Episode 302 - Michael and Julianne Cusick, "Unraveling Layers of Trauma"

Welcome to another episode of Restoring the Soul. Today, Michael and Julianne delve into the complex tapestry of trauma, unwinding the threads that bind us to our past experiences. Many regard trauma as stemming from life-shattering events, but today’s discussion unfolds its layers, revealing that trauma can emerge from the wounds of both presence and absence. Whether it's through neglect or the absence of nurturing, the imprints of trauma take many forms.

Understanding trauma not as what's wrong with you but what happened to you, we'll explore its symptoms, ranging from physiological responses and relational challenges to mood disturbances, sleep issues, and beyond. It's often hard to identify trauma when there are no symptoms, but it can lurk in the system, precipitating unforeseen issues in our lives.

With transformational insight, this episode affirms that real healing is possible.

Transcript

Michael (00:00)
Hello everybody. Welcome to Restoring the Soul. I am Michael John Cusick and today I'm here in the studio with my bride, Julianne Cusick. Hi Jules.

Julianne (00:10)
Hi, hello everyone. Hi, Michael.

Michael (00:14)
Today, we are talking about the topic of trauma in a very specific and concrete way. We've never actually had an episode on what is trauma? Why is it important to understand the difference between trauma and other kinds of distressing things and then what to do about it? Those are the three things we're going to discuss.

Julianne (00:32)
. .

Michael (00:36)
So before we jump in, I want to give an operating definition of trauma. And that is because if you talk to mental health clinicians and people across the board that work with trauma, there's actually no singular definition. And so I'm going to give a definition that incorporates, I think, all the important elements. So trauma is any event, experience, or environment.

Julianne (00:37)
Yes.

Michael (01:02)
that overwhelms an individual and leaves them without supportive resources to cope. Any event, experience, or environment that overwhelms an individual's system and leaves them without coping resources, they're supportive. And that will play out in the body and it has a embodied physiological reaction. So we're going to unpack that today. Julianne, you've been working with couples and individuals with trauma over a long period of time.

Julianne (01:15)
Thank you.

Michael (01:32)
And tell me about how your understanding of trauma has evolved and what that looks like in your work with clients.

Julianne (01:40)
Wow, that's a big one. I would say that prior to my experience working with clients, that trauma, the word trauma to me would have meant like big events. And I think it's very common for people to think that, you know, people come back from war with trauma or.

When there's like we have a collective shared trauma globally now after COVID -19. War, natural disasters, 9 -11, those are big major traumas. And I think that's what I used to think. And that's what I see a lot of clients coming in with thinking, well, I haven't been to war. I haven't been in a natural disaster.

You know, my house didn't burn down, so I don't really have trauma. So to answer your question, I would next say that how my definition or understanding of trauma has changed is that it has expanded. Trauma to me is so much more encompassing and so much more in our lives than we really are aware of, than we realize.

And go ahead.

Michael (03:06)
Yes. So sometimes it can be those major experiences or what clinicians will call capital T trauma because something is so awful or so catastrophic or so life threatening. But at other times, the impact of the trauma is because it's at a young age before coping skills have been learned or because it might be like a raindrop, but it happens over and over and over again. And as we know from

water torture in World War II, that that can actually drive a person crazy and lead them to being overwhelmed in their system. Another factor that I just want to insert this and then let you come back is that sometimes these smaller traumas are happening during a season of stress in a person's life, which makes their brain less able to cope with it. And so as you're talking, I'm just reminded of how there's the big ones.

but also the accumulation of small t traumas that have a whole variety of reasons for why they impact us, right?

Julianne (04:12)
So I think one of the things that's missing in the mental health field is something that gives, instead of the language of big T trauma and little T trauma, is maybe like levels of trauma, like a level one, level two, level three, which we have in the medical profession. And I think that might help us better understand that there are different levels of trauma.

I don't subscribe to little T trauma, big T trauma. I will teach that and say, here's a way of understanding trauma as a spectrum. You know, that bullying might be a smaller T trauma, you know, where a sexual assault could be a large T trauma. And then of course there's, you know, the death of a parent to a child and some of the other events that we.

that we talked about. But like you said, it has to do with the environment, the age of the individual, whether there are supportive mechanisms or not, and the fact that repeated trauma. So if we call bullying, for example, and we say that's a small t trauma, we also have to look at does it continue over time?

And what is that individual who's being bullied? What's their temperament? What's their personality? And what we have seen is that those little traumas, when they're unaddressed and they're reoccurring and they happen over and over and over again, that that actually, the impact of that is actually what we would call a big T trauma. And so really there is no way.

for people to say, well, that was them, you know, this happened to them. This is, you know, I only have this happen. You know, I only skinned my knee. You broke your arm. Well, it has more to do with that environment. You said overwhelming the system, right? So I would say if our nervous system gets into hyper arousal, or we get into a stuck shutdown hypo arousal, that that could indicate that trauma has occurred.

You also talked about the coping, the support, the resources. We've seen situations where, say a child gets bullied, comes home from school, but mom and dad aren't there. Or maybe mom and dad are drinking or they're fighting. So that child doesn't get the support where another child, very same thing could happen to them. They come home, parents are engaged, available.

Inquiring about the child the child feels safe enough and trust the parents enough to share the bullying instant Instance and then the parent is able to engage with the child and we see that there's not an impact of trauma or it's much less So there are so many different factors playing into trauma and And we can't minimize and say well this only happened to me

Because if that's the worst thing that happened to me and I didn't have the resources for support and I was overwhelmed by it, then that's a trauma.

Michael (07:42)
Yeah, I like how you're making that distinction. And I appreciate that you highlighted how I talked about capital A and capital T and that the levels might be more helpful. But the biggest point that I'm hearing you discuss is this idea that trauma is the, the event itself or the experience or the environment is really particular to the individual where some people will experience something and not have symptoms of trauma and others will. And it has a lot to do with the environment.

The words that popped into my mind when you talked about the presence of a parent is attunement and engagement and loving support, eye contact, touch, letting the person be able to tell their story, having, if you will, an advocate.

Julianne (08:26)
Mm -hmm. Yes. So we have a former colleague who also did like rescue work here in the Colorado mountains. And one of the things that they shared with me that they do when there is an accident that they show up on the scene for is they get the injured individual talking because talking about it helps resolve the trauma.

So how many of us in our life have had things happen to us, but it wasn't safe to talk about it, or we didn't have somebody to talk about it, or both. And so it got stuck inside of us. And we think, oh, it's nothing. Oh, it happened a long time ago. But we are all the ages we've ever been. And so that little girl inside, that little girl who was alone, who...

had a traumatic event and didn't have the support and didn't have safe people to talk to, you know, until that's resolved in me, that little girl is still there and she holds that trauma. Same for you, Michael. Things that have happened to you stayed in you until they were intentionally addressed. So for those of us who have these events, we tend to play them down. We tend to minimize.

We tend to say, well, somebody else had it so much worse than I did, but we don't take into consideration what our experience is. What's the worst thing that has happened to us and what's the environment that it happened in? Did we have support? Did we not? Was it safe to tell? Did we get the support that we needed? Because we can tell and then we can end up being blamed. We can end up being punished, being, um,

You know, I think I said blamed already. There was another word, but it flew out my mind. You know, we can end up being interrogated and made to feel like it's somehow our fault. So there's so many factors. It's not just the incident, but it's what happens around it, how it's addressed afterwards.

Michael (10:42)
So we're talking about the causes and they can be many. It can be abuse. It can be neglect. It can be any kind of adverse childhood experience. It can be distress. But we're, as therapists, sometimes thinking about childhood and development, which of course profoundly impacts us. But it can also be in adulthood, a motor vehicle accident. It can be, as you said earlier,

Julianne (11:07)
Absolutely.

Michael (11:08)
You know, your house burning down and you may have survived it, but you're watching from, you know, the street or the sidewalk as all of your possessions are going to ashes. It can be the loss of a loved one. It can be virtually anything is the one side of the coin of trauma. It's the what happened. And the other day I was doing a podcast with our friend Ian and we were talking about the new book by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey called What Happened to You. So.

The understanding of trauma is not what's wrong with you, but what happened to you. And then the other side of the coin is that when it actually manifests as trauma, as opposed to simply a distressing event, that's when there are symptoms that begin to express themselves physiologically. And that's when some kind of impairment or problem develops where people say, Hey, life isn't working. And they often come to counseling because it's playing out relationally.

Julianne (11:42)
Yes.

Michael (12:07)
where it's playing out in terms of their mood or their sleep or addictions or anxiety or something like that. So I want you to respond, but also I'd like to read through a checklist of just the kind of manifestations that this can have.

Julianne (12:07)
Yes.

Before you do that, you touched on something really important, which is really wounds of absence and wounds of presence. And so wounds of presence are when there's, you know, abuse, we're being yelled at, we've been beaten, you know, there's something that's happening to us that can result in trauma. But also when something good fails to happen to us, like nurturing.

safety, protection, having our basic needs met, that absence of something good can also result in a trauma. So I want to just highlight that before you go into, okay, what are some of the things that might manifest in my life if I've had trauma?

Michael (13:12)
Yeah, that's an important distinction. And I've said in a number of places, and I think I even wrote this in Surfing for God, that oftentimes, as I've been doing this kind of trauma work in healing for 10, 15 years, and in counseling for 30, that some of the more difficult experiences of healing are not the people that have the explicit severe abuse, because they kind of get it, and they know that they've got it, and they know that life is not.

going well, it's the people that have had those wounds of absence, the neglect, which some people go, no, no, no, no, no, I wasn't neglect. But then asking questions like, were you touched? Were you hugged? Were you welcomed home with a smile? You know, I was a latchkey kid and did that happen in a single moment? No, that was an environment that kind of caused a certain trauma for something in me to have to shut down. We either learn to compensate or we learn to diminish that part of ourself that has that need. So I'm glad.

that you made that distinction.

So let me read this checklist and I'm taking this list of symptoms. This is neither comprehensive nor is it diagnostic. If you are listening to this, this is not for you to diagnose yourself, but people that are just hearing about the specifics of trauma and what it is and why it actually matters. This may be the first time that you go, oh, I didn't know that that was part of trauma. And as I read these, you will hear that there's overlap, for example, between some of these trauma symptoms and depression.

or trauma symptoms and anxiety. And that's why things like post -traumatic stress disorder, it is a disorder, but it's also a syndrome. So it includes a lot of other symptomology and phenomenon that could in and of itself without the other symptoms there, it could be a separate kind of issue. So the first is a sign of trauma is someone who is experiencing repeated disturbing memories, thoughts, or images.

of a stressful experience. And let me just say that we categorize these in mental health as either intrusive experiences, which include a kind of reliving of the event. They're coming to us, and we'd rather they not, or a kind of numbness and avoidance. In the numbness and avoidance, it's experienced as a kind of freezing state. And in the reliving state,

And in the intrusive state, it's an arousal of our autonomic nervous system. And so we've talked in many other contexts about the window of tolerance. We won't get deep into that today, but we tend to go in one of two directions and you'll hear that these symptoms move in one of two directions. We escalate into a fight or flight, anxious nervous system arousal pattern, or we go into a state of numbness, of freezing.

into a place of hypo -arousal of our nervous system. So these disturbing memories, thoughts, and images are part of the intrusive thought and the arousal of the nervous system. This can also include repeated, go ahead.

Julianne (16:16)
So.

Well, I don't want to interrupt, but I just want to pause if I'm hearing what you're saying correctly, that this impact to us, maybe we do have these intrusive thoughts and images that might be one manifestation, but the other could be this shutdown where we may remember it, but we don't really have any feelings or emotions attached to it.

Michael (16:44)
Yes, exactly. Yeah, so it's the presence of yucky stuff or it's the absence of things that we would normally feel or there are even good things. So I'll just continue and at any point just let me know if you have questions or comments because it's not interrupting. So related to these intrusive thoughts, images, and memories would be disturbing dreams or nightmares of a stressful past experience. Another would be impulsive or sudden acting out.

or feeling as if stressful experiences are happening again. And I use the example often because we most often think of trauma in relation to war and combat, but I worked with someone who was in a combat situation and they were with their family on the 4th of July at a picnic having a great time and somebody set off from fireworks.

And this individual had a significant reaction and they jumped under the picnic table and grabbed a couple of the people near them and they weren't just remembering being back in their combat area. They were actually back there. They were actually in their brain thinking that they were in that situation. And so it's a re -experiencing of the event as if it were happening all over again. Another.

Julianne (18:04)
So we didn't plan on this, we didn't plan on this, but if we're looking at that as a level one, level two, or level three trauma, I would say that would be a level one trauma response, right? The most significant, it's reacting, it's reliving it, and the person is responding in the present moment as if it were happening all over again.

Michael (18:28)
Yes, certainly in terms of the distress in that individual's life and in terms of the potential impairment. And you know, that those are really the two categories, the two sides of a coin, whether something's a disorder to what level of distress is it causing you? And then what level is it actually impairing your life? You know, I can feel sad, but that's not a high level of distress if I have the blues. But if I can't get out of bed, um, and I can't function,

then that's more likely to be depression if it goes on and on. And then if it's interfering with my social, vocational, interpersonal functioning and my ability to connect with people and go to work, then it's a higher level of impairment.

Another one is when people are having big emotions and feeling especially upset or escalated around a reminder of any of the stressful experiences. And we often call these triggers. And I sometimes make the mistake of using the word trigger, but I don't like the word trigger. Having gone through a complex post -traumatic stress disorder myself, I like the word activation.

or sometimes dysregulation. And the reason for this is the word triggered reinforces this very passive experience where in fact I can be, you know, driving down the street and see something, you know, we've worked with a lot of couples with infidelity where they'll see a sexualized billboard or they'll be watching a movie together to try to connect. And then suddenly there's a scene that's there about infidelity and that person gets very, very activated. I feel like the word activated is more respectful.

And it helps people to begin to realize that they have a sense of, uh, empowerment over they can actually do something when that happens, as opposed to triggered, you know, is like a rock release from a slingshot and the velocity just takes me wherever it wants to go.

So what I'd like to do before we continue the discussion is to mention some of the symptomology of how trauma actually manifests. The big category are intrusive experiences, things that are happening to us that we don't want to be there. Julian mentioned the wounds of presence and absence. Well, there are symptoms of presence and absence, and those symptoms are kind of reliving in terms of the intrusion.

Disturbing memories, thoughts, and images. This can include dreams and nightmares of the stressful experience or experiences like it. There can be sudden reactions and activation and big feelings and impulsive responses as if the stressful event is happening all over again. There can be an activation of big emotions with anger, with anxiety, with fear, with shame.

with a sense of terror as if the experience is happening all again and that oftentimes happens when there are external triggers that are going on. Those physical reactions can include things like the heart pounding, difficulty breathing, sweating. Whenever something comes along and reminds the individual of that past. There's also symptoms that are about avoiding or something not happening. And so there's an avoidance of thinking.

or talking about, or being able to be around something that symbolizes that stressful situation and avoidance of situations that remind a person of a stressful experience. And I'm reminded of somebody who, one of their greatest wounds was in third grade where there was a substitute teacher and they had a severe speech impediment and the substitute teacher didn't know that and they got called upon and they just...

froze in that moment and the teacher didn't handle it well. Now this is an example of something that's not severe abuse. It's significant, but it's not catastrophic. It's not war. But in that individual situation with their particular home environment, that became a major trauma. And you might expect what I'm going to say. This person is terrified to speak in public, even though that's part of their job. This person has overcome their speech impediment.

But anytime there's any individual attention upon them, their heart races, they go into a virtual panic attack. I think the last big thing is issues with mood and our physical state where depression and shutting down on one side and then anxiety and our emotions getting really big on the other side. That's typically the fight or flight, which is a hyper arousal of our nervous system and a freeze or faint, which is the hypo arousal of the nervous system.

There's also depressive symptoms like difficulty concentrating, low mood, fatigue, energy issues. Another big one is being super alert or vigilant or feeling jumpy. But Julianne, as I've read this, and of course, this is not an exhaustive list, where does your mind go and how is this hitting you?

Julianne (23:31)
I think that for most people, when we think about situations that are obvious abuse, right? That it's easy to see the trauma. When we're nervous to go to a movie theater, if we're afraid of the dark, if we have recurring nightmares, if, and going, being around certain people, right? Because a lot of abuse happens by somebody we know.

especially as children, right? Could be an uncle, a family member, a neighbor, sadly, a respected authority figure, someone in the church. So those are obvious. I think when we're not impacted by trauma and we have, it's gotten stuck in our system and we're not having the symptoms, I think that is harder to identify.

So somebody is assaulted and they go, well, it doesn't bother me. I don't, I don't feel anything around it. You know, I was, you know, um, I was mugged and, um, you know, I got nothing. I'm fine. And we think that the trauma is out of our system when actually it's stuck in our system and we're, we're in that freeze place and this numbness is there. And that needs to be.

activated and opened up for the trauma to be released. So that's what comes to me is I hear you go through this. I hear two extremes. One is I'm over -activated and I have symptoms, depression, anxiety, dreams, you know, fear of speaking, et cetera, et cetera. But the other, and this is where I think it is harder to identify, is when we're not having those struggles. We may remember something that happened.

But because we're not disturbed by it in the moment, we think that there's nothing there underneath.

Michael (25:35)
Yeah. And then the telltale sign is not, oh, I have trauma, but rather I have relational issues. I have compulsive behaviors. I'm having issues with, uh, my temper, with my mood, with my energy level. And that's often why people come to counseling. And sometimes prior to coming to counseling, those issues begin to play out in not only relationships, but in the workplace or an education or something like that. So.

You know, because of the conversation and information around trauma and especially the fact that Bessel van der Kolk's book, The Body Keeps the Score is the New York Times bestseller now for a couple of years. This is a language that people are more familiar with, but they oftentimes don't realize it. It used to be that people don't come to counseling for trauma, but they come for the presenting problem. And then we say, oh, what's going on is actually trauma. So.

Julianne (26:03)
Mm -hmm.

Michael (26:29)
You know, you and I have talked about this so much and this was a dynamic in our relationship, but classic situation of a couple coming to counseling and it's often the wife that says, you know, he doesn't have emotions. There's no emotional connection. And back in the old days, before we understood about trauma, my approach was to teach communication skills and to kind of explore why the person, you know, wasn't connected to their emotions. And we might give them a, uh, emotional vocabulary list or something. All good things to do.

But now we can actually pretty accurately detect, oh, this is actually trauma that's happening in your body and something has shut down in you. You've seen that.

Julianne (27:09)
Well, yes, and I don't have a problem with communication skills. They're important to learn. It's when we're teaching them. If it's all that we teach in our counseling session or it's the first thing that we go to, we might be doing a disservice to our clients. It's really getting the story, looking underneath, and then doing the resolution of trauma first.

because if we just teach the communication skills, many times we're just layering over the trauma and it's not addressed, and then we wonder why the communication skills don't work. I have a lot of couples who come and say, you know, we've been in counseling forever for communication skills and they don't work. Well, it's because there's underlying issues that haven't been addressed.

Michael (27:55)
So I want to discuss one more thing before we shift to what can people do about this. And let's do this back and forth. But I largely, with your expertise, want to ask you this question. And that is, we see a lot of work around what we call and what has been called in the last 15 years or so in mental health complex post -traumatic stress disorder. And so there's this distinction between post -traumatic stress disorder,

or the manifestation of trauma that's typically from a single traumatic event or maybe a couple and then complex post -traumatic stress disorder. Talk to me about the difference.

Julianne (28:33)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah. So PTSD is usually stemming from one event or maybe just a couple similar events. So I've worked with clients where they've had a car accident or they've witnessed a car accident and that event has caused trauma. Maybe they saw somebody die or be severely injured and that impacted them. Something around water, a boating accident, a near drowning experience.

for themselves or somebody else. Maybe they saved a child. That type of one -time event, when we go to trauma resolution, if there's not a lot of history around it, it's an isolated event, it's more easily

So in my EMDR training, we see that when it's a one -time event, the resolution can be, you know, maybe one session of EMDR or two can resolve if it's an isolated event one time. However, when it's entangled, think of like the roots of a tree, they all get entangled, or it's something small but has gone on over and over and over like.

maybe a young child who's bullied at one school, they move, but that child is bullied again. And maybe they move schools a third time and they're bullied again. That becomes more of a chronic and it becomes more integrated into the person. And so it takes a little bit longer to undo the tangles, if you will, for that trauma to be released and resolved.

Michael (30:18)
And that's where we're into the experiences and the environment of trauma. And a big factor there is powerlessness. I can't escape this. The kid has to go to school every day and face the bully. And the other side of this is that there's no, if in the case where it does become complex trauma, there's no parent that's attuning to that individual saying, you must be terrified and you feel powerless, but let's do some things. Let me advocate for you, et cetera, et cetera.

Julianne (30:48)
Mm -hmm.

Michael (30:48)
That's an environment that causes trauma and it's often there where the complex PTSD takes root.

Julianne (30:55)
Yes. And that reminds me of work I've done with, in involving domestic violence. And one of the things that was really surprising to me that I learned was that when a child is physically abused by a parent, physically or sexually, they have the parents' attention. Granted, it's in a negative, harmful way, but that parent is there. Some of the research.

from years ago in my career that I discovered that was pretty surprising to me is that when children witness domestic violence, so parents fighting, physically fighting with each other and that child is alone, that actually has a greater impact on the child than the physical abuse because there's no connection at all. Both parents' attention are on the other parent in a very negative, explosive, violent way sometimes.

and the child witnessing that is left alone. So again, the lack of the attunement, they feel absolutely abandoned in that moment that neither parent is there for them to comfort, to soothe or to protect.

Michael (32:09)
Right, because that other parent that would potentially be there to go talk to or come talk to them, that person is not there. So.

Julianne (32:17)
No, they're engaged in this conflict, either going back and forth or trying to get away from or instigating, whatever, you know, however it plays out.

Michael (32:26)
Right. So, post -traumatic stress disorder or PTSD is typically a single or perhaps a few traumatic events and they're typically all related to the same thing. And this could include something severe like sexual abuse. But the issue around this is repetition and then what other supports are there for that child or for the individual. Because remember the definition is...

any event, experience, or environment that overwhelms and then leaves the individual without loving resources and support. So complex PTSD is where there are repeated traumas or where the traumas are occurring in an environment where the individual feels powerless, overwhelmed, without the loving resources. And this complex PTSD, it's important because this is a developmental disorder. This affects how the child...

the grade schooler, teenager, young adult begins to form into a person. And this is why with complex PTSD, and I know you see this all the time with your clients as well, feelings of worthlessness, shame, self -hatred, relationship problems, sometimes hypersensitive, kind of morally and behaviorally, there's often great sensitivity around feeling guilty about certain things that might be different from shame.

A lot of difficulties with emotional regulation, big feelings like anger, intensity, anxiety, and then also emotional regulation with shutting down, and then intimacy problems that can be sexually intimate or any kind of emotional or even spiritual intimacy. And this is one of the things we talk about restoring the soul is how our life experience, traumatic or not, is what impacts and shapes our experience with God and with others. So,

It's a very important thing to understand how trauma in general shapes our capacity to be in relationship and specifically to attach. So I just want to kind of bring things to an end, but Julius, will you talk about trauma and how that affects attachment? As I just brought that up.

Julianne (34:27)
Mm.

Oh, well, I could really get excited and talk a long time about attachment and trauma. Um, because I'm thinking, uh, of early childhood experiences of absence of attunement and attachment and being seen, sued, safe, um, and secure and how that imprints a person's system.

We often hear the phrase, oh, you were such a good baby because you never cried. And yet what we know from research is that when a child's cries are unmet, that they learn to stop crying and shut down. What's supposed to happen is baby cries, caregiver hears the cry, caregiver responds.

comes in, soothes the baby, pats the baby, maybe picks up the baby, maybe the baby's hungry and needs to eat or is dirty and needs to be changed. But when the caregiver, when there's not a response to the cries, then this shutdown occurs. And when that happens, it is developmental because as that child grows and goes through the developmental stages, without an interruption to that pattern, and many times that's just the family environment.

And so they grow up with that. In addition to what you've meant, mentioned things like low self -esteem, low confidence. Um, I don't deserve, I'm not worthy. And they, they don't reach their full potential. There's not a sense of self of who they are. Um, I use this example recently. Um, it's one of my favorites. I used to love.

as a kid getting an Easter basket on Easter Sunday and loved chocolate bunnies. And I couldn't wait to bite into that thick piece of chocolate. And when it just crumbled because it was a hollow bunny, we're so disappointed. Well, we can grow up like a hollow bunny. And that was really my experience was growing up in this absence of, and there was this hollowness.

And so that's one of the developmental imprints of trauma or evidence of developmental trauma is this emptiness, this lack of, this hollowness inside. And the great thing is, you know, that is, it's worth doing the healing work because then you can become a solid chocolate bunny and it can get filled in. So it's not, you know, terminal, but it needs to be.

you know, addressed and named, because if we don't name it, I like to say, you know, if you don't feel it, you can't heal it. So, so that's where my mind goes when you talk about developmental trauma and the absence of and the imprint and how that impacts us, not just relationally with others, but within our own sense of being.

Michael (37:42)
Yeah, someone said to me recently that we can't develop a sense of self if we've not been connected to another self. And so that attachment has to be there in order for us to truly know who we are and to be able to show up in the world.

Julianne (37:52)
Mm -hmm.

And that's the beauty of therapy when we have a really good therapist. That's the beauty of a mentor. That's the beauty of a spiritual director. That's the beauty of really having personal engagement with whether it's Jesus, whether it's healing energy, whether it's the...

you know, the light essence, you know, like the sun being in nature, I think is a healing element. And to me, it mirrors, you know, the healing light of Christ. But there's something about the warmth, you know, when you think about a caregiver, you know, a mother swaddling a child or a dad holding his newborn baby, you know, we feel warmth from the other person. So there's ways in which, as we connect with

God, with ourselves, and with other people who are safe and healthy, that those wounds can be healed and the trauma can fall away.

Michael (39:04)
And that is why our motto at Restoring the Soul is stubborn hope, deep change. Real healing is possible. Thanks everybody for listening. I'm Michael John Cusick with Julianne Cusick and we'll talk to you next time.