Women Like Me Stories & Business

KRISTIN WINDSOR: Healing Without Reliving Pain

• Julie Fairhurst • Episode 177

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We explore how real healing can happen without reopening old wounds by restoring safety in the body, rewiring implicit memories, and taking back power in the present. Kristen Windsor shares her journey from decades of diagnoses to creating embodied practices that make change last.

• the limits and harms of retelling trauma as a primary method
• the role of implicit memories in nervous system self-regulation
• what safety in the body feels like and how to build it
• nature, mindfulness, and narration to reconnect mind and body
• mapping layers: thoughts, emotions, somatics, nervous system
• embodied healing as a lifestyle, not a quick fix
• celebrating micro shifts to rewire motivation and trust
• moving from wound identity to purpose and dharma
• three daily anchors: love, awareness, presence

Download KRISTIN'S free 20-minute guided mirror practice on my website. Check out the 15-minute story video, message her on Instagram, and explore one-to-one support options:  

https://www.instagram.com/kristinsquantumcatalyzers

https://kristinkarina.wixsite.com/healyourself


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Who Is Julie Fairhurst?

Speaker • Author • Business Strategist • Founder of Women Like Me

Julie Fairhurst is a force of nature disguised as a woman with a pen and a business brain built for impact. As the founder of the Women Like Me Book Program, she has opened the door for women around the world to share their truth, heal their past, and rise into their power. Since 2019, she has published more than 30 books and over 350 true-life stories — without charging a single writer a dime! Why? Because women’s stories deserve daylight, not gatekeeping.

With 34 years in sales, marketing, and successful business leadership, Julie knows how to turn storytelling into influence and influence into income.

Her mission is clear and unapologetic: break generational trauma one story at a time and help women elevate both emotionally and financially. She doesn’t just publish books, she builds brands, confidence, and possibility, giving women the tools to rewrite their futures, grow their businesses, and lift their families with them.


Julie's Website




SPEAKER_01:

Well, hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of Women Like Me Stories and Business. I've got a really interesting guest today, and this is going to be a quite the conversation. Her name is Christine Windsor. And uh one of the questions I wrote down that I wanted to make sure we talked about when I was preparing for our conversation was what if healing didn't require revisiting your worst moments? And I think that that's so important uh for everybody, but especially for women, that that there's that big fear that if I talk about it or I've got to I've got to go back and relive that pain and that agony again. So this conversation is going to be very, very good. So uh Kristen has transformed decades of complex trauma and over 100. I'm doing it, disabling me. Disabling. Oh my goodness, I have a mental block. Sorry. Disabling conditions by listening to the body and restoring safety. This is a conversation that's going to be about compassion, connection, and what healing truly looks like. So, Kristen, I am so excited that you're here. Um, can you tell everybody a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, hi, thank you so much for having me. I'm really grateful for the chance to share. I think it's really beautiful to bring real life stories into everyday conversations so we can normalize the healing journey and give everyone more permission to explore their own inner work in a way where we are holding space for it within this within this world. Um, so my name is Kristen, and my healing journey started from a very young age. Um, by ages 12 to 14, there was very severe mental health battles, including um bipolar psychosis, insomnia, PTSD. The list goes on and on. And fast forward 10 years, um, the mental health diagnoses had continued to grow. Very long list. I had seen over 100 doctors kept track of every therapist and psychiatrist that I saw across multiple states, had been in 10 years of treatment, tried everything in the book. I mean, hundreds and thousands of hours in different therapies, CBT, DBT, EMDR, IFS, even neurofeedback, had tried over um 40 or over a hundred different combinations of uh 40 different meds, psychiatric meds, and was just at rock bottom. Like there was no hope for it. Like it was a literal living hell. And then things got worse. Relational trauma led to traumatic brain injuries. And my brain stopped forming new memories for five years. And when I finally healed that, I could not remember any of my life. And it was during those seven years of amnesia that I developed my own healing modality that allowed me to transform the decades of trauma that had caused all the health battles, including physical health battles like fibromyalgia and chronic oxygen deprivation, where I was on oxygen tubes every hour of every day for several years. And I was able to heal myself. And that was such a miracle because we often think that something outside of us has the answers, has the power, like everyone else must know better, right? But when we really take time to turn inward and reconnect with those lost, wounded, fragmented, traumatized parts of ourselves, when we really take the time to be present with our body and create a felt sense of safety and have compassion for those protector parts that have the really trauma patterns and to hold space to love those inner child parts or the inner children and to give them the love that they never received because of the trauma that had happened. And when we take time to go inward, we realize that the most powerful healer we have been seeking all this time, right? Maybe it's been 10 or 20 years that people have been on a healing journey, right? And it's I've seen the specialist and these doctors, and I've tried these protocols and I've done the detoxes and the fasts and I've done everything. And it's like, yes, but have you met the healer within yourself? Have you taken back your power in the everyday moments instead of constantly seeking something external that is more powerful than you? And that was a game changer for me for sure. Wow.

SPEAKER_01:

A hundred different so so you saw a hundred physicians and they all diagnosed you differently.

SPEAKER_00:

Um, most of them had confirmed the same diagnosis, but sometimes they just added another one on. Oh, um, so originally it was a bipolar type two with psychotic features, and then they added PTSD on, and then the list kind of kept growing, and they weren't really um, most of that was the therapists and psychiatrists, saw some doctors, like more traditional doctors as well. Um, but they were mainly addressing like the mental side of things and the way that the mental health care, if we can call it that, yes, the way mental health care is set up is it doesn't understand that your experience of the mind is happening through your brain and from your body. And so mental health is not addressing the neuroscience of how the brain works or like the neurophysiology of how the body works. It's like, oh, well, you have a mind, so let's like fix your mind. And it's like, okay, but where's the experience of the mind coming from? And so um, my whole path was teaching myself neuroscience, which is still shocking that that happened through seven years of amnesia. It's like I remember the neuroscience, but I don't remember all the experiences of learning it. So that's always a trip. Um, but by understanding the triune brain, the left-right brain hemispheres, attachment development, neurodevelopment, the role of implicit memories, the nervous system through the polyvagal theory, like understanding the neuroscience of psychology is what let me heal. Um and so we diagnose things based on symptoms, but if we can diagnose based on the root cause, then we can heal the root instead of managing the symptoms. And so that was really the pivot from mental health care that was not helping me at all to actually creating healing for myself.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow. So many people re believe healing uh requires reliving pain. And so, why is that belief outdated? Not only outdated, but harmful.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, yes. That's a beautiful question. So the traditional approach is you have to be able to uh retell the story of your trauma so it no longer traumatizes you. It's like, well, of course it's gonna traumatize you. It was freaking traumatic. Like, there's no getting around that. The things that happen were horrible. Um and just a brief backstory, not going into details, but just a brief backstory so listeners know where I'm coming from. Um, my trauma included sexual abuse uh as a child at age four that had been very suppressed and was the root cause of the mental health stuff that developed before high school. And then there were multiple sexual assaults, physical assaults as an adult. There was religious abuse, psychiatric abuse, um, lost everything in an apartment fire. The first time I finally had my own place in my early 20s. It was just thing after thing after thing, not to mention really unhealthy social groups, a lot of uh backstabbing, betrayals, abandonment, abuse from just the social circle of friends. Um it's just a long series of things uh over many, many years that compounds it on itself. Um, and so I was in therapy, and the approach was we bring up the trauma, we talk about it, we we stabilize your capacity to be present with it. And it's harmful to do that. It's an outdated method because every time you reactivate the networks in your brain carrying that information, you grow them. So you're making that information bigger, which makes the symptoms bigger. And so if you go in and you're like, oh man, you know, I did my therapy, but I'm feeling worse after, and they're like, oh, it's okay. That's a normal part of the process. No, no, that's a sign that what you're doing is harming you, not helping. Yeah. Um, and so I was very misled for so many years going back and the symptoms got worse. And they were like, I don't know, we're doing the healing things. And I'm like, but it's not healing me. So maybe we should try something different. Um, and it's because you grow the networks in the brain the more that you retell the story. And so, yes, to some degree, you want to be able to reclaim the narrative, but that's like the last step, not the first step. The first steps are creating safety in the body and regulating your nervous system and healing the relationship you have with those parts of you and meeting the me, meeting the needs that were not met during the trauma right here and now in the present moment. So you feel those needs met in your body on a cellular level. Um, there's all these other steps. And then when bringing up the trauma has zero neurophysiological response, then you rewrite the story. That's the last step. You don't go there until it's no longer activating in your body. Right. And it's also very harmful because it gives your power to a moment that is no longer here. And so when I'm in, when I was in those PTSD episodes, when I was in all these health battles, I mean, I had fibromyalgia and my whole body was in pain, couldn't function in daily life, was actually in a wheelchair for a short time in the in the thick of it. During all of those intensities, it felt like my power was in the past because I kept reliving trauma, right? That's how like PTSD works. There's the flashbacks, your full body reliving. You can't feel present. Yeah. And the moment that that narrative shifted, and I said, My power is right here in the present moment. I stopped giving my power to the flashbacks. I was like, oh, wait, I I thought it had power this whole time because I've been told you have to heal the trauma and it's coming up and you got to be present with it and all this stuff. And I was like, wait, I could just stop feeding that. Like it's not easy, easier said than done. Yes. But I can just stop feeding it because my power is not in that past experience. And that was really life-changing because when you're in trauma, especially if it's a relational trauma where there's been some form of abuse from another person, which is very common, unfortunately. When that happens, it feels like that other person took away your power. And that lives in your body where you keep feeling powerless in every moment of every day for weeks and months and years and decades. And before you know it, you've lived half your lifetime completely powerless. And your power feels like it's stuck back there in that moment in the past taken by that other person.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And so when you shift the narrative to say, me here now, present moment, self, me here now. This is where the power is. That starts to change everything.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow. Well, what tell me, what does safety look like in the body? Because you said that's one of the first steps, right? Yeah, yeah. So I I'm one so I'm yeah, sorry to interrupt. I'm I'm just confused about what that would look like or feel like.

SPEAKER_00:

Absolutely. So safety in the body, what it looks like and what it feels like, like practices to do it, and like how it actually feels as a result. Safety in the body feels like everything's just okay. Like it's quiet, it's peaceful, there's no thoughts bombarding you, there's no memories trying to pull you from the present moment, there's no future worries, there's no upsetting sensations, there's no overwhelming emotions, there's no disconnection from contentment in the present moment. It's like I can breathe again, is the biggest feeling when you finally feel safety in your body is I can breathe again. I feel like myself again. I feel like I can enjoy the simple pleasures of life. I feel like existing in the world is a good place to be and not a scary, threatening place to be. I feel like I can go outside and expect something good to happen. Because part of what happens is there's this constant expectation of what's going to happen next based on the trauma. So the trauma projects it's gonna be something that resembles a traumatic experience. And so there's always this like um, you're always braced and on guard when that trauma's in the body. And so when you finally feel that safety, it's like stepping into the world and just expecting something good. And every little thing starts to feel good again. The the breeze on your face, the sun on your skin, the birds singing, everything starts to feel good. And so the process of getting there is um a kind of key word in the healing space is nervous system regulation. So that one kind of comes in. Uh, nervous system regulation is definitely a part of it. Uh, reconnecting the mind and the body is a big part of it, just being present and having the mind constantly take notice of what the body's feeling. And so um, there was a time because I had a 100% mind-body disconnect where the body was reliving trauma, the mind had like 15 trains of fragmented thoughts, and neither one of them knew what the other was doing, and neither one of them could be present. And so it's just this deeply fragmented inner world. And so, in the thick of reconnecting it, the daily practice was um basically a mindfulness practice, but kind of just volume turned up on the mindfulness. Um, and it was to mentally narrate what the body was experiencing to try and catch a glimpse of presence because it was so hard to do that. And so when eating, it was I am picking up the spoon, I am stirring the spoon, I see the milk in my cereal turning, I am lifting the spoon to my mouth. I can just narrating every sensation because they were so far apart. The second that I stopped narrating, I had no idea what my body was even doing anymore. There was so much dissociation. Um, a lot of safety in the body practices for me personally had to do with giving myself to nature and just like surrendering to Mother Earth. Um, so many practices of uh mindfulness walks or just being in fields, dancing in fields. Uh, one practice I had a pet rabbit at the time, his name was a goudakit, a goudakit, and I would lay in a pen with him and I would set a timer for two hours, and I would just stay there deep breathing and meditating and practicing presence. I feel the grass underneath my hands, I feel the bunny hopping on my back, I feel the sun on my face, repeating, repeating, repeating anything to practice presence because presence was so far away from where I was. Um, the mindfulness walks, the just being present in nature, this the stopping to smell the flowers, like the little things to just let your body say everything's just perfectly okay right now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow. It's interesting because um I believe that a lot of our sicknesses, if not all of our sicknesses, comes from some sort of emotions or and um and fibromyalgia. It's like we never really heard about it before. And then all of a sudden, I can't remember how many years ago it sort of blasted out, and now, you know, my sister's got it, and um, all sorts of people have it. And I actually um went to the doctor with my sister, and I asked the doctor uh about it, and he said, Well, yeah, it's an emotional disorder, and but you know, medication isn't helping, right? It's just covering it up, yeah. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it's um yeah, it's tough. It's it's tough. Um, so I know you we talked about neuroscience, but what's one neur nervous system truth everyone should understand, but rarely does?

SPEAKER_00:

I love that question. And I will bring that back to the fibromyalgia. So um, something that we need to understand about the nervous system is what's telling it how to self-regulate and how that state of regulation affects so many different things in the body. It's not just, oh yeah, my nervous system dysregulated, but oh, all my other systems are doing totally fine. Like that's not how it works, right? Um, so first, what is telling the nervous system how to self-regulate? And finding this out was like it, it broke the lock to healing the impossible, right? Like figuring this out changed my life. And it is a thing I will dance on the rooftops and let everybody know until the day I die. Um, so we think, okay, I need to just regulate my nervous system, but if you're just regulating your nervous system through nervous system regulation practices, you're not necessarily reteaching it how to self-regulate. The thing that tells it how to self-regulate is coming from implicit memories, which are unconscious memories. So we have conscious memories. Those are like, you know, you got your shopping list at the grocery store, you've got your autobiographical story of I went to the zoo and pet a giraffe last week, you know. But those are a very small fraction of our memories. The majority of our memories are implicit and they are emotional memories, which is what you touched on, the unprocessed emotions at the root of a lot of dis-ease in the body, and procedural memories, which are uh motor skills and body responses and um uh just like body movement patterns, basically. So if someone is sitting and they're super slouched in, that's the pattern that tells the body to have that posture is coming from a procedural memory. It's not just the body slouching, right? Like that's the summary of the effect. But what's happening before that is a procedural memory being activated and telling the body what posture to be in. And so those unconscious memories, the implicit memories, are what tell the nervous system, hey, this is how to regulate your brainwaves, this is how to beat your heart, this is the rate that you should be breathing at. Like this is the okay, release these neurochemicals. Like the protocols that tell it to do all that is coming from the implicit memories. So we can regulate the nervous system all day, every day, but if we're not actively teaching it a new way to self-regulate by rewiring the unconscious memories, it's not going to create the lasting change that people are craving. And that's what my work specializes in is rewiring those implicit memories without revisiting the past experiences that first created them by working with the body in the present moment. And then on the flip side of that is understanding how the nervous system affects all of the systems. The nervous system affects brainwave regulation, which is like the miles per hour that your mind is driving. So if someone's dissociating a lot and they kind of feel like they're walking through a dream all of the time, and it's hard to engage in the outer world because they're just kind of lost in the shadows of the inner world, and they're maybe in a depressive state where they're just kind of feeling that brain fog or just feeling cognitively hard. It's slow, it's hard to concentrate and focus. The brain waves are too slow, too slow a mile per hour. And that's the nervous system dysregulating the brain waves. If the brain waves are too fast and you're speeding down the highway in your mind, you might get the racing thoughts, the intrusive thoughts, the mania that comes with bipolar. And it's hard to function on the flip side because everything's just everywhere all of the time. And there's a lot of anxiety involved in that. And then there's a lot of unhealthy coping patterns like substance abuse, self-harm, eating disorders, because you're trying to regulate it. The heart rate, your breath rate, the neurochemicals, your hormones, neurotransmitters, the um the serotonin that lets you feel happy, the oxytocin lets you feel connected with people, the dopamine that lets you feel rewarded and accomplished and driven to get tasks done. Like all of these things are coming from the nervous system. Um, digestion, and so the capacity for the body to take food and turn it into energy and have good gut health. All those things are affected. So you see a lot of illnesses where there's um fibromyalgia is one example, brain fog, fatigue, uh, chronic pain, and just nothing helps it, right? It just feels so impossible. That stems from this chronic dysregulation because of the unprocessed implicit memories from trauma that doesn't need to go into vast traumas to heal, but you can rewire it in the present moment. And so many other um mental illnesses, physical illnesses that are coming up, and they're like, okay, let's treat the gut issues, let's treat the digestion, let's treat the insomnia, let's treat the symptoms, let's manage the symptoms. And it's like, well, you could look at the root cause, rewire that, and then everything else is going to fix itself permanently. So that's a much better route to go and when given the opportunity.

SPEAKER_01:

So tell me about what happens when someone comes to you.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. The the journey when I work with a client, the first thing we do is create a vision that can pull you towards your deepest desires. And this is such a game changer because most people come in and they're like, this heavy stuff, right? I need to heal this trauma and this abuse and these intrusive thoughts. And like it's very, very heavy. It's like, well, why do you why do you want to heal? Well, so this heavy stuff isn't so heavy. Well, why do you really want to heal? Do you want to feel more peace? Oh, yeah, that sounds nice. Do you want to feel more joy, aliveness in your body, more pleasure and sadness? Oh, yeah, that feels great. And suddenly you go from, I'm so dragged down by the trauma to, oh, I'm so alive in possibility. And that shifts you from the trauma state of dysregulated survival to I am more regulated, more grounded, more present, more optimistic, more here, more focused on what can be. You're actually re-engaging parts of the brain that shut down because of trauma. When there's the trauma, you can't look forward and see something good that's possible. It just part of the brain isn't there. Um, so the first step is creating that vision of why this matters to you. And that vision is so important too, because you have to come back to a why when it gets tough, because it does get tough. Like I'm not gonna lie. Yeah, it gets really tough. Been there many times, over and over. But when you remember the why, instead of pushing yourself to show up for the healing and the work, you're pulling yourself towards something that's beautiful and worth fighting for. And that energy of showing up is so different, and then it makes the practices 10 times more effective just because of the energy you're showing up in. So the vision is the very first step. And then the second step is to really understand each layer of the inner world. And this is where you start to get to the root cause using neuroscience and not just treat the surface symptoms. And so, um, for example, a client came and was talking about intrusive thoughts. And I showed her on a diagram that I developed that your awareness is down here. It's a teeny tiny line. You only know a small fraction of what's going on in you, and then there's all these other layers going on deeper than your awareness. And then the next layer that is closest to the mind is that mental layer where the thoughts are. But if you go deeper, then there's the emotional layer that has the unprocessed emotional trauma and unmet emotional needs. And then the next layer is the somatic layer where there's the sensations of the body, which is where sensations from unprocessed trauma live. And then the next layer is the nervous system where those patterns of dysregulation and the trauma responses live. So, yes, there's intrusive thoughts, but it's coming because protector parts are trying to shield you from all the stuff deeper within. So we can heal the intrusive thoughts all day, every day, but until we create presence with the sensations in the body, regulation and safety in the nervous system, and start tending to those unmet emotional needs, nothing else will actually heal the intrusive thoughts for good. So it's really important to work with all the layers of the inner world and not just one. Um, because you'll see that a lot. Like the somatic practitioners are all just sensations and presence and sometimes it can be a little too much. You actually end up re-traumatizing your body because you're just trying to bring up more sensations. And it's like, wait, you're good. Like there's other parts of you to connect with. And then people who teach mindset kind of miss the somatic piece entirely. So we really want to work with all the different layers. Yeah. Um, and and then we and then I teach personalized practices to connect with each layer and start creating healing at the root cause using my own uh parts work, somatic practices, and mirror techniques. Wow.

SPEAKER_01:

I think it's so interesting the way you talk about how trauma will actually cause parts of our brains to shut down, yeah, and to stop working. And so it's no wonder that people have such difficulty um healing from things. And I don't even know if healing is a word because I think most of our society just says, here's a pill, um, you know, uh um, yeah. And it's uh it's interesting the way you talk about the mind. I didn't, I haven't really thought of it like that before. And uh, so I'm learning some stuff, Kristen. I'm learning some stuff.

SPEAKER_00:

I love it at my heart.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So um when you're introducing, oh, wait a minute, let me ask you about this one. So you've developed more than 80 embodied healing practices. So, what does embodied really mean in this context?

SPEAKER_00:

I love that question. So, a lot of times we create surface level healing, and that's where usually where you're working from the mind and you're kind of focused on experience and trying to change the way you're experiencing life. Um, and it creates temporary results, is just generally what happens. And so the difference between that versus embodied healing is you're working with the deeper layers of the body, not just from the mind, and you're creating transformation through your internal states. You're not trying to change how you experience the world, you're completely going inward and really taking this radical responsibility for um how you're thinking, how you're feeling, what you're choosing. Like it's all coming from within. Um, and so one example is a lot of traditional approaches will say to start recognizing your triggers. And then, you know, if something comes up, you're like, okay, well, I'm noticing this is a trauma trigger. But then you kind of give trauma the blame. You're like, okay, well, it's a trauma trigger, so I don't have to take responsibility for it. And maybe you have coping tools and and and you kind of cope with the symptoms of it and like that's the win. And not to dismiss that because that is important in the earlier stages when you're really just trying to get by and you're just at that very first step in healing. Like that's allowed to be a step in the process, but not to be mistaken for true healing. That's not true healing. That is coping and managing, and that is a gateway towards healing. Um, but taking radical responsibility and saying, yes, I'm extremely triggered, but it has nothing to do with what's triggering outside of me and everything to do with the way I am responding to myself in the present moment and my relationship and presence with myself is where my power is. And to really turn inward and have it every moment be an opportunity. Another thing that's different about embodied healing is that it becomes a lifestyle. It's not just a practice you show up for because you have to, and you do your 15 minutes and then you're done. It's this integrated lifestyle. And the goal of it is it's so enjoyable that you want to show up for it. Like I remember being in the thick of healing, and I'm talking the worst episodes of I mean, panic attacks that lasted two hours, genuinely thought I was having a heart attack, oxygen deprivation from the fold stress response, a dorsal vagal collapse. I literally could not function. It was cerebral hypoxia about um my brain was absorbing 92% of oxygen, where 98 to 100% is healthy, and anything below 95 is like go to the ER for a normal human. Um, just the worst of things. And I felt so good showing up for healing that the state of disappointment and not showing up for healing felt worse than the episodes themselves. Like it was, it felt so rewarding and so joyful and so nourishing, so fulfilling. And that feeling was starting to rewire the brain because a lot um, so we've got uh the main neuro uh chemicals that I mentioned the serotonin, the oxytocin, the dopamine, those are some of the main, main ones. And you start to rewire them. And so instead of the brain and body saying, I'm depleted, I can't feel happy, I can't feel connected, I can't feel motivated or driven or rewarded by what I do, right? That's like the total shutdown, or the unhealthy coping, where I feel connection by, you know, drinking a whole lot of alcohol, or I feel this by doing this really unhealthy coping mechanism. Instead of that being the automatic, it's I feel connection by spending time with myself in my embodied healing practices. I feel happy and blissful by creating this safe, sacred space for myself and going through this process with me. I feel this dopamine rush where I'm like, I did it. Oh, it was impossible for me to show up and I did it, and I feel so rewarded by it. And then you kind of shift the addictive patterns to being addicted to your own power in presence. And then that embodied healing becomes an integrated lifestyle. So you have the tools in any moment rather than, oh, let me write that down. I need to wait for my next session because I'm resource, I'm sourcing my power from other people, right? Um, which is what was happening for me when I was in 10 years of therapy. It was in any moment something came up, and I was like, Well, I don't know what to do. Let me write it down. My therapist will help me next week, you know. But how do you navigate the everyday moments? Um, and so that's one big difference with embodied healing from the the more traditional approaches that might not create the same depth of transformation.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and I and I really love that explanation because in essence it's saying, you know, you you can't keep blaming. You you have to just because that's never going to help you. So you take responsibility for how you feel rather than saying, well, you make me feel this way. Exactly. You know, it's a little more complicated, of course, than that, but but you know, but in essence, I think that that's I think it's really important. Um, many people feel stuck in their healing cycles. So how do you help a client know when healing is actually complete? I love it. Or is it ever complete?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, that's a great question. Um, there's always different depths and and layers and stages, and a lot of times you complete one chapter to begin a new one. Um, I would say with confidence that my healing journey is complete, which is something that my past self never could have imagined. But it's been a very long journey. So it doesn't just happen overnight by any means. Um, it was a it was a very long process. But in the process of healing, you start to notice when the uh the negative things that you've been experiencing as normal, intense things every day start to happen less and they're less intense and they last a little um not as long, right? The intensity, duration, and frequency of the unwanted pattern starts to decrease. And that's when you start to say, I'm healing, I'm healed, I'm whole. I'm healing, I'm healed, I'm whole. And then when those the pleasure points, that dream, that desire, that vision starts to grow and get bigger. Maybe you wake up with a little more peace. Maybe you wake up with a little more aliveness and joy. Maybe you go to bed feeling very safe in your body. Maybe you're able to eat food and be like, wow, I remember every moment because I didn't dissociate or distract myself. It's really found in the little things. Um, so I call them micro shifts. And anytime a client experiences a micro shift, I'm like, celebrate it, journal it, throw a party, put on damn music. Like we are blowing this up to a NASA celebration. Because a lot of people think, well, when I'm healed, everything's just suddenly perfect. It's like, no, it's your healing is compiled of a million micro shifts. And that's really what a million little tiny micro shifts. And so if you celebrate every little micro shift like it is the hugest deal, it teaches your adult self that you have power in your healing and it clicks that dopamine and says, Well, it feels good. I'm gonna do it more, right? Yeah, and then you're empowered to keep showing up, and then it teaches your protector parts that it is safe to trust letting go of the trauma patterns because protector parts know safety by reinforcing the trauma patterns. That's how they've survived. So by celebrating micro shift, micro shifts and the healing, you're like here, protector parts. Here is the evidence that you are safe to trust that healing is happening and it's a good thing. And you can let go of the patterns that you've been holding on to all this time. And celebrating the micro shifts shows the inner child that their needs get to be met because for a very long time they've most likely been suppressed or hiding, and their needs have been kind of masked beneath a lot of the pain that has been happening. And so to celebrate the micro shifts, say, inner child, I am one step closer to building a bridge so I can fully reconnect with you and give you all the love that you've been needing all this time. Oh, that's so beautiful.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, that's so good. Okay, so for someone listening who feels exhausted by trying to fix themselves, what would you want them to hear right now?

SPEAKER_00:

That's a beautiful question. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being exactly the miracle that you are. If you look at a flower and you see the miracle that it is, it's not wrong for being a different color than your favorite color, right? For example, it's not wrong for having one or two more or less petals than the flower next to it. And so the more that you can see the miracle of being alive, and that's it, that's the criteria for being a miracle, right? Like we like we think being a miracle is achieving this and looking like this. If you know that being alive is a miracle, if you knew the millions of miracles happening in your body, just so you can exist to hear what I'm saying right now, then you could celebrate the miracle that you are. There's nothing to fix. There is only more of your authentic essence to be rediscovered. And the parts of you that feel the need to be fixed, feel the need to change because something's broken and something's wrong, those are the traumatized, fragmented, wounded parts of yourself that felt separate from love. And in order to heal, nothing needs to be fixed. Those parts just need to be reconnected with the love that they have been craving. And that can only happen from within yourself. So the moment that you give that part of you love instead of judgment or criticism or pushing them away or distracting yourself because it's too uncomfortable to be present with them. The second that you just breathe and let yourself be present in your body and show that part of you, hey, I'm so sorry that you're feeling that you're broken right now. I'm so sorry that you've been carrying that story all of this time. That story was never yours to carry. That story is not the truth of your identity. It is not the truth of your worth, it is not the truth of your potential. I am so sorry that I have been trying to do all this healing to fix and change things when you are just screaming for love. How can I show you love right here, right now, in the quiet and safety of your bedroom? Or when you have five minutes in the bathroom? It doesn't have to be a big mountaintop, a full-day retreat. It can happen in the micro moments where you just say, What do you need right now? Do you need do you need to spend an extra two minutes in the shower just to have a second to breathe to yourself? Do you need to take your food outside so you can breathe fresh air while you're eating? What how can I show you love through presence right now? And the more that you can do that, you're basically saying, Oh, hi, messages of how broken I am. You don't control me anymore. Ta-da! And you redirect and say, Oh, hi, parts of me. You were here all along and I just didn't see you because there was so much noise going on.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Wow. Yes. Good message for anybody out there that uh that thinks that they need to fix themselves. So, how has stepping into you dar into your dharma changed the way you view trauma? So, not as a wound, but as a doorway?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, that is a powerful question. Um, it's funny because a lot of times people are like, you know, you spent your whole life in trauma and then like practically 10 years freaking healing it. Like, wouldn't you want to get as far away from it as possible? And the farther I would try to get from anything related with trauma healing, the more pointless it all felt. It's like, wait a second, no, I just went through all that and I get to like do something with it. And then comparison, the more that I show up for opportunities like this, um, I'm completing my I'm in the final steps of completing my book manuscript that shares my 80 practices for embodied healing and a new way to understand 25 parts of personality through neuroscience, um, and doing my client sessions and sharing my courses and sharing my content. I just made a new 15 minute video about my story that you had seen and my Instagram content, and there's all of it. I feel an aliveness that I never could have felt if I hadn't gone through the journey that I went through. And that's such a powerful reminder because there are days, there are still days where I can get down and say, Oh man, you know, why me? Why'd I have to go through that? Right. And then I'm like, hey, victim mindset, we are not old friends. You are not welcome here. And then, of course, I shift back, but I realize even if I had, let's say I had been born and Never gone through the childhood sexual abuse. I'd never had the mental health battles in high school. I'd never ended up in the situations where there's more sexual and physical assaults and you know losing my belongings in an apartment fire and just really, really horrible situations. Let's say I'd never been in mental health treatment and psychiatric treatment. I would have gone through this like normal, fairly boring, healthy life and just been like in a very normal, okayness career. And yes, it would have been good. But because I have known such depths of intensity, of darkness and pain and shadow and just all of the chaos, the heights of purpose and fulfillment get to be so much richer and so much sweeter. And I think we all have that power to rewrite our greatest challenges, our darkest moments into a story we can be so proud of, to say, I did that. It wasn't just a storybook. I was neatly handed by life. It was a storybook where I had to fight for the pen and I had to shred some pages and I had to write in the middle of storms going on around me, right? And and to say that, you know, this is a journey that I created and I got to be the author of. And it's such an original path. It it never could have been sculpted without some kind of hero's journey, if you will. Um so I'm really, I'm really, really grateful to have the chance to step into a life of greater fulfillment and aliveness and self-expression than I otherwise would have known if I hadn't gone through those challenges.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

I I think that um that uh it gives us wisdom. Yeah. You know, and uh and then hopefully we can help others that are going through it. Yeah. Well, I want to let everyone know that all of Kirsten's information is going to be in the show notes. So you will know how to reach out to her. You want to snoop around on her website, see what she's got going on, or you want to actually speak to her, or or um, yeah, whatever you need. If you're feeling, especially if you're feeling that um you can't fix yourself because this girl can help you, I can tell. So yeah, so all the information will be there so that you can you can reach out to her. And Kirsten, when that book is done, I would love you to come back and with your book and and let's chat about it and uh and let everybody know that it's available. So so please keep me keep me in the loop. Well, I have learned so much. I just normally I do a fair amount of chatting, but I was just like taken with everything you were saying, and I found it to be very uh refreshing, yeah. Yeah, because it's not the same old, same old, and and uh and I resonated with quite a bit that of what you were saying. So thank you so much for being here and sharing. I appreciate it. So what would you like to leave our our our uh listeners with?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, absolutely. So what would you like to tell them? Three words are all you need to focus on to move forward love, awareness, and presence. And when you can make that your daily ritual, it doesn't even have to look like any one thing. But if you say, I am awareness, I am the observer of what's happening, I am not defined by what I'm experiencing, I am just the the witness of it, the observer of it. And love, how can you show love to those parts of you who are going through the experience? And presence. How can you practice presence with your body when your mind might be trying to go somewhere very different that's not here with your body? So love, awareness, and presence are really the three tools, and you can make it look like whatever fits who you are and where you're at, but that will carry you through. And I have a free 20-minute guided mirror practice you can get on my website. It's an audio guide. You can download it, um, use it once a week, a couple of times a week, however, works best for you, but it's very, very powerful, reconnects mind and body, regulates the nervous system, nurtures your adult self and inner child, harmonizes masculine, feminine energies. I mean, it does all the things. Wow. Very, very beautiful, powerful journey. And it's just a little tiny sampling taste test of the work that I do. Um, and then I have lots of other goodies. You can send me a message on Instagram. Um, you can check out that 15-minute video that I have for free, sharing my story on my website. Um, lots of goodies. So, yeah, definitely stay tuned. And if you're interested in working with me, I do have capacity to take on uh hold space for one-on-one clients. And there's several different ways that you can uh do that. And so we can find the first perfect, perfect package uh for the level of support that you're looking for. So I would love to connect and explore possibilities with you.

SPEAKER_01:

Perfect. Well, I'm going to download that meditation. Yay! I'm totally gonna download that. Uh that sounds good. I I would love to go through it and see what comes up. So that's perfect. Wow. Well, I don't really want to end, but we have to. So thank you so much for doing this. I I appreciate it a lot, and um, and I know that um your work and just even what you've what you've been able to do here is going to be helpful. It's helped me, it's made me think. Oh, oh, got me thinking, and that's the key. We got to get us thinking and thinking in a different direction. So I I appreciate that so much. I really do. Well, everybody, as sad as it is to to say goodbye, I'm going to have to do it because we are we're running out of time. So thank you all for being here. I appreciate it. All of Kirsten's information is going to be in the show notes. And do not hesitate to reach out to her. And we will see you next time on the next episode of Women Like Me Stories in Business. Bye, everybody. Bye.