In this deeply personal and powerful episode of Living Through Heart, Donna Joy Usher courageously shares her journey of uncovering a repressed childhood memory and the layered healing that followed. With raw vulnerability, she explores the nature of trauma, meaning-making, identity, and the power of taking responsibility for how we choose to move forward. This episode is a profound offering of truth, heart, and emotional liberation โ a must-listen for anyone on the path of self-healing.
In this heartfelt and vulnerable episode, Donna opens up about a significant moment in her healing journey โ the resurfacing of a repressed memory of childhood sexual trauma. She shares how the memory came through, the intense emotional and energetic unraveling that followed, and the powerful insights she gained about shame, identity, meaning-making, and self-responsibility.
Key points covered:
Why this episode felt vulnerable to record
Understanding the difference between hard and soft trauma
The power of meaning-making and how it shapes our identity
Releasing shame, grief, rage, and dissociation from the body
Donnaโs multi-layered healing process and emotional clearing
The moment she reclaimed compassion and forgiveness
Why responsibility is not blame โ itโs empowerment
๐ก Resources & Mentions:
Charlotte โ Donnaโs mentor and therapist: charlotte@charlottechalkley.com
This episode is an invitation to reflect, release, and reclaim your power after trauma. Donna gently reminds us that while we canโt always control what happens, we do have the power to choose what it means moving forward.
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Welcome to the living through heart Podcast. I'm Donna Joy Usher and I'm an analytical hypnotherapist, a psychotherapist, a spiritual healer, a Tantra practitioner, a shamanic practitioner, an award winning, Best Selling Author and owner and artisan of savage boho studio. I believe everybody is capable of creating the life they want, if they can just shift the beliefs, stories and energy creating their current reality. This podcast is an audible blog of my thoughts as I go on a journey to heal my soul, surrender into my feminine power and to live from the present moment in heart. I hope you find it amusing, interesting, thought provoking, touching, raw and inspiring.
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ย Hello. I'm Donna Joy Usher. Welcome to this 69th episode of the living through heart Podcast. I'm actually feeling very vulnerable at the moment, because I'm finally going to record the episode about the thing that I keep saying. I'm going to record it, but I haven't yet, which is basically repressed memory that I uncovered a couple of months ago now, and when I feel into, why do I feel vulnerable about sharing this? Yeah, there's some layers in there that will come up into in during want to explain what I went through. But basically what it is is I feel vulnerable that people or women are going to yell at me shout me down for sharing this like maybe, maybe that it might trigger them, and rather than being with their own self and their trigger and investigating it, that they'll they'll hate on me. Instead, I feel vulnerable because of that.ย
I feel vulnerable, because there was a lot of as you'll hear as I progress through this. There was a lot of layers, definitely, of shame and unworthiness that I went through with this. And obviously there's still some tendrils of that around it. I haven't shared this with many people. You know, I shared it with the people who helped me through it, and at one point, I shared it with some girlfriends that were in a training with me in my shamanic tribe, basically to hear myself stay it out loud, because that made it more real, because it was a part of me, my conscious, basically, all of my conscious mind was in denial that this was real, that this had happened. So yeah, this is actually quite big for me. So yeah, and as I feel that, I feel some sadness and grief there anyway.ย
So I want to start by premising why I called this responsibility in trauma. Because what I have observed from my own experience, through my healing journey and when I've been working with clients, is that, you know, shit happens, and often we can't control that shit. I mean, we can go to a whole new level with Adam, you know, soul journey and blah, blah, but I'm just going to talk about this human experience. Often we can't control that shit. But what we can control is what we think, feel, do choose afterwards. And that's that's our power, right? It's also our responsibility. And so for me, what I'm going to take you through is basically kind of what I became aware of, and then my journey through all the layers over the next couple of months to basically get this energy out of my body, because this was a moment of abuse, of sexual abuse from when I was very, very small. And you know, the thing is that when we contract around these moments because we're too small and to be able to process it right, it's not safe to be with it, and there's always a dissociation. And then, like repression, because we can't be with it, so we repress the memory, but the energy of it is trapped inside.ย
And then that energy, there's a meaning making that comes from it, and then from that, you know, the neuronal pathways are wired, and the unconscious is programmed and and that's our responsibility, that meaning making what did we choose our choice? We have choice, and sometimes it doesn't seem like a choice, and maybe it's like it seems like the only way to make sense of it at that time, because we are so small, we are so defenseless, and we don't understand. And it's funny, I was thinking this morning about how. Well, when I was about 19 or 20, I went and saw a Frankenstein movie that was released, and I went into afterwards, I was in this absolute fear for days, because what I realized within that like how, how he had been so kind, how the monster had escaped into the forest and he'd been helping this family, and he'd actually been very, very kind, but then when humans had shown him hatred and had taken stuff away from him, how he had turned and I realized, funnily enough, that I actually got to that age before I realized that adults don't have their shit together, you know, where they I still had this belief that I was going to get to a point I was kind of an adult, and I was going to be all being and understand everything, and, yeah, and I just realized that adults have their shit together.ย
And when we're children, you know, when we're babies, when we're small, we think that the adults in our lives are gods. And so any meaning making we make something has to reflect back on ourselves, because these these adults, our caretakers, are gods. And therefore when they're behaving in some way that is like not good for us. It has to be about us the meaning making, as opposed to, you know, you when you're six months old, you don't have the capacity to go and, jeez, Dad's being a dick to mom, and mom stressed out, and she's taking it out on me, unconsciously taking out of me, and not giving me, you know, not giving me the love and care and attention that I want at this moment, right? Instead, we're like, we make it mean that we're somehow not worthy of her love and attention, and then that gets wired into us, and this is our limiting beliefs and how they form.ย
All right, so I'm gonna say these points that came to me like points of learning from this now, and I'll probably say them again at the end, and then you might from when I say them now and then when I go through my journey story, and then at the end, it might you might get more more out of it. It might mean something different to you. But first of all, I want to define my definition of responsibility, because I remember when I was working with a girlfriend, and I used to say, Come on, take responsibility. And she would kick back. And then one day, we had a conversation, and my concept of the word responsibility and what it meant to take responsibility for something and her definition were two different things, and this is often the way in life, right?ย
Often our meaning behind words, because of our experience, is totally different to somebody else's meaning in words, and we're having a conversation, we don't understand why they're not getting our point, but really it's because their meaning making of a word is different to ours. So for me, response taking responsibility is actually taking power, taking your power back, taking your choice back and and like, it's in very empowering for her, because when she was little and she was told to take responsibility for something, there was always punishment attached to that. So she was like feeling, if she took responsibility that she was going to be punished for it. So when I'm saying responsibility and trauma, I'm saying, How can we, how can we take responsibility for our meaning making in such a way that we can take our power pack, our power back. We can have a power pack. We can take our power back within these moments.ย
Okay, so the first point is, sometimes we can't control what happens to us, but what we can control is what our brain makes it mean about us. And as I said, when we're little, it doesn't feel like we can control it doesn't feel like there wasn't any other choice, right? But as we grow up and we go into these moments, that's where our responsibility comes in. That's where our control comes in. That's where our choice comes in. We can change these meaning makings and and unravel that energy and release it from our body. And then we can start to have more satisfaction in life, because we can start to, you know, actually have what we want.ย
We can realize that we are worthy of it, that we are allowed, you know, all this stuff that we we the matrix of the fabric of our being and our energy and our mind and our unconscious is wrapped into these meaning makings from a small child, and then we get to a point where they're no longer bringing us what we want, then that's when we need to shift stuff so that we can have what we want in life. The second point is some people can't move on from trauma, because they get caught up in what happened to them and how it was too important, and that thing is, it's how it shaped them and has become a part of their identity. There's a thing that happened is now a part of their identity, and they can't let go of it. They can't move on, because in that letting go, it's like, but it wasn't fair that that thing happened to me, and it's almost like they feel like they have to forgive that other person and take the hit, when in reality, it's just like, yeah, that other person was a fucker, and let's choose to let go of this meaning making and of this identity and become something more expanded.ย
So the energy of a moment of trauma has many layers in it, and that these layers are stuck inside us, and it shapes our reality and our meaning making. And you know, if we talk about parts therapy, how there's parts of us frozen in time that we go and work with in a moment of trauma, there can be many different aspects, many different parts, many different like emotions, many different things, all trapped in this one moment and all trapped within our body. And I'm going to go through the layers that I uncovered, the ones that I can remember anyway, I'm sure that there are a lot more subtle ones that shifted that maybe now I can't remember so and the whole point is that if we can release this energy that's trapped within us, out of our body, out of our tissue, out of our energetic body, you know, because it's color, it's an energetic body, but then that is like impacting our physical body, it's impacting our emotional body. So if we can get it out of these bodies, then you know, we're free of that moment, and we're free of what we made it mean about us. People choose to become victims when they don't take the responsibility for what happens after the moment of trauma, when they stay stuck in the moment that they couldn't control, instead of taking control of the ultimate outcome, which is how they choose to be from that moment forward.ย
So I wanted to define at this moment trauma. You know, we talk about trauma and hard there's hard trauma and there's soft trauma. So hard trauma is when something happens in like a split second, and it might be like a car accident. It might be an assault. You know, you know, this is this hard moment of trauma. And then there's like, and there's contraction in that moment, I'm not safe, basically. And then there's soft trauma, which can also involve members of hard trauma, right over and over and over again.ย
Soft trauma is basically when we're made to feel unworthy, not made to feel unworthy when we are treated in such a way, when we're growing up that we ultimately feel unworthy because of how our caretakers might not be there emotionally for us, they might not be there physically for us. They might not be there energetically for us. And basically we it's a soft trauma, right? If we feel unloved, if we feel unworthy because of how our caretakers are being with us, and that's soft trauma. And soft trauma can is just as damaging, if not more, sometimes and hard trauma, when hard trauma, soft trauma, normally, like forms us and our belief systems when we're and I'm just talking generally here.ย
You know between the ages of zero to seven, our unconscious mind is forming our identity. It's forming our basically, our matrix, our reality. It's shaping how we think the world works, and then that becomes our truth, and then that becomes our perception. And that's that becomes like the layers that we view the world through moments of hard trauma. I like, for me, this moment of trauma, one of the layers that I made I made sense of, it was also stuff that I have observed leading up to that point. And then this was kind of like, Oh, of course. All right, this moment of hard trauma was like, of course, this happened to me because of this so the two of them can blend together.ย
All right, so. And then, as I said, before, responsibility brings choice, and it brings the ability to change, and it basically, responsibility brings power. It's an empowering thing. Okay, so let me give you the framework. So I was working with my girlfriend, Charlotte. I'm going to put her details in the in the notes, the show notes, because she's amazing, and she trained me as a little bit my therapy and psychotherapist, and she still has a school doing that. And she's also then gone on with re chained spiritual healing together, got a practitioner level training in that together. You know, I was her COO and her business for quite a while, and she is now working with possibility management, and like working with them, and she's still working with clients, basically.ย
So if you would like to work with her, I'll put her I'll put her email in the show notes, and you can just reach out to her and contact her and talk to her about maybe seeing her, because she's amazing, and I had gotten into a situation where I had unconsciously created a dog fight. It's enough Holland strong camera, if I talked about this or not, but basically, I had been walking my dog's partner, which I knew was anxious and could be anxiously aggressive, and I had this dog fight had happened, and I was it was like, this, ah, it was a moment of heart trauma.ย
And she was like, Okay, you gotta slow it down. And. Yourself to go through all the things that that you needed to go through in that moment that you couldn't so she said, How about we do a session together? But then when we hopped on the session about a week later, I had been going through this myself anyway, and she said that she could sense that I had cleared it, so she didn't sort of say this. So my mind, I'm thinking that we're going in about this dog fight, right? But she's like, Oh. Just feels like this is clear, but let's see what's there. So this guard that I had had, and afterwards, after this like, hour together, hour and a half together, when I was I went upstairs to go to bed, and I could feel subtly how this part of me had always been constricting around what we had uncovered, protecting it and hiding it, right?ย
And the only reason we had got there is because my guard was down, because I thought we were going to work on this other thing, and so I didn't have to hide this thing, right? And this is obviously all happening unconsciously, because I've never been aware of this thing. But I also want to premise that we and her, more than me, had she had, had definitely felt that there was something there, and I had, kind of like unlogically, kind of like, God, I wonder if there is something there. Because when you do therapy with people quite often, who is attracted to you, and what you uncover with them is what you need to work on yourself. It's just amazing.ย
Like, I can remember this one week where I had 10 clients in a row who all, when we got into it, this thing that came up with all the exact same word by word statement that I was working on it myself, right? And and for a therapist, it's like you really need to hold this space for them and put your own stuff to the side. But then there's a part of you can actually be working through. Actually be working through your own shit at the same time. So I had, from the very beginning, attracted women to me who had been who had repressed sexual abuse memories. And Charlotte used to say to me, are you sure nothing happened? I'm like, no, no, not in this life. I'm, you know, I'm good. So when it came up, it was no surprise to her. It was a shock to me. But there was also a part of me that was like, Oh, okay. Well, she was right.ย
So what happened was that I went into the energy of this, what was there with inside me? And so I was sitting with this energy, and it's just like, what emotion is, and I'm like, it's like a it's like a plant that has two leaves, and one emotion is anger and one emotion is grief, just like, Okay, well, can you untwine them? Which one do you need to work with? And there was fear. Sorry, I lie. It was fear, and the fear was the most prominent one. And so I sat with this fear, and I went into this fear deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into this energy in my body, and I was just allowing it to and she's like, okay, really amplify it, make it as big as you can. I was amplifying this fear. And then she's like, how old are you? I was like, Oh, I'm four. Felt about four. And she's like, why are you scared? And I'm like, I can't speak. She's like, why can't you speak? And there it was.ย
And I'm not going to go into this in graphic detail, to be honest, because I don't actually have the graphic detail either. I mean, I wouldn't anyway, but it was a sensation and a knowing, and more knowing came to me during the weekend, and I've spoken to one of my mentors in the shamanic tribe, who also had about this time through her shamanic training. So I just finished practitioner level of shamanic training, too, and she had also, at that point, had had, like, repressed memories of her own coming up from her childhood that she had been unaware of. But I mean, her body had basically been like rebelling and rejecting, and she was getting sicker and sicker, and she didn't know why, and it was this, this energy was in her body making her sick. And she said, Look, you only, you only get enough that you need to to work with it and also what you can handle. And I was kind of like, Oh, I could handle the thing. And then I thought about it, I thought, You know what? Probably couldn't. I don't know if I don't, I definitely don't need to re traumatize myself by going into the full memory, because what happened wasn't important. And this is another important point, and that's that one where people choose the identity, right?
It's not the what that ultimately in in today, it's not the what that happened that is important. It's what I made it mean that is important, and how it's impacting and how it impacted my life. And that's where, if I made the what important, then that would be where my identity would come from. And that is another reason why I haven't really spoken to many people about this, because I didn't want the what to become important. And people who aren't trained in this space cling on to the what. And I remember the first time I had, the first time I ever had a client uncover a memory, and this part of my brain was like, Oh, my God, this is terrible. We need to bring the police. This person needs to be brought to justice. And blah, blah, blah. And. Yeah, absolutely, on one level, that is so true, right? But in my reality, this happened five decades ago. I didn't even know who it was. It happened. My knowing is that it happened at a party, and this person is probably dead, so if I was just trying to get the justice and rules of my identity, then I would be stuck in this moment and the meaning making of it, as opposed to realizing that, yeah, this what that happened.ย
Yeah, it happened, but it's then what I did with it that I can change and shift and I can, I can change what I created from it. So I had this sensation that came to me of like I could feel my mouth and something like, basically a penis being pushed into my mouth, and then this dissociation, basically. And it was interesting, because I had realized into this point that this beautiful place that I could go to sometimes was actually dissociation. And it's, it was like this silvery white light and just this, this feeling of like, you know, of nothingness and like, and that was dissociation, anyway.ย
So I had this sensation come in, and I froze, and I could feel that this was way off to my left, this part of me that was experiencing this, that was frozen this moment of time. So I'm looking straight ahead. I can feel her to my left, and to my right is the exit from this. I can just I can bolt right energetically, and I can just pretend that this didn't happen, and in my head, I'm like, All right, I haven't said anything she doesn't know yet, because I knew as soon as I mentioned it, she wasn't gonna let me get away from it, right? Working with Charlotte for probably about seven years now, she was not gonna let me Well, I mean, she would have if I really wanted to, but I knew that she wasn't gonna let me get away with this, because this was the moment in time, the really important moment in time that I had been doing all of this work for all of these years, and this was the moment in time that I had to find for me to be able to unravel all of it.ย
Right? It's like I had this knot. I'd been pulling threads out of it and feeling some relief, but this was the thing that was holding this all together. So finally I confessed, and I said, what I could sense? And she said to me, all right, what did your brain make this mean? And I can't remember exact words, right, but this is, this is basically what it was. Says, okay, so what did you What did your brain do with this? What did you make it mean? And that is exactly where I had to go. I not to what happened, not to be with it, but to what did I make it mean? And so in that first session together, because we did two sessions together on this and then I did a lot of work by myself, which I'll go through with the layers of but in this first session, I was just going deeper and deeper into the energy and letting it vibrate within me, and then looking for the meaning making that I had given it. And there was so much shame in this.ย
And I finally got to this point where i i It felt like maybe something had been said, but it was probably more that my brain had just done this because my grandparents had this very big house, and they had this bathroom that had two doors that entered it, and I feel that this is where it happened. As I said, I haven't got the exact memory, but there's lots of things that kind of, like, there's a knowingness of that place. And there's lots of things that, like afterwards, when my brain was like, no, no, no, which I'll go through, I was like, oh, but these other things make real fucking sense. Like, I used to go into that bathroom and be really terrifying. I would go and lock the other door straight away.ย
And then, like, you know, there was all this stuff, but I also there was, like this, lot of granddaughters, not my granddaughters, obviously, but there were a lot of us. There was a big family, and there was a lot of us around my age. There was, I think, three, three of us, three girls born the same year, and then another one a year before me, and then my sister and all of the others were prettier than me. I was this little tomboy, you know, my mom used to get my hair cut short. I was this Tubby little tomboy, gluten intolerance. I was always bloated, and my sister was the pretty one, and I. Ever heard uncle saying that, once you know, you know, sisters, the pretty one and she's the interesting one, right? No, little girl wants to be the interesting one. They want to be the pretty one. They want to be the princess. They want to be the one that the, you know, Cinderella. They don't want to be the interesting one. You know, the interesting one gets to scrub floors. The pretty one gets to wear the pretty dresses and go to all the balls, you know, so and, oh my goodness, one of my cousins is so beautiful, you know, the blonde hair and the blue eyes and the cheek bones and the big lips and, yeah, and I was, I had, like, not at this stage, obviously, because I grew up, you know, I had to have all the ย canines that came out really high and looked like fangs. And, you know, I was not a pretty child.ย
So I had already, even as this small, I already ascertained that I wasn't as attractive as my these other, these other girls that were my age, right? So I don't know whether something was said that it was almost like, ah, it was like, I had been chosen because I wasn't. It wouldn't be noticed. If, yeah, it wouldn't be noticed. It wasn't as important. And basically, there was this deep shame in how worthless I was, that this I was so worthless, right? I was so worthless that this was being done to me and no one was going to notice, right? That's why I was chosen, because they would be noticing the pretty ones, but that no one would notice if I had disappeared for a while. You know, rather than being able, at that age, to be able to understand that this adult was doing something to me that was unthinkable. Instead my brain made it mean that there was something wrong with me.ย
And when I was in this shame energy, and when I was digging deeper into into like, how worthless I actually was, like, there it was a bottomless pit. Like and it was this, if people know that this happened to me, they'll know how worthless I was. So now I have to hide this. No one can ever know that this happened to me. And then I could feel my brain. It was the most interesting sensation. I could feel my brain wiring into that, that I had to hide it. No one could know, because I could, you know, that they would, they would know how worthless I was. And so it was almost like all these defense mechanisms were created. And you know, all of these ways of being that I had, that I uncovered, you know that I had uncovered some anyway, right? I already uncovered that I needed. Had always needed to be, right? I need to control, but I hadn't understood where they came from, right?ย
But there's all these defense mechanisms that I had in so no one could question me, because it was like no one would. Because if I was always the one that was right, and I was always the best, and I was always at this, and I was always at that, and blah, blah, blah, and I was always the helper, then no one would even think to uncover my dirty secret of how worthless I was. So that's what I spent basically, you know, in that first session, that was releasing the grief and then releasing anger as well. And these, these are always in many different layers. And then, as I said, afterwards, so after that first session, I could feel, I could feel that slight contraction in my body that had always been there like I could. I could feel that it was gone.ย
You know, there was this difference, really subtle difference. And then the next day, there was this absolute sensation of relief, like, you know, when you do something really, really awful, and then you have to hide it right? Because no one can know. And then then there's this real stress and tension about the hiding and the lies that come from that moment, right? Because really, what I was doing was I was lying with energetically, lying, you know, pretending to be something I wasn't, to hide something that I thought I was.
And it was like my big, dark, dirty secret had come out. Oh, and I was so fucking relieved because it was okay. Nothing bad had happened, like, I hadn't been ostracized. No one had, like, kicked me out. It was like, Oh, my God, thank God, they found out it was okay, you know, oh, that the next day. So that was really interesting to realize that right? Because what my conscious brain did from this moment forth for the next few weeks was like, No, that did not happen. No, no fucking way Did that happen? So I had to really like, okay, brain that didn't happen. But let's just clear this energy anyway.ย
So it was really being aware of energetically, what was happening inside. Me, you know what? I was unconsciously, kind of becoming aware of and bringing it to the surface so I could, like, realize it, so that I could unravel these layers and not just dissociate from it again, right? So during that first week, I was like, I was like, see, saw in between, not that did not fucking happen. And then I would be walking my dogs.ย
Then all of a sudden, this grief and this anger and this waves of like emotion would come over me, come through me, and I was that crazy woman walking around with my dogs, just allowing myself to fucking cry, allowing myself to in my head. I wasn't screaming out loud, but allowing myself in my head to scream. And I was tensing my body and stuff, and I was allowing myself to cry, and might be shook my hands a bit, because I'm like, Well, this wants to come out, and I'm just gonna let it come out, right? And then I would come home and let myself do it, and I want to just like, kudos to my beautiful partner for really holding space for me during this and helping me shift energy. So because I would have this energy come up in my body, and I just go, I need to get this out. And he is a superstar helping me, even though he's not from this world, you know, he's not from the healing world in this life anyway.ย
And he's not, you know, probably like, you know, I said him afterwards, what did you get from that? He goes, Well, I get that you, you know, you felt this or you thought that. So he was very good at just like, realizing that I was having an experience and not judging it, and then helping me release energy. Like by basically, I was just walking and go, alright, don't ask questions. I've got this energy in the back of my heart chakra. I need you just run your hands up my spine and get this out of me. And then he would and then I would start, like coughing and retching and getting this energy out. So what I would tap into every time I would have, like, a layer come up of emotion, I would release it.ย
Then with that, I would have an understanding or an awareness of what was attached to that energy, and what I uncovered was another layer of shame, and this layer was surrounding. I had shame. First of all, had the shame of how worse I was, but then I had this other layer of shame. It's like I didn't belong anywhere. I couldn't fit in with the girls that hadn't been abused yet. I couldn't go and fit in with the girls and claim to be in their camp, because what happened to me wasn't bad enough. You know what? Only happened the once. It wasn't only, isn't it? Even, as I say, that I feel my solar plexus just like I feel nauseous, right?ย
So even though I say I've worked through this, obviously still, like there's obviously still stuff here that I because I have helped women work through stuff and heard stories of women I have coached with and gone through trainings with of just horrific abuse by people that were they're meant to be the ones that were keeping them safe. And you know that's particularly like when someone who's is your primary caretaker, or one of your primary caretakers is also the source of your abuse, and that is like the worst. You know structure because you're having to cling to the very person who's also abusing you. And you know for talking about with whether or not you're an avoidant, whether or not you're anxious, these people are disorganized, because at the same moment in their body, they have the urge to cling and the urge to flee going on at once.ย
And I had like, you know, ex, I had gone through this experience, like helping women, you know, start to work through this stuff. And what had happened to me was like, what I felt was like nothing compared to that. And it was almost like if I went to their camp and said, Hey, can I come and be with you guys? Because, you know, I'm one of you, and if they said to me, Well, tell us your story, and we'll see if it was bad enough for you to be a part of me. Then when I told them what would happen, they would almost like, throw stones at me, laugh at me, cast me out. Like, how dare you. How dare you come and claim to be one of us that is not bad enough.ย
So I had had this level of shame inside me, and so what I did, instead of trying to be in their camp, was I became the one who like energetically, helped. Who, who they set myself up as a healer, right, ultimately, but I would be through school. I would be the one that the, you know, the when I say weaker, I don't mean weak in a bad way. But, you know, you have the ones who are more kind of, like bullish energy, and then you have the ones who got, like, more defenseless. And. I would be the one that would be like the protector of those people, and I would, I would the bullies wouldn't, wouldn't dare like if they were, it was almost like they were under my protection, and the bullies wouldn't come at them, because my energy was such that they knew they couldn't bully me, right? So I kind of set myself up as this protector of people like this, and then as then I became their healer.ย
And, oh, and I'm, I'm really ashamed to say that when I went into these layers, what I felt, what I really felt, there was this part of me that was like setting herself up as this like expert and and being almost like condescendingly compassionate, almost like they're there, you know, I'm so sorry that happened to you and that didn't happen to me. And that was how I was hiding it. That was how I was making sure that nobody saw it, because if they did, they would notice how worthless I was. So that was that really deep level of shame that I felt that I didn't fit in there. So then I would do this thing so energetically, I could see that if I was in a group of women, Whoa, that was danger, right? Because what if those women over there who were like, powerful and whole, and I'm not saying that that is true, but that was the belief of the child, right? That those ones were whole and these ones were broken, and I was a broken one, but I couldn't let anyone see how broken I was, and I don't that is not true. No one is whole. That's true. Everyone is whole. No one is broken, right? None of us are broken. We just have these things that have happened that have made us believe things about ourselves.ย
But I'm talking about the child and what she meant. So she couldn't be with the ones who were whole, because they would see through her. She couldn't be the with the ones who were broken because she wasn't broken enough. Therefore she had to set herself up in a way that it was like this illusion of what she was couldn't be seen through. And so there was this expert that was going on. So with my next session with Charlotte, I went even deeper into this energy, and I released a lot more grief, like in in so deep where it's like whole body grief, you know, when you can cry, you're crying, you're sad, but whole body grief is, is like it's releasing an energy that's stored in your whole body from a moment, and it's super powerful to be able to have that experience, and also super painful, because you know when you allow yourself to go into this emotion fully, you know you're feeling and feeling Like, oh, like, so much pain in my solar plexus, and I and it was so funny, because I had said to Charlotte, yeah, I don't feel pain anymore when I'm healing, you know, I've gone through that and blah, blah. And she was like, Oh, so you can still feel pain. Can you like, yes, shut up. It's so so much.ย
And I did after, after I left my ex husband, I spent about 18 months dealing with the pain of loneliness, right? And it was like a sword going through my solar plexus, and this, this felt like that, right? So it was going deeper into this whole body grief, but then also allowing whole body rage and tantrums and actually lying on the floor and allowing my body to throw a childish tantrum that wanted to throw about how unfair it was right. And then allowing myself to be real about this layer of hate that was there, and hating everyone and everything in the world and I and allowing myself to express, you know, I hated my mum for letting this happen to me and my dad letting this happen to me for not being there. I hated them for not noticing that it happened to me afterwards. You know, hated my sister because it didn't happen to her. I hated all women. I wanted all women to experience how I've had this happen to them as well. I wanted the work. I wanted the world to just burn down if you've not ever allowed yourself to fully go into something. This might sound very extreme, but this is there, you know. This is there deep, deep inside and by when we allow ourselves to go here, this is where we really give ourselves freedom.
And people are scared of going into this like this, because they think that's who they'll become, because unconsciously, they know that this is actually who they are, because it's trapped in their body, and they then it's a trigger, right? But when we actually allow ourselves to be real with it and to experience it, then we can, we can release it. And this is how we release it, by going in and allowing it, allowing it to come out, to feel the vibration through us. So you know, and through this, as I said, you know, my beautiful partner was helping me shift energy as well. And I was able to identify, I can remember this feeling that I had in my body quite often as a child, and then a teenager, that I realized now was a real feeling of unsafety inside, and that came in to me, and he was helping me shift that. And I was able to make. Sense of things. So even though my brain was going, Nope, that didn't happen, I was like, yeah, maybe it didn't happen brain.ย
But this actually makes sense over here now, and I can remember when I was in kindergarten, they had these toilets, these cubicles that you would go into, and they were kind of outside, but undercover, right like out on the deck, and then the playground was behind it, and the doors were really short, so any adult walking along could see over the door and see you sitting on this toilet cubicle, right? And I can remember a point in time where that all of a sudden became scary, being able to be seen in the toilet, on the toilet was very vulnerable, and I couldn't it was, it was interesting, because I can remember being confused as to why none of the other children felt this way, why all of a sudden I felt this way. And I would wait till everyone was playing, what everyone was distracted, and then I would go to the toilet. Was this point of stress in my day, like, how would I get to the toilet? How to go the toilet?
ย And all of a sudden, this made total sense, right? It wasn't there before, and then all of a sudden it was there. And I had this repressed memories. Obviously, my brain, my little girl, is not going to be able to go, oh, this makes sense, because of this thing that happened to me when she's totally suppressed it and dissociated from it. But then all of a sudden, she's got this new this new fear that's there for her, and now she's having to work around this thing so that this thing doesn't happen to her again, right? So it was the first thing I may have spoken about how my father used to say to me, but not to my sister, you know, as I was growing up, Oh, you got to beat the boys. You got to beat the boys, and how I took it on, and how I really embodied that, and how I became super competitive, and how I got into male dominated fields like dentistry, in the military and and it all became about me being the boys, right? And, and when I say to her, did he say this to you? Like, my God, my he used to be really proud because he didn't have a son. He obviously wanted a son, right?ย
Like I think most men secretly do, and I was his second daughter, and it's like the fact that I could, I was smarter than and, you know, when you're younger and girls are bigger than boys, that I was faster than them, stronger than them, that didn't last forever. But, you know, he would take great pride in that. And and then, and one of the ways that I actually got show a lot of actually attention and affection was when I beat the boys. And I used to say to my sister, did dad ever say this to you? And she's like, No, I realize now that he might have, he probably did, but my brain was making it mean something totally different than hers. Was because I had to beat the boys to stay safe, because there was no way I was gonna let something like that happen to me again.ย
So, yeah, all these different little things that were, I'm like, oh, that were super important that, you know, it all made sense in a totally different way, almost like this jigsaw puzzle pieces all coming together. And then when I was going to the initiatives retreat. It's like between clearing this and clearing the energy of the way I had stayed safe with women, and then also through the shamanic training I'd come through and done a couple of really big for our healings within that where it was like four on four on one kind of things, where I clearing energies that I had used to protect me, right? I was going into, it was like my ultimate fear come true, going into a group of 44 women, and all my defenses that my child had created were gone. And the night before I ended up, I was in Bali, meant to be in Bali for a month, and then this stuff happened, you know, I was meant to be there for a week by myself, but my computer died, and I was going to be working. And then where I was going to stay, they were doing all these renos. It was gonna be real, super noisy anyway.ย
So I ended up coming home for the week, and then the night before, I was flying back for the retreat. You know, Rob was, you know, wanting, you know, said I expressed his desire to make love to me, and I just said to him, You know what, babe, that that sounds like a beautiful idea, but I'm like four right now, and I really just need you to hold me and let me know that I'm safe and that everything's okay. And he did, right? He just helped me, and, like, hugged me in a very non sexual way. So kept his sexual energy to himself and helped me and just let me know I was safe. And, you know, stretched my hair and did stuff that you might do to a little four year old, right? I said, she is just terrified at the moment. She is freaking the fuck out and, and I just need you to help me with it.ย
So then I went back. I went back to Bali, and I'm, like, just holding her myself, like being with her and, and this is like, you know, my God, there's gonna be all these amazing women there, because this is, like, an advanced Tantra courses. They were gonna be gorgeous. Going to be skinnier than me. They're going to be sexier than me. They're going to be like, you know, and because Daniel really does attract amazing women, yeah, because I remember, like, when Rob said something about, are you either smart one there? I'm like, No, I won't, because a lot of these women are like, you know, got PhDs in. Like, I remember I was at one and she was absolutely stunning, and she had a PhD in it was like, you know, she could, she could have been like, an astronaut kind of thing, right? Another one had, but, you know, they've got a PhD in this over here and that, and they've done, like, all these degrees. I'm like, No, I'm actually not in this group of women. I'm not extraordinary at all. I'm actually very ordinary. So I didn't even have that, right going in. I knew there was going to be these amazing women. They were all gorgeous. And, you know, didn't have my issues with, you know, like, Oh my God, I've been and because, you know, let's face it, two months of like, this emotional stuff. And, yeah, my little girl had been eating a bit too much carbs, a little bit too much chocolate, so I was going a bit softer than normal as well.ย
So, like, from a body point of view, I was feeling a bit vulnerable too, because I knew there was going to be, like, you know, some nudity and in like us, like being with each other, which was beautiful, by the way, but yeah, so I turned up and then where I was staying, because we had to organize our own accommodation the very first afternoon, this beautiful woman who has become like a dear friend of mine, John. And she's like, and this is like, I mean, super interesting, right? She's Turkish. Now, like living I went to migrate to Germany when she's very small. Ironically, both of her parents were dentists, you know, as a dentist, and now she's a diplomat living in China. I'm super interesting.ย
Anyway, we got chatting, and then I was like, okay, okay. She's like, really nice, and she's not like, you know, being really scornful of me. And it's okay. And then when I went the next day to the retreat, and I was sitting in this room, and I could feel ah for the first time ever, my energy was with me, and I was able to feel how my energy had always been elsewhere in the room, trying to, like, manipulate, trying to make me look better, trying to, you know, show up in a have me show up in a way where I was somehow an expert. And you know, I realized this partly because when I did the shamanic training, and we were doing these healings on clients, and we would all sit together in circle beforehand, and we would tune in, and the client's energy would actually turn up about half an hour before they would, and what we would tune into was always what came in the door. So it was so interesting, just for me realizing, oh my God, my I'm doing we're all doing this at all the time, right?ย
Our our energy is always out there, trying to show up in a certain way, trying to keep ourselves safe in different ways, all these defense mechanisms that we set up as children, and all these like energetic beings that we've called in to help us. And all this stuff is going on and all the time, and I had stripped my little girl bear of all her energies and all her defenses, and I was sitting in a room full of amazing women, and it felt so good that makes me want to cry, because it felt so good to just be able to be me for the first time ever, and to not feel like I had to turn up in any other way, or to try to be anything else, or to have someone see me in any way, to just be able to be me, and to Feel the safety in that. And it was beautiful. And, yeah, it was, I will talk about what I got out of the retreat in another episode, maybe in the next one. But one of the things that happened in this retreat was we were doing a morning ย embodiment practice.ย
And I was feeling such resistance and going in, and when I dropped in, there was all this grief and sadness there. And they were like, Okay, look around the room and see. And we had all these different altars. There was Ganesha and Kali and different altars and different things. And there was like a Lakshmi and Saraswati were there. And Lakshmi is the goddess of abundance, and Saraswati is the goddess of like, like the arts. Kali is like she's she's something else. And I probably have talked about her before, and I will again in the future, but Ganesha is like the God of removing obstacles. And I just looked up, and I'm I looked at this, this image of Ganesha was there, and he was there, energetically there, that his archetypal energy was there, staring into me. And I just knew I had to get to him. And I crawled across this room. And I bowed down in front of him, and I prayed for me to be able to let go of the pain.ย
Because I I realized it was me holding on to the pain, and that pain was creating my identity. And I just prayed to let go of the pain. And I did. I let go of it. And you know, at the end of the retreat, I think it was the day after, and I was feeling just this sense of freedom from this moment in time. And I was in the bathroom, and all of a sudden, I felt the energy of this perpetrator, whoever they, were there with me, very respectfully, like a distance away from me. It's not like they were trying to, you know, live all over me, but they were just there with me, and maybe, maybe my brain made this up, right, but maybe it probably did right for me to have the healing in this moment, because what I felt, when I felt this energy there, like they had come to me, and what I was able to feel for them was just a huge amount of compassion and forgiveness because I had let go of the meaning making in that moment.ย
Therefore I was able to feel feel this compassion and forgiveness for them, because I was no longer an identity created from this moment, and I was able to see what a horrible existence that must have been. And this is just my personal experience. I'm not saying, you know, if you've had this similar experience, you don't. I'm not telling you what to do here. I'm not telling you how you have to be. The whole point of this podcast is for me to share with you my experience and my journey, and perhaps for you to be able to have shifts because of this. So please don't feel like I'm telling you that you have to do this if you've had a perpetrator in your life, but I'm just telling you what I did and what I experienced and I was able to see, you know, how, what a horrible existence to be doing this, to have to have done that to little girls. You know, the level of self hatred that must have been there on some level, you know, probably unconscious, maybe conscious.ย
You know that, what a horrible, horrible life to have lived, and what had been done to them, to have turned them into that monster, you know, when they were little, and maybe, maybe nothing. Maybe that's just what they brought through. Maybe that was just the choice of this existence, but probably something horrible was done to them, and then that, you know, because that's normally what happens with perpetrators. It was done to them, and then that's all they know, and that's how they gain their power back by doing it to others. And yeah, I was able to just let go. So there you go. That's my story. Thank you for listening and holding space for that. And I'm just going to go back to those points I made in the middle, the big in the middle, the points I made in the beginning, about responsibility and trauma, and see if you hear something different now in the words, sometimes we can't control what happens to us, but what we can control is what our brain makes it mean about us.ย
Some people can't move on from trauma because they are caught up in the what happened to them and the importance of that right and the identity that they create from that and that thing, the way it shaped them, has become a part of their identity, and they can't move on. They can't let go, and it can be scared letting go, right? Because it's like when we, when we, when we have shaped our identity around something we don't know. And like, it's our unconscious. It's so amazing, our conscious knows how to survive this thing, right? Because, because it has set up all these defense mechanisms, it has sets up all these way of beings, and it knows now how to survive being this identity. It doesn't know how to survive the not being that identity, and that's scary for it, because its job is to keep us safe. And what I found to be true is when I've had massive shifts like this, thatย
I'm still me, I'm just more me. You know, it's just a deeper level of understanding of who I am, because this stuff is not us. It's almost like we put on these, these clothes that aren't us, and then we and we call this us, This clothing is us, and when we can take it off, we actually just get to be more us, more real and who we are. But that can be scary, and if you haven't done it before, yeah, that's, that's like, it's, it's big. The first time you allow yourself to do that, you that you fully surrender to the letting go. It's. Art, and you really need someone to hold space for you if you've never done it before, the energy of a moment has many layers that are stuck in us and that shapes our reality and our meaning making. So you can see all of these different levels that I cleared, and I may go on to realize that there are still more there. Maybe I've got this point of forgiveness and compassion, but I may still go, Oh, my God, there's this level of pocket over here that I hadn't realized.
And, oh, I can see how. And once you kind of start you clear the big thing, then often the attachment to these little things is gone. And as you realize them, they just naturally shift out of you. But you can see how I had had, you know, I had the shame of being worthless. I'd had the shame of not being, you know, not being able to fit into either camp, of not belonging. I had the hatred for everything and everybody, oh, the self hatred. I didn't go into that, the hatred for the body. And it was the start of an unraveling, which 'll go into probably in a different podcast about, you know, the body, about loving the body. And I could, and then I could see how, also, you know, this whole like, yeah, no, I'll go into that episode.ย
That's a whole other thing. But yeah, so there's all these different levels of energy that we in one moment, one split second in time of that just before that dissociation, it's like all frozen in my body. People choose to become victims when they don't take the responsibility for what happens after the moment of trauma, and when they stay stuck in the moment they couldn't control, instead of taking control of the ultimate outcome, which is how they choose to be because of that moment or from that moment. And then, once again, my definition of responsibility, of taking responsibility and trauma is that it brings us choice, because we can shift. We can change. We can let go with old identities. We can let go with old patterns. We can get and most importantly, we can get let go of old beliefs. And this brings us the ability to shift, to change. And basically it is empowerment. So taking responsibility is is our empowerment. It also brings in our boundaries, right? It brings us the power to say yes or to say no, and that that is our power. Okay, thank you for being here with this. If you still here with me by the end of this, I'm assuming I can't see a clock, but I'm assuming it's been quite a lengthy podcast.ย
So thank you for listening to this. So really, yeah, honor you for your own journey, for whatever your experience is, and I will see you in the next episode. I just want to say thanks for listening to this episode of the living through heart podcast. If you want to find out more about me and what I'm up to head on over to my website, Donna Joy usher.com they're going to find information on my fiction books, on my jewelry business, savage boho studio, and also on any content tools or courses I'm creating to help women to feel empowered, enriched, important and in love with their lives and.
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