Lion Counseling Podcast

Pageau - Why Your Grandmother’s Love is More Real Than Your Trauma

In this Legacy Highlight, Jonathan Pageau and Mark Odland explore one of the most profound ideas to ever come out of trauma work: the memories that give life are more real than the ones that destroy it. Mark describes how EMDR helps men see old wounds with new clarity -calmer, farther away, and no longer the center of their identity. Jonathan expands this into a powerful spiritual truth: trauma is a negation of being, but love - especially the love you’ve received from someone who showed you your worth - is an orientation toward life itself. Together, they unpack how men can re-anchor their identity in what is true, and how masculinity only becomes whole when strength is offered as service.

In this legacy highlight you’ll learn:
  • Why traumatic memories lose their emotional “charge” after EMDR
  • How life-giving memories rise to the surface once the nervous system calms
  • Why replacing a traumatic memory with a loving one isn’t “faking it”—it’s aligning with what’s objectively more real
  • Jonathan Pageau’s perspective on the purpose of masculine strength
  • Why mastery, ambition, and drive only become healthy when framed as an offering
  • The true role of a man as builder, protector, and servant to God, family, and community
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About the Lion Counseling Podcast
The Lion Counseling Podcast helps high-achieving Christian men overcome anxiety, trauma, addiction, burnout, and relationship struggles using a blend of EMDR therapy, Christian wisdom, and practical psychology. New episodes drop every Tuesday.

Creators and Guests

Host
Mark Odland
Founder of Lion Counseling, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Certified EMDR Therapist

What is Lion Counseling Podcast?

The Lion Counseling Podcast helps men escape the cages that hold them back and become the Lions they were created to be. It exists to help men obtain success, purpose, happiness, and peace in their career and personal lives. The podcast is hosted by the founder of Lion Counseling, Mark Odland (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Certified EMDR Therapist), and Zack Carter (Counselor and Coach with Lion Counseling). In their podcasts, they address a variety of topics relevant to men, including: mental health, relationships, masculinity, faith, success, business, and self-improvement.

Mark Odland:

And then they go back to the original memory, and like you said, they're like, wow. Like, it's further away. Right? It's it's further away. It's it's calm.

Mark Odland:

It's fuzzy. And now I think about this instead. I think about when I got married. I think about, you know, a memory where their deep lie is I'm worthless, completely worthless, or or bad or horrible. And and now after EMDR, these other two or three memories of an experience in church, a loving grandmother who showed them that they were worth, so they were valuable, they were loved.

Mark Odland:

Now that is taking up the space. Yeah. And it helps it and it's not like I have to go through these three steps to remember that grandma loved me. Now it's like the nervous system takes it in and they don't have to try so hard. It's almost like it's shifted the way that they're seeing things.

Jonathan Pageau:

Yeah.

Mark Odland:

Which is which is exciting and powerful. Yeah.

Jonathan Pageau:

Yeah. And I think I think it's important. How can I say it? It's like it's important also because one of the things that you could say about this, like, you know, if you were to be cynical is you could say, know, you it's like you're basically twisting the world, like, right? You're you're faking it.

Jonathan Pageau:

Like, you're you're you're you're kind of creating a fiction, you know, in this person's life in order to replace something horrible that happened to them. You know, that could be the cynical take on this. But the truth is the very opposite. Right? It's like, you could say, you know, I mean, the simple example is like replace the memory in the hierarchy of what's salient to you.

Jonathan Pageau:

Like, replace the memory of my loving grandmother. Replace the trauma with a memory of my loving grandmother. You would say, oh, you're just you're just be right. You're just fudging it. You're just trying to pretend.

Jonathan Pageau:

But the truth is that there's one of those memories that is life giving, and there's one of those memories that is life negating. Like there's one of those memories that if you make it the center of your being, it leads to all darkness. Leads to death and and desperation and, you know, and suicidality and all of these things. There's another version that leads to basically a spiral up. Right?

Jonathan Pageau:

It's like a possibility to ingrain yourself in something to imitate someone to then reproduce that behavior, you know, with the people around you. And that is true. Like, it's true in the sense of life is not just facts. Life is orientations, and life is the imitation of that which is good becoming and good. And so, I think that it is objectively true that the love that your grandmother had for you is more real than this trauma that you went through.

Jonathan Pageau:

Like, it is it is objectively true because it is life affirming, and the other one is negate is is a kind of negation of being.

Mark Odland:

Yes. That'd be beautifully said. Beautifully said. Well, I know we're getting close to wrapping up our time, Jonathan. One of the questions I like to ask our guests and of course, we could be spend a whole podcast on this.

Mark Odland:

But in a succinct way, you know, a lot of my a lot of the guys I work with are business owners, entrepreneurs, and they're pretty successful, but they're struggling to understand what does it mean to be a loving husband, a loving father, a successful businessman, and and essentially, what does it mean to be a man? And that that is a complicated question with lots of cultural shallow potential answers. Right? But if if if there was a way to put into words from your perspective, what does it mean to be a man? I'd be curious what you'd say.

Jonathan Pageau:

Yeah. But, I mean, I think that there's a there is a reason why, in some ways, men have this drive in this kind of external drive in to build things, to make things, to create, to, you know, to master things. All of this all of this is a very positive element of masculinity, and it's something that, of course, has been degraded in the past few decades. It's been mocked as just power, as just tyranny in something, but it isn't. It's actually, you could say, an element of of how God created Adam, you know, to be the gardener, to kind of be the the one who has dominion over creation.

Jonathan Pageau:

Now, can that go wrong? And the answer is, yeah. Of course it can go wrong. It goes wrong all the And the secret is really in the example that Christ gave us, you know, is to kind of understand that the reason for a leader and the reason for mastery is offering. The reason why you would master anything, the reason why you would become the leader of anything or that you would create everything always in some ways has to ultimately be framed under the notion that it is an offering, that it is an offering to God, that it is an offering to others.

Jonathan Pageau:

And so, if we understand that, if we understand it deeply, then the balance, let's say, between your career and your family won't be as difficult to manage because you will feel when you'd say your work and your family and your your work life and your career and the things you're building are becoming an obsession in themselves. And you can usually sense that when it is when you are in fact neglecting Because your if it is an offering, then you are not supposed to sacrifice your children for whatever it is you are building. That is not the case. Way of understanding it, but rather you should be making things in order to become you know, to serve your community, to serve your family, and ultimately to serve God. So, I think that that's the way to understand it.

Jonathan Pageau:

It's that all of the things about masculinity, you know, the kind of warrior aspect that we have, all of those are good. But they they're only good if they're put in service of something, both that which is greater than you in the sense of giving to God, but also in service of that of those that are weaker, those that that that that that can use your strength, you know, in order to make themselves better. So, it's like the image of the knight is a great example, like the true like the the true image of the knight who fights, but doesn't fight only for his honor, but fights for those that can't fight for themselves.