know, I, I did kind of start doing some healing work there, but it wasn't until. A few years after my twins were born that I realized that some actual deep, deep healing was needed because at that time I was getting really triggered by my kids and that was of course no fault of theirs. It is not kid's fault when we get triggered, they are kids, but I was getting really triggered and now this hyper achievement turned into hyper reactivity towards my kids. And I was, I could see the trajectory of me passing down this hyper reactivity to them if I didn't do something about it. So I knew at that time I was going to do everything in my power. to not pass that down and that I didn't want them to live in this push pull. I wasn't actually so aware of it, but I just knew I needed a massive change and I knew that this wasn't the kind of parent I wanted to be. That's when I started meditating. That's when I started journaling. I started doing self healing work. I Went deeper into therapy, that's when I completely changed my relationship with alcohol, and in that choice, in those choices, that felt small, but I could tell that it was like It was like a reversing and a redoing of what had been done. I could finally see my life in a different way. For the first time ever, my worldview was expanding from this really limited and reactive and painful experience. That also had a lot of joy because I did have a great life, but it really started to open up to be possibility, to be joyful. And along that journey, as I continued with a great talk therapist, but I started learning more about. What it feels like to be compassionate to yourself because all along this line from nine year old Lindsay fifteen year old Lindsay 22 28 30 all of these times when I was carrying this shame The thing that was missing majorly is I had no compassion for myself I don't know exactly when I learned that but definitely as a nine year old I learned if you There's something deep that you can't say to anyone. You can't have compassion for yourself around it because there's something about it that is bad. For some divine reason, and I'm so grateful, I was awarded this invitation into exploring self compassion through these modalities, through meditation, through journaling, through going to talk therapy, through. listening to spiritual talks through Ram Dass. It was so many different outlets that I was being exposed to all at once. And I continued chipping away at it for a few years. I was making a lot of progress with these modalities. I really was. And I was feeling really so much better and incredible. But like, the reactivity would still hit, or just, The lack of self compassion would still hit. It wasn't near as much what it was. And then somewhere in that time, around 2020, my friend, my psychic friend wrote down the name and phone number of a somatic practitioner. And because she said, Oh, you're supposed to, you're supposed to go see this person. And I think I might've mentioned this on the podcast. I can't remember. But when your psychic friend writes down the name and phone number of a practitioner. you're probably supposed to do it. I kept that name and phone number in my wallet for a few months before I called. I don't know why. I guess I just wasn't ready. But finally, I called her. We set up an appointment and that's when I started my journey, my, my journey into the body because I had already been on this journey into the mind with meditation and inquiry with journaling and I'd been on this journey of processing through talk therapy. So I was These things are already in motion, but I had never experienced someone making a space for me to explore my inner feelings and to be like, what does sadness feel like? And then to get to describe it in a way that doesn't need to make sense. And that's why I am so passionate about somatic work and subconscious work because I loved my talk therapist. We did a lot of amazing things together. I still love her. But it wasn't really until I got into the somatic work and then doing subconscious work that I could really. release the weight and the shame of these things that happened in my life. So a year after working with my somatic therapist, she told me about rapid resolution therapy. And she told me how a session works. And I was like, immediately, I was like, Oh, I want to do that on Specifically on the night in Vegas that I still feel shame around and I still feel trauma. It's like a still a trauma point for me and I want to do it. So we did one session around that and I, it took me even a while to tell her. What happened there, because again, even though I was, I was working on it, it was still something that I wasn't fully integrating as part of who I was, like, it's, or part of my story, part of my experience. So one session of rapid resolution therapy, and then after that, I was feeling really tender. But then two days later, I did a psilocybin ceremony and went into the ceremony with this therapy session that had just happened, so it was fresh, and I went into the memory of the night. When I was 30 in Vegas and the thing was I was so scared for so long of being like I can't go back to that memory or I can't remember and I still maybe don't remember everything but going having that rapid resolution therapy and then being in a safe. skilled place to experience psilocybin, like with, with like highly skilled people and a real loving community. It gave me this place to be like, Oh, that's what I've been avoiding this whole time. That has is what has been causing this major push pull for me in my whole life. for the last 10 years, and now I can just see it for what it is. And then that charge was gone. Like the chart, I can think about that night, I can think about that experience, and the charge is gone. And the same thing with My experience when I was nine with the neighbor, like I can think about that experience and I don't feel That grip inside. I don't feel that shame. I don't feel that Fear that the little Lindsey felt but it wasn't Until last night that my friend and hypnotherapist Leo Mack said in a group journey, he said, what aren't you saying? And that's when I realized we did this group hypnotherapy journey and I was like, Oh, I'm not really embodying my life's experiences. And letting it be a part of who I am and being proud of who I am, even in its messiness and even in the pain, you know, and even holding the fact that it is true. Other people have had it bad. had it way worse. Other people have had horrible experiences and just holding all of my experience in love. Like, I wasn't really doing that because I wasn't really telling the full story of these traumatic experiences and how I alchemized them. And that I can be proud of that. And there's something to be said about really looking back on doing big work. You know, we do it with work. It's easy, it's easier to do with work with some kind of achievement. But to look back on a healing journey and be like, damn, like, look at how far you have come. Look at how much you have worked through. Look at how much. You have let go and how free it feels to let go, how freeing it feels to not have that push pull. But I knew there was another level because I haven't really talked about it. And there's a few conversations that I haven't really had, you know, about it that I kind of think still need to have probably before this episode comes out. That's why I'm sharing this, because There might be someone listening that is feeling the weight of that unspoken thing that's feeling that push pull energy. Or maybe it's not a push pull. Maybe there's maybe it is the worst thing that could happen, but maybe there's the shame and so we're not talking about it. Or maybe you have a story of. It wasn't that bad, but I've been carrying, carrying it with me for 20 years. And so then we really have to ask ourselves, was it not that bad? Because you're still hanging on to it. And I'm not saying that to be like, you got to let it go. But it's like, sweet, sweet, sweet being. I'm saying this to the nine year old Lindsay, like, with tenderness and love, then it was that big of a deal. And you do deserve. the space to heal it. And you do deserve the space to really feel it and to let it be a big deal. So if there is something unspoken for you, you can speak it when you're ready. You can also heal something without speaking it. I did that for years and I made amazing Progress. You can take those small steps each day on your healing path. And then at some point, you'll be ready to speak it in a different way, again, without the charge and to say, to lay it all on the line and say, these are the things that happened to me. This is what made me who I am. And not that I'm thankful for those things, but like, I'm super thankful for exactly who I am. Um, so maybe in some. I am thankful for those. I'm thankful that I, again, was, I mean, I'll call it divine guidance or I don't know, just my karmic path or whatever that I could choose to heal and that I could choose to heal in my own time, in my own way, exactly as I needed because I love who I am today. And even that's, you know, that's amazing. I would have never said that about myself 10 years ago or seven years ago. To just know that you can love who you are is a really interesting way to, to reframe the way we think about suffering because suffering sucks. And we have suffered in large and small ways. Every single one of us. I have. you have, I know you have. And my friend and I were talking about this a couple weeks ago. It's like the teaching that suffering is grace has always been a sticky one for me because When you hear about like the bad thing the actual really bad things to happen to people not just like I'm stuck in traffic I'm suffering but like the big ones. It's hard to be like that was grace And so what I've come to even in these last weeks and honestly even in this last 24 hours is that suffering is grace Because of what we do with it after It's not that suffering is grace because God or source or whatever is giving you suffering so that you can come out the other side. I don't really buy into that. I think that bad shit happens because we're all humans on this imperfect planet and the grace comes in after because we have to decide. We get to decide. I'm going to turn this suffering into something. I'm going to turn it in to healing. I'm going to alchemize it. I'm going to make it part of my story. I'm not going to be ashamed of it. I'm going to turn it into art. I'm going to turn it into community. I'm going to turn it into connection. I'm going to go deeper in my relationship. I'm going to be a better parent. I'm going to show up on the spiritual path and just be in love more. And most of the time that is because of some suffering we have had. So, suffering is grace. I do believe that. And yet, not in the way that it's sometimes sold. And whatever has happened to you, when you are ready, you can heal it. And it really can lose the charge and it can be just part of your story that becomes just another way that you love yourself. I hope that you're loving yourself today. Thank you for listening to this episode and I'll see
