Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Licensed psychologist Dr. Jen McWaters, and wellness coach Kaitlin Reed, join forces to help women create an abundant life through holistic wellness practices, mindset shifts, and fostering a healthy relationship with food and their bodies. Join us as we take a deep dive and uncover the raw truth about mental health, nutrition, fitness, and beyond, offering insights and strategies for transformative growth.
Dr. Jen McWaters is a licensed psychologist and a holistic wellness coach for women. She is a Certified Integrative Mental Health Professional and is passionate about helping high-achieving women overcome their mental blocks, find freedom from anxiety, and create an abundant life inside and out. Find out more about her work at: awakeningholistichealth.com
Kaitlin Reed is a fitness, nutrition, and mental wellness coach on a mission to help women build the body and life they deserve and desire. She has BAs in Health Promotion and Wellness & Fitness Management, MA in Performance Psychology, currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Health Psychology. Her goal is to help women finally understand the science and strategy of nutrition and exercise so they can achieve their goals and live an empowered life. Head over to kaitlinreedwellness.com to learn more.
DISCLAIMER: This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Please consult with your personal physician if you have any personal medical questions.
Welcome to the Counter Culture Health podcast. I'm doctor Jen McWaters. And I'm coach Kaitlin Reed. We're here to help high achieving women overcome mental blocks, find freedom from anxiety, create an abundant life, and build the body and life that they deserve and desire.
Kaitlin:In this weekly podcast, we'll uncover the raw truth about mental health, nutrition, fitness, and beyond. Let's get to it.
Jen:Hey, guys. Welcome back to Counter Culture Health.
Jen:We are so excited today to have a guest with us, doctor Amber. Doctor Amber is a licensed clinical psychologist and holistic healing coach. She specializes in empowering purpose driven leaders in recognizing and healing unconscious generational patterns within themselves that are impacting their relationship with self, the people they love, and their relationship with their creator. Doctor Amber utilizes evidence based psychological practices combined with faith and spirituality to facilitate healing on a mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual level. Doctor Amber has been in practice in the psychological field for over a decade and is committed to guiding leaders in their journey of creating fulfilling, loving relationships in a life of health, wellness, and God given purpose.
Jen:Doctor Amber, welcome. We are so happy to have you.
Dr. Amber:Hi, ladies. Thank you so much. I'm very happy to
Jen:be here. This is such a needed topic. Although, I know it might feel heavy, I think, at times as we've talked today, but so necessary. So we are gonna go into the topic of generational trauma, understanding what that is, how it impacts our life in a holistic sense, and also weaving in conversation about relationships, loving difficult people, how to work through healing, and weaving that all in with our relationship with God. So I'm so happy to
Dr. Amber:hear your little yes.
Jen:So why don't you get us started? If you want to, you know, share anything else about yourself, please feel free to. And then I'd love to know more about how you would define generational trauma, and how would you know if you are going through that or have suffered from that?
Dr. Amber:Yeah. That's it's so relevant to what's going on today. I think there's been such awakening up in our culture of people recognizing how important mental health is and how impacted the generations have been around mental health because it was never prioritized in our history. So, for me, that definitely happened. I started waking up in 2014 when essentially my life systematically started falling apart.
Dr. Amber:I actually that's, I think, when I met you, Jen. Lucky you. I, I was, you know, in my postdoctoral fellowship, I was working at a hospital. I was in an eight and a half year relationship. We're planning getting married.
Dr. Amber:We lived in San Diego. I had a private practice. I mean, by all means, I felt really successful and I was very happy. And life, you know, just systematically, that eight and a half year relationship ended very traumatically and and kind of over a long period. Shortly after that, the cat we had together died.
Dr. Amber:My car broke down. I got diagnosed with this rare blood disorder. And then after that, my father passed away. I had walked into the skilled nursing facility he was in, and I saw him dead on the floor. And all those things together really just, it shook me to my core, it shook my identity.
Dr. Amber:And when you lose so many things at once, you really start asking yourself the bigger questions of, like, why am I here? What is my purpose? You know, who who am I? And it's really easy to go into a place of, you know, feeling sorry for yourself, of victimhood, of why me? Why is this happening to me?
Dr. Amber:And, of course, I did that for a small amount of time, but it really shifted, and it shifted into looking at, you know, how did I get here? How did I contribute to these things happening in my life? My health isn't what I want it to be. My relationship ended very poorly. You know, I lost, like, my my family member, and I had to look and say, like, how did I end up here?
Dr. Amber:And that was really the beginning of my discovery just of how generational trauma impacts us and how it really becomes our responsibility to change that. And so to answer your question, Jen, generational trauma, if you if you look back in your family line, you know, your parents, your grandparents, your great grandparents, they've most likely experienced a trauma or multiple traumas. And when we have trauma in our family line, if those family members haven't dealt with the trauma, they haven't healed from the trauma, it's still what we call unresolved, then the emotions of that trauma and then the coping strategies of it, right, how they adapted to because trauma changes the brain, It changes how we see the world. It changes how we interact in relationships. It changes how we deal with our emotions.
Dr. Amber:And so all of that fallout, if that's not dealt with, it gets passed down to the next generation. And then it becomes the next generation is now holding that trauma. Maybe it's an abuse. Maybe it's abandonment that runs through the family. Maybe it's infidelity or addiction or divorce.
Dr. Amber:But, essentially, that generational trauma gets passed until there's someone that says it ends with me. And that was my awakening beginning in 2014 was I looked at my family, and I looked at myself. And I realized in my twenties and in my early thirties, I was perpetuating things that I had seen my parents do. I was living out patterns that were in my family that I didn't even realize I was doing. It was all unconscious.
Dr. Amber:And so as painful as that time was, it was one of the biggest blessings of my life because it woke me up to, wow, I have way more power in this life to, take charge of how I'm showing up, how I'm thinking about things, how I'm handling my emotions, how I'm showing up in relationships, how I take care of my body. Right? And it just really sent me on this long journey of healing in every in every way, and it's been very powerful. But, yeah, essentially and I call it cycle breaking. Essentially, somebody in the family has to decide it stops with me.
Dr. Amber:I'm not going to do this. I'm not gonna pass on this addiction. I'm not gonna pass on this controlling behavior. Whatever it is. Right?
Dr. Amber:Because there's there's so many different options of things that we could potentially deal with. So, yeah, that was just a little bit of how I came to realize that generational trauma is very real, and we have responsibility in ending it.
Jen:I I love that you shared some examples. So that was part of my question is, I think the word trauma gets thrown around a lot these days. And, like, what are what kinds of of things are we talking about? So as you mentioned, you talk about the the typical things we think about like abuse or even addiction, but also you talked about maybe there's more of like a thematic thing happening, whether that's divorce or abandonment or neglect. Could be so many different things.
Dr. Amber:Yeah. Well, let's talk about the different kinds of trauma. So there's like an isolated traumatic event. You get into a life changing near death car accident. Right?
Dr. Amber:Or there's your whole, you know, fire burns down your entire home and and hurts a family member or kills someone. That's a traumatic event. Then there's what we call chronic trauma, where chronic trauma is perhaps you were in you know, you had a parent or you had a spouse who was emotionally abusive and it was going on for years. Right? And then there's complex trauma.
Dr. Amber:Complex trauma is perhaps you grew up and you experienced sexual abuse and emotional abuse and neglect and there was a divorce. Right? So there it's multifaceted. So, it really like and your level of healing will really depend upon, you know, was this trauma that was sustained over time for long periods? Was this an isolated event?
Dr. Amber:Because that's gonna really dictate the course of your healing and how much healing and the time and effort that you put into this, based on that. So, and to answer to give you more examples, Jen, it shows up in sneaky ways because we have adaptive strategies that we use to deal with deal with the experiences of trauma. So for example, you know, people pleasing can be a trauma response. If we were criticized or if we were put in the middle of things, if there was heavy conflict in our family, people pleasing is a response to try and, you know, not cause problems, not cause conflict, to be a peacemaker. Right?
Dr. Amber:Or conversely, if you find yourself, anxious a lot and needing control of things, That's also can be a trauma response to feeling out of control, feeling helpless at different points in your life. So, there's lots of different, like, coping strategies that people develop that actually will those will too get passed down in the family, which can create more sort of chronic traumatic experiences of, that that just keep ongoing, and it's it seems like it's normal in the family, when in fact it's really kind of, like, dysfunctional coping from trauma that never got healed in the past, if that makes sense.
Kaitlin:Okay. Doctor Amber, can you walk us through or or maybe explain to us how you went about like, what was your healing journey? How did you go about healing generational trauma? And, you know, how can other peoples do other people do the same?
Dr. Amber:Yeah. It's a great question. And it it like, the word that you use is journey, and it is exactly that. As I was mentioning before with different types of trauma that we experience whether it's like a single episode or continual trauma or complex trauma. In my case, it was complex trauma, chronic trauma.
Dr. Amber:This is something, honestly, that that can take years years to heal. And so it's it's about an evolution of healing, And you have to remember that, trauma impacts the brain. It impacts the body. It impacts how we see the world mentally. It impacts our emotions.
Dr. Amber:It impacts our relationships and how we show up. It impacts our sexual functioning. So when you think about it like that, healing becomes a journey because you're actually healing, like, multidimensional all facets of you. So what I would honestly say what has been the biggest game changer for me and what I what I do with my clients is number 1, I believe the most important thing for healing generational trauma and and trauma of any kind is having a relationship with God. Because God has many names and one of them is Jehovah Rapha, I am healer.
Dr. Amber:So if we think about all the healing modalities that are out there and there's a lot, you know, there's hundreds of therapies on their own, but then there's eastern healing modalities and there's just so much coming through that that people are sharing. But, you know, God is the ultimate healer and he has your journey of healing. He has, he knows what needs to be healed inside of you far more than any person does. And so the biggest thing that I did, and actually Jen, was a big part of this, is I got saved in 2014. Jen took me to The Rock Church in San Diego, And I gave my life to the Lord.
Dr. Amber:I got baptized shortly thereafter. And it really became about developing a relationship with Jesus. And through that relationship, he began transforming my life. He began renewing my mind. The scripture talks about renewing your mind.
Dr. Amber:The way that I saw myself, my lifestyle, so going from excessive partying and promiscuity. I remember the first thing the Lord did was he told me to get rid of my club dresses. He told me to to donate. Well, no, he didn't tell me donate them. He told me to give them away.
Dr. Amber:And I remember I was so upset about that. I've spent a lot of money on these advanced Vegas dresses and I pride myself on my, you know, because American culture, beauty, like women's beauty and like money and fame and all these things. This is what matters in our culture. This is what the world tells you is important. And so for me, you know, I was focused on how I looked.
Dr. Amber:I was focused on my performance and my success. And the Lord was like, I want you to shed that. And so it's a shedding journey of shedding your habits, valuing yourself. You know, I really had to learn to see myself as worthy that my body is a temple that the Lord gave me. Then it was about, you know, thinking help, like, what were my thoughts?
Dr. Amber:And this was a big where I started working with mentors and coaches and therapists. And that would be the second part that I would say on your healing journey is number 1, your relationship with God to guide your journey. But number 2, is to seek professional help. You know, there's trauma therapies out there, EMDR, and doing parts work, and cognitive processing therapy. It's so important to recognize that trauma impacts all these areas.
Dr. Amber:So I had to look at the way that I thought about myself. I had to look at the way that I thought about, relationships. For example, I didn't trust men. You know, I just inherently didn't trust them. But at the same time, I wanted a relationship with a man.
Dr. Amber:And so because I didn't trust them, I was attracting in men who were largely emotionally unavailable, fear of commitment. They were fun to party with, but they weren't the the kind of men that we're going to really, like, I could build a life with. I didn't understand that that had been something that was passed down, in my family of not knowing how to trust in a man, to attract in a trustworthy, type of guy. So, changing that, changing how I manage my emotions. Right?
Dr. Amber:I come from a, you know, my family was they'd have very reactive moments. And then after those reactive moments, it's like nothing ever happened. There was no working through. There was no resolving conflict. And so learning how to deal with your emotions, learning how to communicate when you're upset versus shutting down or yelling or name calling.
Dr. Amber:Right? These are fundamentals that we don't get taught in society. Emotional intelligence and communication and emotion regulation, These are all things that need to be taught in our school systems. And they're not. It's relying upon the family.
Dr. Amber:And unfortunately, if you look back in your family line, many of our families didn't know how to communicate in a healthy way. They just didn't communicate or they waited so long until they erupted. So looking at how I manage my emotions and then, you know, you start to see and I'm sure a lot of your listeners know this that if your nervous system is dysregulated that then can create disease in the body. And then, you know, healing your body, healing your nervous system, looking at the nutrition that you're taking in, looking at the products that you're using. I mean, when I tell you my entire life has changed from head to toe because I had to learn healthy ways of thinking, of taking care of myself, of being when I thought I was perfectly fine, I was just kinda doing what the world tells you to do, which is work really hard, play really hard, be successful, look good.
Dr. Amber:And none of that was making me healthy. All of that was making me burnt out and sick and my relationships weren't what I wanted them to be And so there's been like just, just such a journey. And that's really what I help my clients do is to break those generational in a healthy way whether you learned it or not because so many people didn't. They just didn't learn how to show up in healthy ways. So, yeah, that's a big piece of it.
Dr. Amber:I have a question. Oh.
Jen:Go ahead. You go.
Kaitlin:Well well, what would you say to someone that is they're aware that, you know, things are not healthy. They're not regulated. Things are not going well, but the fear of change is stronger. So they'd rather stay, you know, in this, this dysfunctional is what's normal and comfortable and that's what's keeping them from the unknown. The other side.
Kaitlin:What would you say to someone that's thought in making that that jump or that leap to healing?
Dr. Amber:Well, I wanna remind everyone that you can't control anybody right you cannot and that's a big lesson. We have to learn as human beings is that we can want change for people, but we ultimately cannot control them. And there is such a thing as a comfort zone. There is such a thing as being afraid to step out of that comfort zone because we are we are it's it's so familiar what we have and the fear of change, the fear because it's really the fear of loss. You know, when people are afraid of change, they're really afraid of losing something, whether it's a connection.
Dr. Amber:It's usually a relationship or an attachment because we are built. We are designed by God as beings that are attached. We cannot survive if we are not attached in some form to someone else. And so losing that attachment, you know, I hear so many people I work with entrepreneurs and, you know, leaders and a big part of their fear is leaving behind, you know, that their success, they're gonna leave behind the friends and the family, because of the of stepping out and being successful or making changes, right? And so it's very you have to come face to face with your fear of loss, and you have to recognize that change is inevitable.
Dr. Amber:It's a part of our life. And we are going to, at some point, to have something that we really want, to have a better life, to have, what we really desire. We're going to have to lose things, and that is a part of it. We don't move on, we don't advance, we don't get healthy without losing some of the connections or some of the people or some of the environments that we're used to. Yeah.
Dr. Amber:You know? And that is
Kaitlin:Yeah. Notice oftentimes we focus on all the things that we're going to lose rather than what we're going to gain. You know, what we're going to gain from leaving situations or how much better our life could get from leaving situations. Instead, we're so focused on the loss.
Dr. Amber:Yeah, and I think that's where having a relationship with the Lord is really powerful because you can co create a vision. Like, God has a plan and a destiny for your life. And sometimes we get stuck in the what's familiar, but God is like knocking on the door saying, hey, I have more for you. There you have gifts, you have skills, and I want I want you to use them. And you know that, right?
Dr. Amber:Like, you know that feeling when you're like, I'm meant for more. To get excited about what that more is that God has for you and recognizing that grief is a part of it. And us learning how to grieve and learning how to let go, that's a big part of healing. It's a big part of growth is being able to say, gosh, I really loved these people, but they're not good for me anymore. And that's really hard.
Dr. Amber:So that's that's kind of the big piece. But being able to see, like, have let yourself have the vision for where are you moving towards, that's that's a big piece of it.
Jen:I wanna piggyback off of that because, my question too was related to you said your relationship with God was big part of your healing journey.
Dr. Amber:Yes.
Jen:And I think a great thing to talk about is what if part of your trauma is around the way that religion was used or maybe your parents' relationship with God was talked about or modeled? Because I've worked with people where I definitely say, like, that is what is needed is a relationship with god, that they have so much baggage when it comes to their upbringing with religion or parents' dysfunction and how maybe they abuse or misuse things like scripture. So what would be your recommendation for someone who is like, well, gosh, I I all that brings up a whole another bag of emotions, let alone my trauma. I also have now trauma related to the idea of being in a relationship with God, and what does that even look like?
Dr. Amber:Yeah. That's funny you should mention this. I was reading this book by Jennifer Ivaaz. It's called Inner Healing and Deliverance. And she really talks about how, for so many of us, we have wounded hearts.
Dr. Amber:Like, we we've been wounded. We've had trauma. And let's talk about the religious piece for a second. So let's say you have a family who said they were Catholic or Christian or or Mormon or whatever religion. And yet behind closed doors, they were cruel or mean or abusive or there was infidelities, whatever generational trauma that was being passed on and she really speaks about the fact that the more our heart is wounded and hardened the less that we can actually connect with God because God speaks to us.
Dr. Amber:He speaks to us through people. He speaks to us through our thoughts, through images, through dreams, but the more that our heart is hardened, wounded, unhealed, the more we keep God out. And so, a big part on your healing journey is recognizing that people are fallible. Like, your parents, your your siblings, your partner, they are not perfect. And although we are called as disciples to represent the Lord, when we are believers, we are called to that, but so we fall short.
Dr. Amber:And so remembering that if you saw hypocrisy, if you were harmed, what I wanna encourage you is to focus on your healing journey and creating a relationship with the Lord that's just you and him. Because it it's not you know, people are going to always let us down, I believe, like, that's just it's just the nature of humans. We're we're flawed. That's why we can't put our everything into a human being. As children, we we were dependent on our parents.
Dr. Amber:We kinda had to serve to survive. And that's what makes it so tricky and that's why so many folks are wounded. Because it's like I think I told you ladies this before the metaphor of the rattlesnake that, you know, when we're when we have a healthy attachment with our parents, we can rely on them. We know that they're gonna show up. They're predictable.
Dr. Amber:We know they love us. If if we don't, you know, sometimes our parents or our partner can be like a rattlesnake where they're unpredictable, they can bite. Right? They're dangerous. And yet, to survive, we still have to attach.
Dr. Amber:And so when you have a parent or someone in your life where you've had wounding like that, it's like trying to attach to a rattlesnake. You're you're naturally going to guard yourself. You're going to defend yourself against that person. Well, the same thing happens with God. When people hurt us, we imagine there can't be this all loving, omnipotent, unconditional God, because people who are right in front of our face have failed us, have let us down.
Dr. Amber:But this is where cultivating your own healing and a relationship with the Lord outside of those people, that's what I would invest your time in. And telling the Lord, bring your anger and your pain to the Lord. Bring it to him. It's called prayer journaling and it's something I have my clients do is to write to the Lord, to speak to him, like, giving him your burdens. I don't understand why this happened, Lord.
Dr. Amber:Why did this happen? Why did I experience this? Because he wants to hear from you. And when you open up that doorway with him and you ask him, please show me or show me your truth over my life, you're building that connection, and he can start speaking to you and showing you things. And once you start building that connection, you realize, wow, my parents had their own wounds or my partner had their own wounds.
Dr. Amber:And it had nothing to do with me. And so I don't have to write God off because they are imperfect, because they have their own wounding that they were acting out. Does that make sense?
Jen:Yes. I love that. And I'll just add a disclaimer too is that and, Amber, I think you would attest to this, we all could, is as you do that, and you grow in your relationship, and you are asking and praying for healing, it might require more pain first. To your point, it might mean that you have to lose a relationship or go through something hard to to grow in an area that God wants you to grow. So I always use the metaphor with clients.
Jen:It's like if you've been going around with a limp, like an untreated bone fracture that, you know, healed and crackling, you're limping along. But now you're actually wanna do the healing work, which might require re breaking of the bone. And that might be more painful, but it'll get you to the place of healing. I feel like the same goes with our relationship with God. In the healing journey, he might take us into places that could be more painful and to get to that place of healing.
Jen:Therapy is the same thing. Doing trauma work will bring up more distress and difficult feelings first before you get to a place of relief and being able to move past that. So would you go with that?
Dr. Amber:Oh, a 100%. Because the only way is through. You can't I mean, we taught this back in the hospital. Like, there's just no skipping over it. And I think that's the one really tough thing is that the generations before us, because mental health was not prioritized in the way that it's become, so much pain and trauma, it was just kinda like pull yourself up by your root straps and move on.
Dr. Amber:And that's what was learned. And so we have so much suppression and oppression in people in our lives that, we are a generation that's holding all the unresolved pain of of the people in our past. And it definitely can feel, like it's it's a lot. Cause sometimes you're holding your own stuff, but then sometimes you're holding your dad's stuff or you're holding your mom's stuff. And it's about recognizing that through your healing journey and going through that is not easy.
Dr. Amber:I always tell my clients like healing is not for wins. Like if you're really committed to healing, it's it's tough. It's very tough. And there's gonna be days where you don't wanna do it. But it is the best thing that you can do because we don't wanna carry on the pain and give it to the next generation.
Dr. Amber:Right? That's the whole purpose is so that they won't be in the pain that we've experienced.
Kaitlin:You brought up forgiveness a little bit ago, and I think forgiveness we all have someone to forgive or forgiveness is a, you know, a big piece of the healing journey. So how how do you truly forgive someone? How do you go through that process and why is it so important?
Dr. Amber:Yeah. There's so many layers to forgiveness. I've realized, there's there's so many things that and I remember because there were years where I was actively, you know, that's a big thing that I help my clients with because spiritually and emotionally, if you don't have forgiveness, you're in bondage. So that's like like the biggest thing is to remember that, the person that betrayed you or hurt you or neglected you or abandoned you or abused you in whatever way. There are no way right.
Dr. Amber:This is not about them being right. Forgiveness, we've heard this a lot. It's not about letting them off the hook. It's about getting out of bondage to them. Being, I'm gonna use strong word, but, like, being enslaved to hating them or, resenting them.
Dr. Amber:And it it makes you sick over time, you know, the roots when you really start to heal your body. And I'm sure a lot of your listeners have gone on or are on journeys of physical healing. You learn that the roots of physical disease are often emotional and spiritual. The roots of cancer emotionally is like rage and anger. So it is destroying, the soul and the body to not forgive.
Dr. Amber:It's hurting you to not forgive. So that's great. We can know that, right? That can be like cognitively, we know that. But then it's like, but how do you actually forgive?
Dr. Amber:And I can tell you that been And there would be times where I'd be, like, in bliss. I had just done this exercise and I was, like, yes, I forgive. You know, and I felt it. And then it would be like a month later and there it comes, that resentment, that bitterness.
Dr. Amber:And I was just like, why? Like, why can't I
Dr. Amber:let this go? And I'll why? Like, why can't I let this go? And I'll tell you 2 things that were major for me. And what I've seen with my clients, and that's the beauty as a practitioner of doing your own work.
Dr. Amber:I highly recommend it. You you have to. You can't you cannot lead people to dark places if you're not willing to look at your own dark places is is what I say. But, I the 2 things. Number 1, if you some of us have had such intense trauma that we have repressed memories.
Dr. Amber:Meaning you have dissociated through that trauma, your mind went somewhere else. It's a beautiful thing that God has done. He makes it so that we can literally leave the experience physically so that we don't have to remember it. Or you might be too young where you don't remember it. But either way, if you have memories that are in the body, right, the body keeps the score, but you don't consciously remember.
Dr. Amber:Well, I found in my clients and in myself, if there's memories and there's incidents of trauma that you don't remember, it's going to make it hard for you to fully forgive because there's still it's it's like it's kind of this brilliant way of your body being like, hey, we haven't like there's still stuff going on in here. There's still stuff that hasn't been searched out. So I can just say,
Dr. Amber:you know, for me, it was only like a year
Dr. Amber:and a half ago where I discovered there was a level of abuse that I didn't even know. I hadn't I had repressed it. I was too young. And when it was time, the Lord showed me through a dream, and then it was, like, time to heal it. And that was a huge thing that when I finally got to the root, to the root, to the root of the issues, because remember complex trauma, there's perhaps a lot that has gone on.
Dr. Amber:When I got to the root, that's when I started to feel free, and I could not get free until I got to the root. So that's actually a genius thing because the Lord wants you to be free. He wants you to be free. Number 2, so I had to get to the root to the root. And unfortunately, some people, you do a bunch of healing work and you're like, and you have to think sometimes there's decades of stuff that's living in your body.
Dr. Amber:And then you started your healing journey a year ago, 2 years ago, even 3 years ago, but you have decades of stuff that you're holding on to. So it's not that weird when you think about it like that. But the second thing I would say is that if you're trying to maintain a relationship with someone that you're attempting to forgive, there really needs to be repair. There just really needs to be if you wanna have, like, a genuine, open, loving connection with that person, if it's possible. Right?
Dr. Amber:I think we all have and maybe you ladies have and and my clients certainly know you have relationships where you keep that person at a distance. You love them, but you're never gonna let them super close Because they don't understand what they did, they're not willing to acknowledge what they did. And I remember I can share that with my mom. There's just a lot of complex trauma with her and my father. And I finally got to the root of everything.
Dr. Amber:And I needed to tell my mom. And I said, we need, you know, like, I pretty much said we have to do family therapy or else I just can't have the relationship with you that you want. I have to do this with you. I can't pretend that I feel okay. And I have and I have realized and and my clients will echo this as well.
Dr. Amber:It's like trying to be friends with your abuser. You just can't. You know, you can't just be friends with someone who was so abusive to you. You have to have a reckoning and a repair, especially if it's someone that you do want a relationship with. And so the repair, it doesn't have to be family therapy, but that would be awesome if it was, that would be ideal.
Dr. Amber:But it means that the person owns and, like, acknowledges what they did, and they take ownership. We call it radical responsibility. Then you own your side of
Dr. Amber:things too. And both
Dr. Amber:of you come together to acknowledge very vulnerability like this is, this is how we did this, this
Dr. Amber:is how we created this, but
Dr. Amber:I want to have this is how we did this, this is how we created this, but I wanna have something new moving forward. And I can tell you that it's possible. Yeah, I can tell you that it's possible. I've seen some very challenging folks who were really unaware. With enough pain, they came to realize, I don't want this anymore.
Dr. Amber:I wanna make a change. I'm willing to do the work. But to go back to what you said, Caitlin, honestly, for some people, it takes a lot of pain in their life to become ready to do the work that they need to do. But repair, right, and really getting to the roots, the repair and the root. I would say these are 2 things that can really help facilitate forgiveness with someone that you wanna maintain a relationship with.
Kaitlin:So powerful. I think a lot of people get hung up on how can I forgive someone that doesn't acknowledge that they did anything wrong, that can't take responsibility for doing anything wrong? And, you know, I it's it's such a reminder that you being angry and bitter and holding resentment doesn't impact that other person. It does not change their life at all. They don't feel anything, but it's destroying you.
Kaitlin:And that's why it's so important. Important. It's not about the other person. It's about you and your health. Yeah.
Kaitlin:And I will just say this because there was, you know, for
Dr. Amber:your listeners, there was a long
Dr. Amber:time where I was searching for, you know, for your listeners, there was a long time where I was searching for, you know, for your listeners, there was a long time where I was searching for what is it gonna be that's gonna help me really, like, forgive. Right? And like I said, it's the repair and, the root. But at the same time, when you have a relationship with the Lord, he reminds you, you know, I have we all have betrayed God in certain ways. We've turned our backs on him.
Dr. Amber:We haven't acknowledged him. We've used his name in vain. As far as a relationship goes, I have done things to the Lord and he has still chosen to forgive me. Calling. He says, you have done all these things, and I still choose to forgive you.
Dr. Amber:So why can't you forgive them? And I think it's hard because we know there can be heinous things that people experience. And so that's where it's it's very clear. You don't have to have relationships with people if they're toxic. And that's very important that we all understand that that we're I'm not in any way saying be in a relationship with an abusive person or a toxic person.
Dr. Amber:Absolutely not. But if you want a relationship with this person and they want one with you, if they cannot acknowledge their side of the street, then it's really about love and boundaries. And it's about I'm going to have you in my life, and you will be in my life at a distance, and that will be our relationship. And if you're not okay with that, then let's talk about repair. And if you're not willing to repair, then there's gonna be boundaries, and that's just what it is.
Kaitlin:Wow. What a powerful conversation, that I think can be so helpful for so many people and hopefully really speaks to and inspires someone to start their healing journey. So thank you for coming here today and sharing your journey and your story and also how other people can start their own journey as well. So with that, where can people find you? How can people work with you?
Kaitlin:Give us that information.
Dr. Amber:Yeah. So it's simple. You can just go to doctor Amber Rochelle on Instagram. And then in my bio, there's a link to, book a call with me. There's a link to my YouTube.
Dr. Amber:So that's kinda where you can find me. I also you can email me if you have questions, doctor amber rochelle@gmail.com. And thank you so much for having me, ladies. I really it. Maybe we can do this again at some point.
Jen:We'd love to have you back. Thank you so much for being here today.
Dr. Amber:Awesome. Thank you.
Jen:Thanks for joining us on the Counter Culture Health podcast. To support this show, please rate, review, and share with your friends and family. If you wanna be reminded of new episodes, click the subscribe button on your preferred podcast player. You can find me, Jen, at awaken.holistic.healthand@awakeningholistichealth.com.
Kaitlin:And me, Kaitlin, at Kaitlin Reed Wellness and Kaitlin Reed Wellness .com. The content of the show is for educational and informational purposes only. As always, talk to your doctor and health team. See you next time.