“Honoring my feelings and healing this trauma has been essential to fully loving and accepting myself.” – Gabby Bernstein, from a post on her site.
The Self-Led Journey Through Addiction Recovery and Trauma – a conversation with Gabby Bernstein and Tami Simon, founder of Sounds True.
Gabby Bernstein is a number one New York Times bestselling author with nine books, including Happy Days: The Guided Path from Trauma to Profound Freedom and Inner Peace.
She says “Often when we write about shame, it activates the shame in other people and it activates the fear in your publisher or your husband or whoever else might be out there.
“But to write this book and to vulnerably share my authentic truth, my journey of addiction recovery, trauma recovery, the decades of devotional, spiritual, and personal growth to get to where I am today, it took a lot.”
She adds, “My ability to be this vulnerable is my true strength.”
On Internal Family Systems therapy: “As Richard Schwartz said in his latest book, there’s no bad parts, and the more Self energy, the more compassion, courage—there’s these C qualities: calmness, connectedness, curiosity, creativity, and that commitment, that committed nature—the more we bring those C qualities to these protector parts, the more they can relax and they can actually do great work.”
Creative Mind Audio Podcast episode – audio from the above video:
The quotes above are from the transcript – see below.
Visit the Sounds True site to learn about Sounds True One, Insights At The Edge interviews and resources such as books and programs on Internal Family Systems by Richard Schwartz mentioned in the video and audio podcast:
Sounds True has created “the world’s largest living library of transformational teachings that support and accelerate spiritual awakening and personal transformation.”
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Creative Mind Audio Podcast episode transcript
Tami Simon:
Today, my guest is Gabby Bernstein. Gabby is a number one New York Times bestselling author. She’s written nine books, including The Universe Has Your Back and a new book, Happy Days: The Guided Path from Trauma to Profound Freedom and Inner Peace.
She’s an international speaker, host of the podcast Dear Gabby, and she claims her mission to help us crack open to a spiritual relationship of our own understanding so we can be aligned with our true purpose.
Gabby is a genuine explorer of spiritual and healing modalities, and through her explorations, she has found a pathway to recovery from addiction, the healing of trauma, and being very upfront and forward with her own devotional spiritual nature.
Here, she shares with us how she found what it means to be led by the self, that mysterious center of our being that can witness everything that goes on in our life and can be a compassionate center connected with source energy. Here’s my conversation with Gabby Bernstein.
With that, let me welcome, friend, Gabby Bernstein. Gabby?
Gabby Bernstein: Hello, my friend. How are you? It’s so nice to be here.
TS: Yes. It’s great to be with you. Right here at the beginning, you share in the beginning of your book about how this is your most vulnerable book and how it actually came out from you as a risk. I wonder if you can talk a bit about the risk you feel you took to write Happy Days and why you felt it was the time to do so.
GB: Well, I’m not sure about you when you write a book, but whenever I write a book, the introduction’s the last thing that I write because… Does that happen for you? I don’t know.
That’s my experience, because when I write a book, I go through this journey and then come out the other side and realize, OK. What just happened?
So I wrote the introduction of the book at the last minute in response to some of the feedback I received from my publishers, and this is how it went. They said to me, “Gabby, we are nervous for you. You’re sharing one negative story after the next and we don’t feel like you’re showing your true strength.”
My immediate response was, “My ability to be this vulnerable is my true strength.”
And with that conviction, I was able to stand my ground and say, “This material will be printed in this way, and it will be of high service to the world.”
Often when we write about shame, it activates the shame in other people and it activates the fear in your publisher or your husband or whoever else might be out there.
But to write this book and to vulnerably share my authentic truth, my journey of addiction recovery, trauma recovery, the decades of devotional, spiritual, and personal growth to get to where I am today, it took a lot.
Tami, I wouldn’t have been able to put my face on a cover of a book that said Happy Days: The Guided Path from Trauma to Profound Freedom and Inner Peace if I had not fully lived that.
So as a result of having the bravery and the courage and the vulnerability to live to tell, I have committed to putting my face on the book, to standing behind every single word, and that conviction and that courage was necessary in order to put it into print.
TS: I wanted to ask you a question about sharing vulnerably, because I think sometimes it can get a little confusing, as in there’s a way that we’re really letting people see us and know us.
And that’s so important, but there are other times when I can feel sometimes people are saying like, “I’m just being vulnerable,” but what they’re actually doing is—I don’t know what other words to use—puking out there a process in a certain kind of way.
And I’m like, whoa! Is that really helpful right now? Did I need to know all that? What are you actually trying to do? So what do you think is clean vulnerability, if you will?
GB: Oh, what an awesome question. I’ve never been asked that before. That’s such a radical question. Great.
Clean vulnerability, I think it’s extremely important for us to talk about clean vulnerability right now in this day and age when we all are the media, we all have access to these phones and devices where we can just spew, like you said. What is it? Puke out our vulnerability. So we all have that at our fingertips at any given moment where we can just let out.
I believe that oftentimes there’s an additional way that we spew, right? So there’s the puking out all of our ideas, like you mentioned, or all the things that we need to tell, and then there’s the vulnerability for the sake of being seen, because there’s many of us out there that have this deep longing and need to feel seen, to feel recognized.
These days, a lot of people are doing that through their unclean vulnerability. So I want to define what I believe clean vulnerability is.
When we have the ability to share our truth and express our genuine experience without feeling triggered by it, with knowing in our heart that we have come through the other side of our experience and to live to tell that truth, we can trust that it will have an impact on others.
Whereas in my book, Happy Days, there’s a chapter on shame, and I share about how I was talking. I agreed to lead a group. Let me back up a bit.
In the book, I talk about how I remembered being sexually abused. When I was 36 years old, I remembered childhood abuse in a dream.
Shortly after that, I was asked to speak on a panel at Kripalu, lead a workshop with two other women, and it was on the topic of women’s empowerment and sexual abuse and things that other women had gone through, particularly sexual in nature. I agreed to do it.
In doing it, it was actually a disaster, because I was not grounded. I was actually extremely activated still at that time. It was actually there at that retreat that I started to recognize a lot of my own shame.
So this was a really big sign for me that I was not in healthy vulnerability and, thankfully, I had the tools to pull back and reorganize and get regulated and really care for myself so that I wasn’t activating myself and re-traumatizing myself in front of a lot of other people.
So we have to become the witness. And I hope that people listening right now can not have to learn that the hard way like I did, where you can really recognize, OK. I have to do my own work first, make sure that I feel safe in my system, feel safe in my story.
And when I speak on behalf of the parts of myself who have experienced trauma or the parts of myself who have experienced addiction or any extreme behavior, I’m speaking for them not as them.
Because that can be really dangerous if we’re in that. I’m leaning into IFS here, which we can talk about as well, but if I’m in that activation while I’m sharing vulnerably, I’m going to trigger other people.
Whereas if I’m in my grounded self and my adult resourced self, speaking about an experience in the pursuit of the service of others, that is clean vulnerability.
TS: Now, Gabby, let’s just back up for a moment, because you introduced IFS, which is Internal Family Systems, a therapeutic method developed by Dick Schwartz, and some of our listeners may not be familiar with it. It’s obviously been very, very important to you.
When you talk about being aware of your parts, a part that feels shame or a part that feels traumatized, can you tell me what it’s like to be sitting in that seat of awareness of a part versus, “I went through this. This is me”?
GB: Yes. I’d love to demystify IFS for your folks that have not necessarily read your books that you’ve published for him, for Dick, and the great work that you share with IFS.
So Internal Family Systems therapy, otherwise known as IFS, created by an incredible human, Dick Schwartz, who you and I are both friends with, is a very transformational therapy that can really heal you from the inside out.
From my perspective, the way that I would demystify this for the average listener, for somebody who may not be aware of this process: it is a process of recognizing that we are not one mono human, but we have a lot of different parts of who we are, and these parts of us were established at a very young age.
So the two specific parts that we recognize, the parts that are almost inner personalities—so rather than thinking we’re one personality, we have a lot of different personalities inside of us.
Maybe you found yourself saying things like, “Oh, there’s a part of me that gets really rageful when my husband speaks in that tone,” or, “There’s a part of me that wants to just retreat when I feel activated.”
We all have these different moments where we can say things like that, noticing that that actually could potentially, opening your mind today, be an inner part of who you are.
So from an IFS perspective, there’s two types of parts.
There are the exiled parts, which are the little children who experienced trauma, who experienced feelings of being inadequate, unlovable, experienced insecure attachment in any form.
So in those moments in childhood when we start to recognize those experiences of trauma in whatever form, big T trauma or small t trauma, being bullied or being sexually abused.
We’ve all had these moments of trauma. Those exiled parts immediately go under lock and key and we say, “Nope, I never want to feel that again.”
So we put these little children under lock and key and we say, “I’m not going to go there and I’m going to build up all these protection mechanisms,” otherwise known as protector parts, to avoid ever having to face those impermissible feelings of fear, terror, inadequacy, and feelings of being unlovable.
Protectors could look like control. Protectors could look like being an overachiever, like if you felt like you’re unlovable, you could be a big-time overachiever.
If you had a narcissist parent or a very insecure attachment style, you may have built up a protector part that wants to prove yourself to the world and be very successful out in the world so you could feel like you’re being seen, you’re being good enough, you have enough.
These protection mechanisms, otherwise known as protector parts, start to run the show.
They have a very important role in our inner family system, but they can get very extreme. In my case, my protector parts became so extreme because I had this dissociated memory of trauma that I was working so hard to override that I became a cocaine addict.
Now, actually, today, Tami, is my 17 years of sobriety today. October 2nd is my sober date. So I’ve been sober 17 years now.
TS: Congratulations.
GB: Thank you. Thank you. It’s really nice to celebrate that with you. I can really look now and say that the cocaine addict part of me is a part of me that I am grateful for, that I love, because she was doing whatever she could to keep me safe at that time.
So that would be a very extreme part, those addict parts. They’re like firefighters. They swoop in to put down the fire, to put out the fire.
So for the viewer right now or the listener, consider that we have an inner family system.
But what’s beautiful and what’s most hopeful and heart opening is that we also have this part of us, this ever-present energy within us, known as Self, with a capital S.
Self is the undamaged, resourced, adult part of who we are, the energy of love.
Often, in spiritual lexicon, we might say higher self or God, the spirit within us, the part of us that is totally undamaged and available to take care of these more extreme parts.
So now I can answer your question about what that feels like for me. I hope that in my explanation it helps people go deeper.
So the more I practice IFS throughout my trauma recovery with my therapist and with Dick and getting more trained in the model, the more I could see the moments when my protector parts would get activated.
So for example, when I feel out of control, I would get very activated. So I could start to become the witness of those moments instead of becoming the activated part.
So the more I was able to notice those moments of, OK. My team are not doing the work that we need to get done and I’m freaking out and I’m getting activated.
And my protector wants to control, in those moments. I could then notice that protector and know more about it and start to become curious about that part of me.
In that space of extending curiosity and compassion and bringing calm energy to that part, I started to extend with that Self energy. I started to allow that Self within me to become the internal parent that could guide that fear-based part, that super protector part to a more calm state.
So I can now, as a result of bringing more Self energy to those protection mechanisms, to those protectors, the protectors can actually do better work in the world.
So my controller is still doing a great job, Tami. She’s keeping everything under control in the house. She’s got the toddler. She’s writing the books. She’s showing up here with you. She’s staying clean and sober. She’s doing great work, but she’s not in an extreme role anymore.
So as Dick said in his latest book, there’s no bad parts, and the more Self energy, the more compassion, courage—there’s these C qualities: calmness, connectedness, curiosity, creativity, and that commitment, that committed nature—the more we bring those C qualities to these protector parts, the more they can relax and they can actually do great work.
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Douglas Eby (M.A./Psychology) is author of the The Creative Mind series of sites which provide “Information and inspiration to help creative people thrive.”
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