Does our past really matter? Why does every therapist want to go digging around in our past? What is the connection between our past and our current struggles?
In this episode, I am joined once again by my therapist, Lisa Kemppainen, as we discuss these questions and more.
You can heal, and an important part of the healing process is returning to the parts of us that were wounded and learning to love them and to get them unstuck.
I am grateful you are here,
Jerry
1:1 Transformational Coaching:
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Returning: Meditations and Reflections on Self-Love and Healing
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Instagram: @jerryahenderson
Disclaimer
Does our past really matter? Why does every therapist want to go digging around in our past? What is the connection between our past and our current struggles?
In this episode, I am joined once again by my therapist, Lisa Kemppainen, as we discuss these questions and more.
You can heal, and an important part of the healing process is returning to the parts of us that were wounded and learning to love them and to get them unstuck.
I am grateful you are here,
Jerry
1:1 Transformational Coaching:
Learn More Here!
Pick up your copy of my book:
Returning: Meditations and Reflections on Self-Love and Healing
Want to Change Your Drinking Habits?
Reframe App
How is your relationship with yourself going?
Get your free-self assessment guide
Watch On Youtube
Website:
www.jerryhenderson.org
Support the Show:
My Patreon
Get Your Free Weekly Healing Tips!
Free Guided Self-Love Meditation:
Get it Here!
Instagram: @jerryahenderson
Disclaimer
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Permission to Love podcast. I'm your host, jerry Henderson, and I'm excited to have Lisa back with us once again. Today we're going to be talking about our past. Why does our past matter? Why is it important to talk about it and why is it important to revisit our experiences in order to heal? Why is that an important part of healing?
Jerry Henderson:Now, before we get into the episode today, I've got a couple of things that I want to announce. Number one group coaching. If you've not yet signed up, it's not too late. It's going to start February, the 19th. You can simply go to jerryhenderson. org/ coaching. I'm offering a couple of scholarships for people who may not be able to afford the price point of $95 a month right now. So if you're interested, send me an email at jerry@jerryhenderson. org or simply DM me on Instagram. My handle there is @jerryah enderson. The other thing I'm doing is I'm offering a sliding scale. So if you can't quite afford that $95 right now and you need help, you can go ahead and sign up on my website and use the code SS2024 and that sliding scale price is $47.50 a month. I'm really excited about this program. I'm really excited about getting us together and going on a journey of learning how to heal our relationship with ourselves.
Jerry Henderson:Now, another announcement that I'm really excited about is my book Returning. It's a collection of thoughts and poems on self-love and healing, and it's really designed for you to read the thoughts, the poems, to take time to reflect and to really go on a healing journey for yourself, and so I've intentionally left a lot of space in the margins for you to make notes, for you to write those things to yourself that maybe you wish you would have heard, but never heard. So if you want to be one of the first people who get notified when the book gets released, you can get on my email list, if you haven't already. Everything that I mentioned in these episodes, there's always a link in the show notes for you to easily access it. So, without any further ado, let's go ahead and get into today's episode. I'm excited to once again have my therapist, lisa, here as a part of this journey. So, lisa, welcome to another episode of the Permission to Love podcast.
Lisa Kemppainen:Thanks, jerry, I'm really happy to be here.
Jerry Henderson:I'm always glad that you're here. Today, we're going to be talking about our past, and why does it matter? And why does every therapist seem to want to go digging around in our past? We have these current issues, these current problems that we're trying to solve, but yet, all of a sudden, all these questions come up about tell me about your childhood, tell me about your parents, tell me about this and that.
Jerry Henderson:I remember our experience with that, and I remember moments where I'm like, why the hell does that even matter? I'm trying to not drink anymore. And what does it matter about my relationship with my dad or my mom? And it was really a big disconnect for me, to be honest, and at times I mean, I really felt a lot of resistance and I'll know we'll talk about that later but it was interesting to me now that I look back on it and see that there was that resistance. But, as a therapist, help us, help the listeners and the viewers of this podcast, understand why the past matters. So, lisa, why does the past matter when you're working with someone?
Lisa Kemppainen:The past matters because it lays the foundation for who you are. It's that simple. Okay, yeah, and I know it's really, really hard to think. You know how did something that long ago. How is that affecting me now? But I really like the analogy of thinking of ourself as a house, right? And let's say that you have a house and the walls have a crack or a bit wobbly, right?
Lisa Kemppainen:So let's pretend that that's who you are. In your life right now, there's a few things that are maybe cracked or a bit wobbly right Depression, anxiety, addiction, broken relationships, whatever. And when you were looking at that house, if you wanted to fix the walls right, you could put something to hold it up and make it more secure, you could put some plaster, but the truth is it would probably begin to wobble or crack again unless you looked at the foundation. And so that's the analogy.
Lisa Kemppainen:That makes so much sense is that you know, the past is the foundation of who we are, and if we don't look at that, we can, you know, slap whatever on ourself, saying that we have a crack or war, wobbly, but eventually the depression or anxiety will start to show up again, and so you have to go back and you have to look at the past and make sure that the foundation is secure and cemented, and level, if you will. So I don't know, does that analogy make sense to you?
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, it does, because it addresses a lot of what you know my journey has been, which was the patching right of the drywall, or patching of things, because for me it was. I'm trying to deal with my symptoms. I'm trying to deal with my current pain, lisa, I'm not trying to figure out or revisit pain in the past. I've done my best to try to bury that. So why the heck do we want to bring that up? We'll talk about that here in just a second. But you know, yeah, it does make that really clear distinction between present problems being symptoms of a foundational issue that's not been addressed or isn't being addressed. Would that be correct?
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, totally. And it's why I get a lot of clients who say you know, I've been to therapy before and I got some great skills, but I don't feel any better. And it's because a therapist has to understand that you have to go to the foundation to heal. You know, it's one thing to know things and that's really really, really good. It puts things in context and it can be downright interesting, right, but it doesn't do the healing unless you go underneath and you fix the stuff in the beginning.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, so interesting because, as you were talking about that, it reminded me, which you know I obviously still struggle with, but it reminded me of that really acute feeling that I had for so many years I mean, it sounds like four plus decades. There's just something wrong with me and there's just like something off and I don't feel right. I hear the lessons about, well, you should do this in order to heal, or this is. You know what the healing journey looks like and you try to pat plaster on, you know those solutions, but underneath you feel like a fraud, you still feel like an imposter, you feel like you're bolting on, and so do you think that's why people, like you said, really struggle with therapy in terms of feeling some transformational therapy happening, because they're just trying to patch things on.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, of course, and we live in a culture, right, that doesn't want us to go to the past. I mean bygones, be bygones, or you know. One of their sayings are there move forward, or let it go, or you know don't revisit the past.
Jerry Henderson:There's a bunch of them. Yeah, yeah, time to move on. Like I said, let it go get past it, all of those things.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, yeah.
Jerry Henderson:And so we're not really ever.
Lisa Kemppainen:I think it's seen as weak to have to go back in the past. I think what's seen as more stoic and strong is to just be able to be like well, that was then and this is now, and I'm moving on Sure.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:And wouldn't that be nice.
Jerry Henderson:Would be nice. What the problem is like with me is that you're trying to run a race with two broken legs, right, and you keep wondering why can't I make any progress, why can't I move forward? And you're like somebody keeps saying, well, you know, you got a couple of broken legs there and like, ah, it's okay, that happened, you know, four weeks ago, I'm good now, I should be okay, or whatever. You've lived your whole life with those set of broken legs and you're trying to walk a journey towards healing, but no matter how hard you try, you're not addressing the root issue. So here's a question, lisa.
Jerry Henderson:My past was really painful and a lot of the people who are listening to this and viewing this have a painful past and I know you do as well, lisa, and we've done a really good job at finding ways to bury that, and part of that has really served us right, because the burying kept me from addressing the pain. The drinking kept me from really having to look at some of the issues that I needed to look at. And I think that if my past has been so terrible and I had such a terrible past and I've done such a good job in my mind of distancing myself from it. Why do I have to dig back into that? I mean, we talked a little bit about it. It's the foundational work, but why do I need to talk about it? Why do I need to sit with you as a therapist and talk about that past?
Lisa Kemppainen:Well, you don't. So if your life is going great and everything is hunky-dory, right, don't visit the past, right. But what we're really talking about and to is people who that's not. The truth Is that, you know, depression, anxiety is lasting a bit longer than a few weeks and is not situational. So there is something, situational depression that you would expect. You're depressed after you, you know, lose a spouse, or something like that. But we're talking about, and to people who have addiction and a broken relationships and depression anxiety more than just your average person. And if that's the case, if it's a pattern or something that you're experiencing for a couple of weeks, then you have to talk about the past. But if life is working and you're not in pain and all is well, don't dig in the past, sure.
Jerry Henderson:Let it be yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:If the past needs to show up, the past will show up. So I don't think it's. You know, I don't want you to have your listeners think, well, everybody's got to do the past.
Jerry Henderson:They don't.
Lisa Kemppainen:And if you do need to address the past, life will indicate that you do.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, well, it's interesting because I may think that I'm living the present, but what I'm actually doing is still living my past. Right, and when we look at for me, at least when I looked at my story of I'm in the present moment, trying to live my life, trying to work, trying to be in relationships, and I'm, in my mind, thinking that the past has no bearing on any of that. It's just that I can't figure out how to do life now is my thinking. But what I'm actually doing, at least in as I'm thinking this through right now, is I'm reliving my past each day, but it's in this present moment, but I'm just not aware of it. It's at a subconscious level, and that subconscious past of brokenness and separation, as we talked about in another episode, of being separate from ourselves, is showing up every day in my present and it's actually determining my present moment.
Lisa Kemppainen:How did your past determine your present moment?
Jerry Henderson:Good question. Well, that's a really good question because I thought I was over my past. I thought a couple of things that allowed me to be over my past, and for those of you who have been watching or listening to this podcast, you'll know a little bit of my story about the sexual abuse, the physical abuse, emotional abuse that turned into addictions at the age of nine and 14 years old. I was in rehab and just a whole really brutal process growing up, and so then I came to faith right, became a Christian at the age of 17. And I was told that I should forgive, I should let go. I'm a new person and I don't need to address that. Just let the past be the past. You're a new creation. And so all of that really resonated with me because I wanted to bury all of that and I wanted to distance myself from that pain, and so it gave me a lever to pull to do that.
Jerry Henderson:But the reality is that it wasn't gone. The pain was still there, even though I could feel the sense of being forgiven under that set of thinking. But then understanding that even though a person might feel that they're forgiven or that they're learning to forgive others doesn't mean that they still have a gigantic wound inside of them. And I also thought I was over my past, because I was doing so much to create an image and to be perceived as somebody that didn't have that past. And so, even though I thought I was overall of it, I truly wasn't. In a way that it was being indicated to me that I wasn't. Was through this constant sense of shame, self-hatred, self-loathing that made me choose things that I thought I was worthy of, so I would get into relationships that I knew were going to be really toxic for me, drinking myself to death, becoming a workaholic, driving myself to outrun my story or to try to heal a wound that was still wide open and that nothing was providing any sabb for.
Lisa Kemppainen:No, you just spackled it.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, yeah. I tried spackling it with faith, I tried spackling it with relationships and work and accomplishments, and then I just tried pouring alcohol down the thing and none of it worked.
Lisa Kemppainen:No, and that's kind of what I mean by life will show, keep showing up and telling you well, maybe your past is something that is perhaps guiding you a bit more than you thought it would, or is.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, absolutely so. To talk to some about, you know, if I've had a really terrible past and I don't want to talk about it, I've buried it. But then and there's a real acknowledgement of that, right, there's an acknowledgement that, yeah, that was bad and I don't want to talk about it, so why do we need to dig into it? But then what do you do with a person who says that they have a really good childhood? I know, for me, I mean, I knew my childhood wasn't good, but I also minimized it to such a degree that it was like, yes, some stuff happened and it was, you know, it just wasn't good and so I minimized it. But then there's probably folks who just feel like now my childhood was great and I've got nothing to talk about, so why do we need to dig into it? How do you handle those kind of situations, lisa?
Lisa Kemppainen:Lots of people will say that, and as a therapist, you are always in the place of just being curious, right? So for me that prompts the question well, what made it great? Not particularly asking that person to be defensive, just curious. Why do you think your childhood was so great? And people will say, well, it was great because you know it was so carefree and I rode my bike at you know six o'clock at night, came in for popsicles, okay. Or I knew that I was loved and wanted Okay. Or my parents, you know it was great because I had clothes and food and shelter.
Lisa Kemppainen:So it's interesting to know why people think their childhood is great and it's a rare childhood that's so great that you can just check that box, that nothing happened. That would influence who you are, right, yeah. So as you, as as a therapist, you start to question that and it comes to find out. For example, maybe somebody says, well, my childhood was great, but my parents never. I never saw them work through conflict, okay Well. And maybe somebody says, and that was really great that they I never saw them work through conflict. But as you kind of go through therapy, you figure out oh well, that's why in relationships now you can't stand up for yourself or you can't, you know, address anything that's uncomfortable, and now you're resentful and angry and have a hard time communicating anything that's not pleasurable in this relationship. So your past is showing up because your parents didn't show you how to do conflict.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, right.
Lisa Kemppainen:And there's a number of ways that that a good childhood can still be good. It can be great and also, you know, have some ways that it is currently affecting you. Another one would be, you know, if you have parents that really had super high expectations and wanted you to be perfect, and now you have, you know, degrees on your walls and money in your bank account, a beautiful spouse at a car and you feel super empty inside, that would probably be that you thought that who you, what you did, was your value and that somehow, unintentionally, your parents gave you that message that that's what they cared about was what you did, not who you are.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, so we're in our story, right? Because as we think about the voices of our past, right that all of a sudden become our voice and we forget to separate, or we lose sight of separating, the voices of others from our voice or from our authentic self. And I was working with somebody and they were talking about how their you know, family history was one of accomplishments and achievements and financial success, and they followed that path and yet never felt like, regardless of the fact that they were making multi-millions of dollars every year, they did not feel like they were worthy of love because they hadn't yet quite accomplished enough, which then you connect that voice to a childhood which seemingly was a good childhood. But there was a voice that was one of if you don't do X, then love is withheld. And so now your voice to yourself is well, if I don't do X, I'm not worthy of love.
Jerry Henderson:And so it might not be something really glaring, right, it may not be what people are always classifying as capital T trauma, but there are, you know, all these I don't know if we'd call them microtramas or we don't want to get into comparative trauma, right, one's worse than the other, because it's about what happens in you more than what happens to you, and so the challenge, though, is that, if we can't see it, okay, so at least it's like I had a good childhood, and I can't even make the connection between those things. That might have just been like, well, yeah, my dad was a little hard on me, but or, yeah, you know, my mom always wanted me to look and act a certain way, or whatever those voices are. How do you help a person begin to identify that that's the original source of it and it's not who they are, if that makes sense.
Lisa Kemppainen:Well, yeah, it does make sense. And that's the beauty of being with a therapist is because we have a trained lens to be able to make those connections. And you probably are going to make those connections because, well, it's just hard to see those things, especially when there's reasons that you don't want to see that. But hopefully a therapist is trained to look for those and hopefully they can introduce those in ways that might certainly be painful and uncomfortable. But when I would make connections for you, how was that for you?
Jerry Henderson:Well, I always thought about like these truth bombs that were happening during our sessions where I would talk I'm a talker, enfp, you know, and one that just, yeah, I have a lot of words, I verbally process, thus having a podcast and so the challenge for me was that I was too close to it to be able to see certain things, and so you would help me become curious, allow me to talk, and then you would just ask some questions, ask me to kind of poke around on something, and the beauty of how it worked for me was that it was me finding myself to that source of truth with guidance, and it wasn't you saying well, you know what that's, x, you're doing that because of Y, that's why this is happening for you.
Jerry Henderson:So it wasn't this labeling, because I'm a real firm believer that, as a person discovers that truth and somebody helps them make their connections, those aha moments really stick with them, instead of somebody saying this is what's going on with you, because then I get a choice to accept or reject, right. But when it's self discovery, I can really resonate with it. But there were things like my relationship with my mom, and I remember I was talking to you about dating relationship that I was in and you helped me make the connection that I was actually kind of dating somebody who was taking a place or meeting a need for me that my mother had never met for me, and you really helped me understand that my relationship with women in the romantic space has a deep connection with my relationship with my mother growing up. I had no box for that in my head before then, so that connection became a very big aha moment for me and allowed me to observe and become curious and aware and then make more mindful decisions.
Lisa Kemppainen:Nice, I'm glad that you figured that out. That's a huge piece for you.
Jerry Henderson:It was a huge piece.
Lisa Kemppainen:Well, and that is such a hard thing as a therapist I know we're not talking about being a therapist, but I will tell you that is one of the more difficult things is because you know it, you've already, you see it and you're like oh, there it is, and it would be so easy right To just say well, here it is and we can save you some time and money, and I'll tell you right, but it's not half as effective as allowing a person to get there their own way.
Lisa Kemppainen:So I'm glad that you thought that I was able to do that with you.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, well, darn. Now I'm curious, right, because I'm like I bet there's about six other things at least is going dang. I, henderson, still hadn't seen this one yet, so we'll have to jump into another session and continue these self-discrimination Discovery processes.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, and it's just hard. It's hard to go back to the past for a variety of reasons, and you know it's hard because blaming your parents is a tough one for people, even if your parents were outright abusive. You know kids. When somebody comes to take a kid out of a really abusive home like Child Protective Services, I mean the kid, as they're walking out of the door a lot of times, is still screaming for mommy or daddy.
Lisa Kemppainen:And it doesn't you know you think, well, aren't you glad to be getting out of here? Probably part of them is, but part of them is also, you know, really really, yeah, connected in some, maybe some really unhealthy ways, but nevertheless, the child parent bond is a big one, and so when you go back into talking about that stuff, you have to talk about your parents as it was their responsibility to help you navigate emotionally.
Lisa Kemppainen:And I mean I think most parents, if we went out and, you know, did a survey, they'd be like well, yeah, you know, my job is to keep my kid, you know safe and healthy physically and provide for them. But I doubt that anyone would say it was also my job to help my child navigate emotionally.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, and so it's hard to most parents.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, it's hard to talk about your parents and you feel like it to some extent you're betraying them, especially if they were well intentioned and they did the best they could.
Lisa Kemppainen:And you know they came from crappy, crappy childhoods as well.
Lisa Kemppainen:I deal with that by saying well, let's talk about all the good things your parents did and maybe, if they were really lousy, maybe the best thing they did was, you know, give you a mattress on the floor. I don't know. Yeah, but most parents you know most parents do the best that they can, and so let's just honor the parts of them where they did a great job. And for some people that's a long list, and for some people that's not a long list. But I think that's a really important thing to do and to be able to put that aside and then say you know, but for our purposes right in therapy and to help you heal, we're not really interested in the ways that they did well. We want to focus on the ways that they shortchanged you or screwed you up, and so once you're able to kind of honor that and put that aside, people might still feel like to some extent, they're betraying their parents, but they're much more willing to you know they're much more willing to go there.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah Well, I like that because you are trying to honor a piece that doesn't feel like you're completely betraying. So I mean, I just want to dig in a little bit around that because for me, you know, I knew and I could really easily put my finger on the source of a lot of my trauma with my dad. That was very easy for me to see Now, in that I also was able to go. Well, he had a really tough childhood and you know. So he was just kind of doing the best that he could do.
Jerry Henderson:And I was also encouraged right away as I shared a little bit earlier, when I came to faith that you need to forgive your dad. That was like almost one-on-one when I came so you need to forgive your dad. And then I began to justify the story. Well, he grew up in a really tough situation, so he was just kind of doing his thing and trying to figure out how to do it. But I knew I could equate the unhealthy behavior and the source of a lot of the family trauma to him. My mom, on the other hand, anytime, lisa, you wanted me to try to talk about like maybe, what my mom's role was in any of that, and you didn't quite say it that way, but I had this kind of underlying resistance that started to come up Because it felt like to me I saw my mother as a victim.
Jerry Henderson:I saw my mother doing the best that she knew how and that I had zero right to have any judgment towards her, and because of that narrative. And so what I wasn't able to do was trying to figure out how to heal my relationship with my mom, even though she's passed. You know, she was passed away from cancer but I still couldn't get to a place of working on healing that because I was so busy defending her. So talk a little bit about that. You know with me, with others, everything that I just kind of unpacked, that people are living through that right they can point their finger at one person, then they start making excuses and if they're in the Christian space or any kind of religious place where they feel like they have to forgive, and then maybe trying to defend a parent etc. So not sure what the question is in all of that, but maybe just kind of discussing what your experience with how to help a person navigate all of that.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, well, a couple of things come to mind. First of all, is the forgiveness thing right? So somehow forgiveness has gotten misconstrued in that to forgive somebody, you need to also clear them of responsibility.
Lisa Kemppainen:And that's a big, that's a big doozy, right, because you can forgive somebody and know that they were doing the best they could and also continue to hold them responsible. And yeah, and that's what happens with parents is is is understanding that, yeah, they did the best they could. I mean, I'm a parent, I did the best I could, and that that doesn't also alleviate me for my responsibilities, even if you're a parent who has no clue, like most American parents, that it's your job to help your child emotionally grow and feel safe and understand their emotions and put names to them and not tell them to. You know, go in a corner and figure out what they did wrong and, three year old, supposed to come back and give you some explanation of their self emotionally.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, exactly yeah. I remember, when you pointed that out to me, that the timeout is probably one of the worst things that you could do to a child in some ways, right, isolate them, separate them, leave them to themselves to figure it out, and then they can only come back and get your love and approval when they've said the right things to you.
Lisa Kemppainen:So that's right. Yeah, Timeouts are. You know, and most American parents are all hunky dory on timeouts. It's considered good parenting, but they're basically like you know, you're showing me emotions I don't like, so go sit by yourself and be separate from me and I'm not going to help you figure it out and figure out how you know you've, yeah, and come back to me and apologize and tell me what you did wrong, and that's really great. You're only four.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, exactly yeah, and all I'm sitting there thinking is I'm going to use the bathroom or I'm hungry and I'm going to say whatever they want me to say so that I can get out of this corner and move on with my life, which then, yeah, deep levels of people pleasing, you know, character building, all that stuff Anyway, and not that a child's making those conscious decisions at that point. So anyway, I digress.
Lisa Kemppainen:No, the underlying, the under, and that is actually a great example of. I had a good childhood, right, and so then a therapist is, as you get to know the person and you're saying so, what happened when you were really angry, or you're you know, you hit your sister over the head because she ate your pizza, or whatever. Oh well, I got sent to my room by myself for the night and I was told to think about what I did wrong and then, and so so it's like oh well, how is that playing out in your life currently, right?
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah Well, I don't. I don't know how I feel. Oh well, that's interesting Because the people that were supposed to help you figure out how you feel weren't there. So how, how the heck are you supposed to know as a 44 year old man?
Jerry Henderson:I don't know how I feel.
Lisa Kemppainen:I feel happy, sad or pissed off.
Jerry Henderson:Right. Yeah, that's pretty much it you categorize, right.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, and once you tell a client, did you know? Did you know there's as many feelings as there are colors. You know, it's just amazing. I don't know if I ever sent you like a a feeling vocabulary, but it's amazing how many adult people not only don't know how they feel, but they don't know words. They don't even know options. You know that most women will say I'm frustrated when they're really enraged, but they think that's the only option. Right? So because we don't have parents that saddest down and said hey, what was really going on with you? You looked really mad. That's called mad, and when you're mad you don't hit your sister over the head. Here's what you do with it. Parents have no idea that they're responsible for that.
Jerry Henderson:Sure, absolutely, because you could be listening to this or watching this and thinking, holy crap, there's no way I'm going to get parenting right. Or come on and my parents, like you said, they did the best they could. They didn't even know about emotions, they didn't know how to process that stuff and how the heck are they going to get me to figure that out? And gosh, we all just need to get a little bit tougher, get some more tough skin. We've got a real soft generation walking around. Everybody just needs to kind of, you know, suck it up, realize they did the best they could and move on with things.
Jerry Henderson:And if you start getting to the layers of, well, I didn't get lunch because I acted out bad, then no parent comes out unscathed as being a crappy parent. And then we're all super traumatized because we didn't get a sandwich, and so you know that can become this viewpoint that people have, and so that then gets all this resistance of, well, I don't want to blame my parents and just want to move on from it, and I'm an adult now. I just need to deal with my crap and didn't have anything to do with that. How would you deal with that? I mean, what's your thoughts on all of that.
Lisa Kemppainen:Well, that also is really exciting to me as a therapist, because I love resistance. Resistance is really really interesting. I actually had somebody in therapy many years ago who walked into my office and said we will not talk about my past, and I said, okay, and we did not for a year.
Lisa Kemppainen:We just talked about why they didn't want to talk about their past, and eventually they talked about their past once they felt safe enough to do that. But the resistance is really interesting, right? So that would be where I would go with. That is well. First of all, I would respect somebody's choice in doing that, but it would trigger me to go oh, there is some meaty stuff in there for this person. There's some really worthwhile stuff, because they are so very clearly resistant to talking about that. And what is that about for you, right? Why? Because it's because I don't want to blame my parents and I don't want to feel all the stuff that I'm going to feel when that comes up. I have no idea how to handle feelings. Those are usually the two main reasons.
Jerry Henderson:That's right. It's two, because why don't we want to blame our parents I mean even parents who have done things to us that would be classified as child abuse or absolutely terrible things, but yet we still have that resistance to blaming them. What do you think that's about?
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, I actually really don't know, except that I just think it's biological. If I were to guess, I just think. And there are people that are I've worked with them that say, oh heck, yeah, I mean they're not getting anything from me, they were awful and I totally blame them. And then we kind of work on what do you want to do with that? Do you want to move from that place or are you comfortable with blaming them? How is that impacting or showing up in your life? But I think maybe it's just a biological thing that we just are always looking for their approval. I mean, no matter if you're 59 and a half and have a career and have a life and have all these other things. When I talk to my mom, I still want her to tell me how good I'm doing yeah, exactly yeah, yeah I think it's just I don't know if I sat and thought, maybe even about animals, that somehow they're just always.
Jerry Henderson:the penguins can always figure out who is their mom out of 2,000 penguins, yeah right, I don't know yeah because you can get into the nature, nurture and trauma, bonding and situations that kind of unhealthily made you feel like you had to please them, to get their approval and everything that goes with that. But then, like you said, there's also that very core underlying piece of biology genes, survival Right. And I need the approval of parent because they're my caretaker and they don't care for me. Wow, that's a more scary narrative than trying to even just to win their approval, I would assume.
Lisa Kemppainen:Right, it can also be that if they're really really terrible, it's like, well, if they were really terrible. How terrible does that make me?
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:I mean, I must have been really terrible if they had no interest in taking care of me in any way.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, it's almost easier and safer for me to assume there's something wrong with me than it is to assume that there's something wrong with them. Because I make that choice, then it's a much more risky scenario, right, we've talked about before and I was thinking about the other day. It almost becomes and I'm going to test this thought a little bit but it almost becomes a control mechanism, survival mechanism for me to think there's something wrong with me because I have no control over your behavior. But I can control my behavior in some sense. Not always right, but there's this thought that if I can point the blame at me and try to figure out what's wrong with me, then I can maybe start trying to control how I respond, how I don't respond. And so the narrative of absorbing I'm the one who's wrong, there's something wrong with me, even in an adult abusive relationship or any of that that you go okay. So now, all of a sudden, I have some ability to control this space, which might keep me out of trouble in that space. Does that make sense?
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, it does make sense. And if it's about you, right, then you don't have to do anything about the relationship, right? I mean, if you, just if you say, well, it's not about me, it's about him or it's about her, then you're forced to look at that in a different way.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, right, yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:Absolutely. And I guess it's so much easier to make it about yourself, because then you don't have to hold anyone else accountable. And if people aren't willing to take accountability, which is so common the case with parents, it's a rare parent who says you know, let me hear about how I screwed up and I just want to take responsibility for that.
Lisa Kemppainen:You know the parenting is so, it's so hard, and it's a natural place to want to become defensive and say are you kidding me? You're going to hold me responsible for that. Do you know what the hell I was doing? Just to keep you alive? Yeah, right, yeah right, exactly I work three jobs to put food on the table.
Jerry Henderson:So yeah parenting is.
Lisa Kemppainen:Parenting is tough, as we all know.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, absolutely. You know, as we're talking about the importance of the past and even our resistance to talk about the past, I know I had definitely some resistance and that resistance came out in minimizing right and deflection. I'm not one that's going to just throw out a hard no of we're not talking about my past, at least I mean it's just not my personality. And so my personality went towards a softer approach of, yes, some stuff happened, it was bad, and I would laugh and dismiss it in that way.
Jerry Henderson:But the really powerful connection that we made in a call one time was about how I was trying to heal adult Jerry. I was trying to get adult Jerry to behave. I was trying to get adult Jerry to stop drinking and to figure out how to do relationships and get his stuff together. And so I didn't realize that like I didn't feel safe, I mean I had this underlying sense of just a pit in my gut all of the time, 24-7 alarm bell going off. I didn't make the connection that adult Jerry didn't feel safe because little Jerry never felt safe and that became a core belief in a thing that just went with me my whole life when I learned to heal that space with little Jerry, that alarm bell stopped going off all the time, so it provided safety for him. So how do you help a person make that shift away from adult person adult Nancy, adult Jim or whatever towards the little parts of them that were wounded and understanding that that's their experience today, and make that path and make that healing work?
Lisa Kemppainen:Well, I think that the first thing is just to get the person to start to remember that they were a little person and they were a little person with feelings. I mean, so much of us just doesn't even pay attention to that. And then it's about talking about what happened to them and what was going on and what they might have been feeling and what they need. And usually when that starts to come up, somebody can find a place in them where they start to feel compassion or some other tender feelings towards this little kid that they kind of pushed out. And then it becomes about integrating that little kid and not just feeling sorry for this little kid who went through this stuff, who's having such a hard time, and actually starting to integrate and remember that that little kid is actually you.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:Do you kind of get what or remember when we did that?
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, absolutely, because I would talk about the little jury, like I'm doing right now, right Of this distance of he language, and then making that bridge to me right and moving from judgment and shame to observing with compassion, as if I was seeing someone else, with compassion towards self-compassion and more part of myself, with compassion.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, yeah, because it's kind of like the way I think of it is just that we like dropped our kid off on the side of the road and went on to be an adult, and the kid's still sitting there waiting for us to come back. Making waiting for us to make a U-turn and come back and put them in the car and actually have a conversation with them, because that's what we wanted as a kid is.
Lisa Kemppainen:we just wanted somebody to talk to us about what was going on and help us navigate our feelings and see who we were and not discount us or put us down or say that we shouldn't feel that way or any of that stuff. So if you can get a person to start to see this little kid, even if they might think of it as separate from themself, as something that's, I mean, it would be a hard person who couldn't look at a five-year-old in pain and have some compassion, right.
Jerry Henderson:Sure.
Lisa Kemppainen:I guess, yeah, they're out there, but, and then you can get them to think that's actually you, and that little person has just been waiting for you in all your busyness and all your perfection and all your affairs and all your drinking, just been waiting for you to come back around and pick you up. And that's usually when lots of emotional stuff starts happening.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, absolutely, because I've had this little aha moment here of getting me to go back or getting a person to go back to revisit their past or to talk about their past isn't as much about just replaying the events. It's like why the hell do I need to replay all these events? It's about returning to the part of ourself that got abandoned along the way, right, maybe in a sense. Yes, so I have to go back to the narrative that allows me to go back to myself, where you got dropped off along the side of the road. So when returning to my past, actually returning to myself and to the parts of myself that I abandoned, so I can see them and heal them, true, right?
Lisa Kemppainen:So it's one thing to know and we were talking about this a little earlier. It's one thing to make the connection that you dropped the kid off on the road when the heat, I mean that's interesting. That's interesting, that's useful, it's totally important because you have to get it before you can actually heal it. You have to understand it right.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:So you get the person to understand that's what happened. Then you get them to put the kid back in the car and have a conversation, and that's where the healing happens A lot of therapy doesn't work because a therapist will get the person to go oh yeah, that's what happened but they never get the person to get the kid in the car to really get to the root of the healing, and that is I'm sure you remember that is some pretty intense, emotional stuff it is.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, wow, even now, in this moment, I'm having these emotions come up. I've been thinking about me as a little tyke, myself in the car with me, me being my healer, me being my protector, me going back to loving man, this kid who just felt like abandoned, and then I was ashamed of him, and then he's like well, now I'm double, triple abandoned and I'm stuck here. And so when people feel stuck in life, it's probably that there's a part of them that's stuck in the past Not always, but in a lot of places, right?
Lisa Kemppainen:You're catching on.
Jerry Henderson:Ah, I'm getting there. Ok, good, they're having a therapy session. I like this.
Lisa Kemppainen:You're not going to need me.
Jerry Henderson:No, no, I am, and so it's identifying the areas that we're stuck in, or that I'm stuck in. I can't seem to figure out how to make this communication process where I can't figure out how to get deep intimacy with my spouse or nobody ever sees me. Well, where?
Lisa Kemppainen:did that. I always feel unsafe.
Jerry Henderson:Always feel unsafe. Where did that part of me get stuck? And then how do I go get myself unstuck? By inviting the little guy into the car and having that conversation and understanding that and saying what do you need?
Lisa Kemppainen:And then the part is making a pact, if you will I'm making it sound easy, but basically making a pact that I'm never going to leave you alone again.
Jerry Henderson:Wow.
Lisa Kemppainen:I'm never going to let them do to you what happened. I will protect you, I will listen to you. And then, surprise, surprise, once a human being gets seen and gets heard and gets listened to, they just feel better.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah yeah, and start to feel safe. Yeah yeah, I was in my bedroom the other night, about two nights ago, and out of nowhere I'm having this remembrance of me being terrified. There's a certain house in my childhood that I remember and I'm sure when people experience trauma they remember very clear, distinct places and spaces. There's this one particular house where a lot of things are kind of seared in my head and we'll talk about all those. But one of the things that hit me the other night was when I was a real little guy I think it was 5'6" or however old it was my parents showed me the exorcist. Now some people listening to that may think, well, you know big deal, but it was a huge deal for me to watch. It's a big deal.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, big deal.
Jerry Henderson:And so it terrified me and I remember at night where I couldn't sleep in the bed, I had to sleep on the floor because there's a scene in the exorcist where the bed's shaking and so I'm constantly afraid that that bed's going to start shaking and so then all of a sudden I'm sleeping in the floor. But then that wouldn't work, so I would open the door and I would sleep with half my body outside the room and half my body inside the room and I turned the whole light on and sleep that way for years. And I remember sitting there the other night and just all of a sudden really connecting with that absolutely terrified kid who the terror of that and who had no access to an adult to help soothe their comfort. It had no idea how to soothe or comfort myself, and so it would go sleepless nights and then get in trouble for sleeping out in the hallway for some reason or who knows, and that wasn't tough enough to handle it and I needed to get my ass back in bed and man up and figure out how to handle it.
Jerry Henderson:And so, when you think about that, that was a very clear moment for me in what we're talking about here to be able to move beyond. Just oh, I saw that that happened with me and that's really tough. That that would happen to a kid To really connecting to the point of getting deeply emotional about that was me terrified. As a little child with no access to feeling safe, no wonder I felt unsafe the majority of my life.
Lisa Kemppainen:Right, exactly. You may or may not know this, but what therapy is really doing is allowing you to have what we call a corrective experience. Yes, so you feel that pain in therapy. You connect to that, and I, or whoever is your therapist, is actually your parent. We never say that, but we're doing what your parents should have done in that moment, which is held space for you, made you feel loved, made you feel supported, made you feel like you could talk about what was going on, make you validated, and so that's part of the beauty of what's happening in therapy is that your therapist, who you've grown to be close to and that you trust and that does a great job listening to you. That's when you have a corrective experience and that's when the healing happens.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, wow you didn't know I was your parent.
Jerry Henderson:Well, you know, I mean, no, I sure didn't.
Jerry Henderson:I'm learning all things all the time, lisa. So, yeah, no, that's beautiful because, as we've talked about, and one of the things I work with people on is like you have this experience traumatic, and it's not just what happens to you but in you and then you make decisions about people, life and, most importantly, about yourself, and then that becomes a core belief and that core belief begins to have all these behaviors and then those behaviors begin to drive our personality and that's who we now, all of a sudden, we think that we are, and it begins to wreak all this havoc and we're trying to deal with the behaviors, but yet what you're talking about is that going back and correcting the experience, because correcting the experience then can help us make new decisions about ourselves in life, which they can help us adopt new core beliefs about ourselves and the way that we see ourselves and the way of what we should have experienced and shouldn't have experienced, et cetera, which then begins to blossom new behaviors in our life, and so that piece those new experiences and those corrective experiences.
Jerry Henderson:how can a person help themselves in those corrective experiences? Because you get the kid back in the car and you're listening to this podcast and maybe you're not able right now to do therapy with somebody, or whatever your situation is. Are there ways that a person can give themselves corrective experiences?
Lisa Kemppainen:Yes, there is, and I'm gonna go back and say what you were saying is the corrective experience is fixing the foundation. That's what that is. The corrective experience is fixing the foundation, right. So how a person can do that is people aren't gonna like my answer, but cry.
Jerry Henderson:Okay, yeah, I don't like that answer because you've been trying to get me to cry for years and I just kind of I've had a few months. I know I'm still working on it, so yeah, yeah, it's yeah, crying.
Lisa Kemppainen:I mean that's kind of the overarching emotional experience. But literally you could get out pictures of yourself as a little person if you have them and you can just think about what was going on. You could write a letter. Which sometimes I have clients do is write a letter as the adult to the small person and let them know how sorry they were about what happened and make it you know. Write a letter saying that who they will be in relationship with that little kid from now on. You can have the little kid write a letter saying what's going on with them and sometimes therapists will even have that person right in their non-dominant hand to get them in touch with the little person. I've never done that, but I've heard of that.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, there's techniques to do it and when you do it right. The thing is is when you start to feel emotion, any of it, when your body starts to feel any twinge of anger or sadness, whatever it is, you have to not, not, not shut that back down, Okay.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yep. You have to grab ahold of it and be with it, yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:You don't have to react to it. You don't have to, you know, go out and drink or go out and screw around, or go out and do whatever you do, right, you just need to be with it, because that's what that kid needed, is needed someone to be with it with them. Yeah, so if you have a therapist, the therapist will be with it with you. But if you're running solo, like you're talking about with people, maybe listening to this podcast, in this podcast, you get to be with it and you will be uncomfortable, but you won't die.
Jerry Henderson:Sure Right, and it is about that part, I think, of witnessing right. It doesn't mean you have to get lost in it, like you were saying, but non-resistance towards it and witnessing it. Would that be a correct word, Like let me just witness this part instead of shoving it down? I remember we were on a call and some emotions really started to come up for me and I started to get you know the moment where you know if you let yourself go a few more steps, you're going to be boo-hooing. And so when, tactically-.
Lisa Kemppainen:Could you rephrase that boo-hooing please?
Jerry Henderson:Okay, absolutely I will. So if you let yourself go with it, you know that you're going to be sobbing, You're going to be letting things go there you go, you're going to be cleaning out that system, right, and I remember that.
Jerry Henderson:you know, I started to feel that and I started to hold my breath and you said, breathe. And you were sneaky because you knew if I started to breathe I wouldn't be able to have the same resistance towards it. Right, holding our breath is an act of resistance, I guess, in some sense, and so when I took a lot of myself to breathe, man did everything. I just started crying and, you know, even getting emotional, thinking about it right now.
Jerry Henderson:But it was a very cleansing moment to be witnessed in that state, to not be judged for it and to allow myself to not resist or to get past that initial resistance and so, yeah, so thank you for that, thank you for that You're welcome.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, yeah, the whole thing in your breath is, and I think that's just a biological thing, right, is that? You know to keep feelings down, to keep you know when we're scared, when we're threatened, I mean just kind of to and clench down grand bear it. But if you ask someone to breathe, you just cannot keep emotions down. If you open up the airway It'll just, and most people hold it like right about here.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, right at that surface, yeah, you can feel it. You can feel all of it coming up and, yeah, and I'm finding more and more the gift of allowing that to come out, and what it's also helping me to do is get in touch with emotions that I hadn't gotten in touch with before, because it's interesting, right, emotions are interesting. I guess in the sense, lisa and help me with this that when you suppress some of your emotions, you kind of wind up suppressing all of them.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah.
Jerry Henderson:It's like we want to selectively suppress emotions, and how does that work for us? How do we do it? Is that something that works very well for us, lisa?
Lisa Kemppainen:Oh, I mean, it is true, if you dial down, you know the ones you don't like. You're going to dial down the ones you do like.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:Although people do get pretty good at and my mother's not going to watch this, so I can even say my mother's really good at only expressing the ones that feel good. Yeah, it really limits us because we are supposed we're designed to have the whole experience.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah yeah, I was talking to somebody, a friend, and they were just talking about well, I don't like, why do I even need to experience negative emotions, man, it just seems kind of pointless. I just need to keep on the positive vibe and the good feels. And you know, doing the negative emotions just feels like, you know, waste of time, just drags my energy down, and so I'm just going to stuff and move forward and thoughts on that. Is it a healthy practice?
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, it's just not. I mean, biologically and in our psyche we are meant to. You know, we're meant to process stuff and eliminate it.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:So emotions work the same way. I mean you can imagine, right, if you never allowed yourself to, if you just stuffed happiness, say, you saw a comedian all the time and you were laughing and it was funny, but you never allowed yourself to laugh, you just held it all in. I mean you would spontaneously combust.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:I can watch Wanda Sykes for more than 15 seconds without busting up right, right, and that it just doesn't make any sense. It's just that we don't want to feel because we didn't have parents who taught us how to feel and that we wouldn't die and didn't show us I mean, how many parents do I have that you know? I'll say, well, you know. Do your kids know how sad you are? No, I don't want to worry them.
Lisa Kemppainen:You're responsible for teaching them what to do with that right, what that looks like that you won't die, that you can come around and it's kind of like are you going to like, give your kid the keys to the car without ever letting them see you drive? Yeah?
Jerry Henderson:It doesn't make any sense. No, it doesn't make any sense.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, emotional training, understanding how to deal with emotions, which is like such a key part I remember you telling me that my emotions are my superpower and learning how to get in touch with my emotions, especially, once again as an ENFP, but not just for ENFPs, but for all of us that place of living deeply in our emotions. But yet, when we've been taught not been taught how to deal with them, or we've been taught to keep them suppressed, right, don't cry about that, or I'll give you something to cry about, that kind of language, or you know, man up, toughen up. Or you know, don't be this, that or the other thing.
Lisa Kemppainen:And so, yeah, walking around with a lot of pain. So what I've been wanting to say to you and I'm glad I remembered is that when you don't allow yourself to, when you tell yourself you're boo-hooing right, when you don't allow yourself to feel you're doing that again to yourself as a kid. Yeah, you're doing the same thing that had that happened to you as a kid. That's why it's so important that you don't do it.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, because that kid already got enough of being told you know, man up or don't be a pussy, or whatever people say right they already got that. So when you're feeling something and you go oh Jerry, stop boo-hooing. You're doing the same thing to that kid again.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah right, I'm repeating my training that I got as a kid. I'm just re-executing that on myself again. Sure Right, absolutely. And no healing taking place.
Lisa Kemppainen:No healing and actually harm, right yeah. But when you say to the kid you're boo-hooing adult self, wow, it's really hard to feel these things. It's super, super, super scary and tough and you're really courageous, right yeah. If you say that to yourself and let yourself cry, then you've actually done what that kid needed, because that kid needed to say it's really scary to see the exorcist. Yeah, I understand that you're really afraid and how smart you are to sleep half in the room and half in the hallway. You're so resourceful, yeah, right.
Lisa Kemppainen:And I'm so sorry that you had to see that movie, and you will never have to see it again. If you don't want to, that's what should happen. And cry honey, you can cry in my arms until you're done crying. But that did not happen.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, no, it did not happen, and it's interesting. Once again back to the thought of I'm, as an adult male, trying to manage an adult. What I'm thinking is an adult male's response to something in the moment, right, like, let me try to unpack this a little bit so I'm in a situation where maybe I'm feeling fear or anxiety, unknowingly, and then, as a man, it's just like come on, man, just toughen up. And when I say as a man, there's just kind of these stereotypes that we have of what a man should be or shouldn't do, et cetera, that are so stupid.
Lisa Kemppainen:Arcane.
Jerry Henderson:Arcane, stupid and all of the words that we could try to put on that. But it's the adult Jerry looking at. Adult Jerry now going. Dude, get it together, stop being X, y and Z.
Jerry Henderson:But yeah, what I had to come to and what was really just such a beautiful connection was no, when that's happening, that's Jerry as a child that adult Jerry needs to respond to as a loving man with courage and integrity and with boldness, to meet that young child, that hurting child, that hurting part of me, and to do what you just said to dismiss that part of me is abusive and is not, you know, what any man would want to be showing up on this planet doing, treating the child that way. But we dismiss it because it's us. And so we get really confused about. It's not adult Jerry trying to deal with adult Jerry. It's adult Jerry who needs to figure out how to respond to little Jerry in that moment. What is? How does he do that? He doesn't stuff it, he doesn't make fun of himself. He sees that part of himself.
Lisa Kemppainen:So Because that's the opportunity, right yeah, in that moment. That's the opportunity to heal yourself, to return back to yourself, to give yourself permission to love yourself. There's the opportunity and you get to choose what you do with that at that moment. Or you know you can stay in therapy forever Because you know, I mean I never get rid of you if I, if I, I could. But you stay in therapy forever and you know your therapist keeps reminding you that those moments are super important. Or you know you decide oh yeah, those are really important. I'm, you know, at the middle of I'm in work and I'm at my desk and I'm given the opportunity to either, you know, just hammer on myself or know that this person behind this desk, in this chair, is actually my six year old self who's desperately looking for approval. And I really don't have to shame them.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:And it's a whole different way of being in the world because, you know, we, we, we love to be, to be hard on ourself. We think that's motivating and it's so dangerous.
Jerry Henderson:What is dangerous? Because I've got a quote that I, you know, shares, that you know shaming yourself and relentlessly criticizing yourself doesn't cause you to change or to heal. It just simply turns you into your own abuser, right. And so now you're just your own abuser, thinking that punishment is corrective, thinking that that's the way that you were treated. So now you need to treat yourself that way to make change happen. And it is trying to serve us. It is a safety valve that we're trying, or it is a safety mechanism that we're trying to use because we're afraid that if we don't do that to ourselves, we'll stay stuck versus loving as a much more healing way to live life.
Jerry Henderson:And I like to talk about love yourself in a way that the parts of you that are hiding and that are in pain feel safe to be seen by you, right. And so the parts that my five year old didn't feel safe to be seen by me and to express what it needed because I was shaming it and pushing it away. But giving myself permission to love myself and loving parts of myself and continuing to figure out how to love parts of myself in such a way that I feel safe to be seen by myself. I feel safe to be in my own presence instead of wreaking havoc on my nervous system by constantly shaming myself.
Lisa Kemppainen:So are you saying that you're making a commitment to never tell yourself to stop boo hooey?
Jerry Henderson:Well, I think that would be a good idea, lisa. I think that, as a result of our session today, yes, I think that would be a fantastic thing for me to commit to no more saying I'm boo hooey.
Lisa Kemppainen:You are not boo hooey.
Jerry Henderson:No, I am expressing a deep need. Yeah, I am expressing a very deep part of myself that is in pain and needs me to know that it's in pain and have me respond in love and not to shame it or to minimize it in any way.
Lisa Kemppainen:So yeah, sounds like. Yeah, there's so much to talk about with this subject.
Jerry Henderson:There is absolutely.
Jerry Henderson:So, we'll have to do another episode on it, we'll have a part two around it. So let me, let me. I want to close this out with a couple of thoughts. One is a question and then one is maybe providing people with a practice that they can take with them. So it's interesting to me because people will ask me the question Do you regret what happened to you in your life?
Jerry Henderson:And, you know, do you wish that any of it didn't happen? And you know, at this point I'm, I'm good, right, it's a part of the story at all belongs. It's made me who I am, and part of that, you know, is still things that I'm continuing to work on and grow in, and other ones that I just deeply and I'm learning to cherish all of it right, and there's parts that I cherish more and parts that you know not so much. And so you often will get people who will feel like, well, why do I need to, like, go back and heal this stuff? Why do I need to get rid of or address certain things of my childhood? They've made me who I am today. They've made me strong, they've made me resilient.
Jerry Henderson:Absolutely absolutely, and that's a beautiful gift, right, but is there ever any confusion around that space of like feels, like you know? We think that it's either a B binary choice of you know you have to either like, keep it all or get rid of it or where's that space between Honoring that it made you who you are today, but yet still allowing yourself to investigate how it's not serving you?
Lisa Kemppainen:Right. Well, there you have it right. We've been talking about so much of that. How do I hold my parents responsible and also understand that they did the best they could, right? Yeah so so much of this has been both and Right, and so what you're talking about is how do I, how do I honor the fact that it actually gave me some strengths? I mean, I'm I'm fiercely independent Lots of times. That's you know, that's what will come out. I'm somebody that has incredible compassion. I I'm good with money.
Lisa Kemppainen:You know, whatever it is because my parents were Broke and I had to figure out how to financially take care of myself. So you can keep all that right and also you can still acknowledge that those were great things that came out as some pretty tough circumstances. I mean, both things can be true, right, you can be. You can be terrified and excited at the same time.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, that's great, because we don't want to confuse the fact that Healing my childhood or healing the past or going back there, means that I have to give up who that made me Become in some ways right, the good qualities of who that made me become, and so it doesn't mean you need to give up your strength and your fierce independence. Those are things that we developed, that are, you know, survival mechanisms and beautiful things that really help us in our journey, right? Yeah, so Healing doesn't mean you have to give up the gifts that came along. It just means that we're healing the things that aren't serving us anymore. Does that make sense, right?
Lisa Kemppainen:and it's the same thing with your parents right, holding them accountable. You don't have to get rid of all the things that are great about your parents, that you love about them. You know your parents might have given you some a great work ethic, or they might have given you, you know, a love of God and appreciation of nature. Whatever. So as an adult, as you're doing this healing work, you get to go back and pick. These are parts of myself I like to keep, because I got them from my parents and they're working for me, and these are parts of myself I don't want anymore. I don't have those values of my parents have. This part isn't serving me. So you get to be an adult in this process and Figure out what you want to keep and what you want to throw away.
Jerry Henderson:Absolutely 100% love that, yeah, yeah. So I always like to leave people with at least some little take away, other than you know the ah-ha's, the, the mentions, and we did that a little bit about Writing the letter and how to you know, allow yourself to be your own Witnesser and to sit with yourself. So we were talking earlier about the part of us that, as a, as an adult or whatever you know, young adult, whatever our story is that we can go back and we can return to the parts of us that Got abandoned, invite that part of ourselves into the car and and begin to become curious and ask questions. What are some questions that you might encourage people to do? If they were to go through a visualization process of doing that, what would you? What would you Maybe give them some examples if they're feeling stuck in that practice of, well, how do I do that? What would be some questions that I would ask? It's sector. Could you help some people with that that exercise?
Lisa Kemppainen:Okay, how about the first question? Um, what mattered to you?
Jerry Henderson:Okay.
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, how about just getting curious with this kid? What mattered to you? What did you want someone to know about you? What was something that you hid from the world?
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Kemppainen:What was your favorite thing to do and why? Yeah, who? Who did you feel like you could talk to? And maybe that was just a stuffed animal, right, what, what, what did you most want that that thing or that person to know about your life? So there you go.
Jerry Henderson:No, that's good, because, right, I mean, I'm thinking about somebody thinking you know, okay, I'm doing this, and like, what am I gonna say to my little self here? I don't even get started on this. And one question that you've always Encouraged me to ask and to ask others is just that simple question of what do you need? Right, like what do you need in this moment, and To just sit and listen to see what arises, yeah, so what do I do with it? When it arises, lisa, what do I do with the answer that comes from that? Would you encourage people to lean into it a little bit more?
Lisa Kemppainen:Yeah, or we can keep asking questions based on that answer, because what we're really trying to do is we're really trying to get to know that little kid. So if you, you know, ask the little kid a question and say you know, who did you trust at that moment, you know time in your life, and the kid says you know nobody, then the next obvious question would be did you wish that you had somebody to trust, or have you ever had somebody to trust? So you just keep kind of staying curious about that because you're trying to build a Relationship with that younger kid and you're just trying to be curious because I don't know about you. But I can imagine myself at six years old what it would have been like to have somebody sit down and just say you know, ask me questions about who I am and what I cared about. Yeah, it would have been a big deal.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, mm-hmm. And what if a person gets the kid in the car and they're angry at the kid?
Lisa Kemppainen:and.
Jerry Henderson:What do you do in that scenario? They just all the reasons why they were a loser and all that. All those feelings start to come up, and you know Well yeah, you gotta gotta go with that. Okay, yeah, and that's okay.
Lisa Kemppainen:It's totally okay. What? Whatever is there is okay, and whatever there is meaningful, and whatever there is useful and whatever there needs to have a place to be Said yeah and he could be mad at the kid, right mad at the kid. For you know why did you have to make things worse, or why couldn't you fix this, or why were you such a brat, or you know.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, why did you have?
Lisa Kemppainen:to be chubby.
Jerry Henderson:Right Made life so hard on yourself being chubby. Yeah, why'd you have to be so awkward and be such a disappointment? Why'd you have to get in trouble, make mom and dad's life miserable to the points where they were constantly having to deal with you and take Things out on you. And you know I could just had your act together.
Lisa Kemppainen:What yeah?
Jerry Henderson:born in a different family.
Lisa Kemppainen:You know, whatever this the narrative is, it's a yeah right, and then the interesting thing would be to let the kid answer Right, yeah right, yeah well why? You know why did I? Yeah, because nobody was there for me except, you know, ding dong switch was my deal.
Jerry Henderson:Yeah, wow, who he gets me again. You get me kind of emotional on that one, because you start to hear the responses of a child and, instead of you answering for the child, allowing the child to answer. I mean that's gonna have to. I mean that I can feel it right now. That's gonna have to break open some things within you. Are not gonna have to, but it would seem to break open some things within you To hear that little part of yourself answering in such a way For you to hear that, yeah, right.
Lisa Kemppainen:And that's why it's a beautiful thing. I mean not, you know, promoting my profession, but promoting my profession. That's why it's just a beautiful thing to have a therapist there who can help Be there on you on this journey. You know, we're not the ones. I mean, I'm doing my own work. Right, I'm not the one doing your work, but I'm also Beside you along the way and it can be, you know, if you're walking up a really rigorous mountain trail and you don't know what the hell you're doing or where you're going, it could be really great to have a guide.
Jerry Henderson:Sure can, absolutely hundred percent. Well, speaking of people working with a therapist, lisa, I know that you not only offer one-on-one Therapy services, but you also do individual coaching. So if people are listening to this podcast and watching this podcast, they're really resonating with you and the style that you do it in. How could they get a hold of you? What would be the easiest way for them to get in touch with you?
Lisa Kemppainen:The easiest way would be just to reach out with an email, and that's green like the color Lisa. 5164 at me. Mecom, yeah, love to hear from you.
Jerry Henderson:Lisa, thank you so much for another Episode and our time together. You're on the permission to love podcasts. I know the listeners and the viewers are getting so much value out of this. So thank you for the gift that you are and thank you for the gift of your time.
Lisa Kemppainen:You are so welcome. Thank you for having the courage to do this.
Jerry Henderson:Well, what another amazing time with Lisa. Thank you to every one of you for listening to this episode now. If you haven't had a chance yet to subscribe or to follow, please do so, because that'll keep you updated on when new episodes come out, and if you haven't had a chance to rate it or review it, that would really help the show. It'll help extend its reach and help more people understand how they can give themselves the permission to love themselves, and so thank you, thank you for being here and thank you for making your time, and I want to remind you as, as always, you are worthy of your own love.