S2 EP 4: Healing Childhood Trauma & Embracing Imperfection in Parenting with Mia Von Scha

In this powerful episode of The Midlife Awakening, Odelia sits down with child therapist and trauma specialist Mia Von Scha to explore how unresolved childhood trauma resurfaces in midlife — especially during perimenopause — and how we can begin to heal.

Mia shares her expertise on attachment theory, EMDR, and the importance of rupture and repair in parenting. Together, we discuss why it’s not only okay to mess up as a parent, but how those moments of repair actually teach our children resilience and emotional regulation.

Key insights from this episode:

• Why perimenopause often brings unresolved childhood trauma to the surface
• The difference between big “T” trauma and developmental trauma
• How attachment patterns formed in childhood shape our adult relationships
• Why imperfection in parenting can be a powerful gift to our children
• How EMDR offers a gentle, effective way to heal trauma without rehashing the past

This conversation is both comforting and hopeful, reminding us that healing is possible at any age — and that our journey toward wholeness can also be a profound gift to our children and future generations.

🔗 Learn more about Mia’s work at transformationalparenting.guru

or follow her:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/transformationalparenting/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TransformationalParenting/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/TransformationalParenting

Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/mia-von-scha-0a5b431/

Tiktok: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mia-von-scha-0a5b431/

Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:01.314)
Hey guys, and welcome back to the Midlife Awakening. This is a podcast about transformation for women who are waking up to who they really are while navigating everything that comes with midlife. I'm so glad that you're here. Today on the Midlife Awakening, I'm joined by the incredible Mia Von Scha. Mia is an experienced child therapist, trauma specialist, and therapeutic play expert with over 15 years of experience supporting families across the UK, South Africa, and internationally.

She holds a master's in integrative counseling and psychotherapy for children, adolescents and families, and is highly trained in therapeutic modalities including EMDR, NLP, hypnotherapy and child accelerated trauma treatments. Mia is the founder of Transformational Parenting and one of the directors of Origami Wings CIC, where she helps families heal and grow through trauma-informed support. Her approach is grounded in the latest research on attachment theory,

child development and resilience. But what really stands out is her warm, compassionate style that makes people feel safe and understood.

I wanted to bring Mia onto the show because so many of us, as we reach perimenopause, find that we can no longer ignore the past. Old wounds and unresolved childhood trauma rise to the surface, and it can feel overwhelming. But as Mia reminds us, this is also an opportunity, a chance to heal ourselves so we can step into the second half of our lives with courage and confidence, and so we can model healthier ways of being for our children. So let's dive in in here.

from here about trauma, healing and the hope of transformation.

Odilia(01:56.92)
So welcome here to the show. So glad that you can join us today on the Midlife Awakening. And today we're going to be talking about various topics around childhood trauma, how we can help our kids, how we can help ourselves as we sort of come into this age of perimenopause and it becomes very prevalent that we do have childhood trauma that we can no longer suppress and we want to now heal. So maybe we can start out with you just sharing with us how you got into this line of work and why you're so passionate about it.

Yes, certainly. Thanks, Odilia. Lovely to be here. This is the work I did not want to be in when I started out. I was like, if you think of the hero's journey, I was the reluctant hero. It's like a challenge. like, no, thanks. Not that one. So I actually started off in the late 90s when I was doing my psychology undergrad. I was working in a trauma, you know, like a crisis drop-in centre.

which was a pretty rude awakening to trauma work. I was in my early twenties and my very first client had watched his entire family get murdered in front of him. So it was all a bit much and I ran as far as I could from that line of work as quickly as I could.

I imagine in the 90s, I think now in 2025, there's a big focus now coming around trauma and being trauma informed and childhood trauma and there's a big focus. But back in the 90s, it wasn't the case. It wasn't really talked about, was it?

No, and the techniques that we were using at the time, I mean, they're barbaric when I think about it now. You know, we were having people just talk and talk and rehash their trauma over and over again, and which can be re-traumatizing. It was certainly I found it traumatic as a therapist. So yeah, I didn't really want to have anything to do with that. I actually moved far away and ended up doing more life coaching work. work here
with parents and helping parents with parenting techniques and just working on their own stuff so they're not passing it on to kids. But of course as my journey went on and the more I did the more I realized actually it's all coming back to trauma. And there is no healing and moving on and parenting effectively and unless you've dealt with the trauma that it kind of infiltrates everything you do.

Yeah, it's like that generational trauma, isn't it? Just keeps repeating the cycle, just keeps repeating itself until at some point someone decides it ends here and I'm going to heal this so that I don't, you know, traumatize my kids effectively because we do even if we have the best intentions not to. Those patterns and those habits seem to just come out of it. They're more like not instinctive, but I don't know what's the word I'm looking for, but

It just sort of comes out, you've got no control over it. It's part of who you are, really. And so you hear.

Yes, yes. Well, we create these internal working models of the people in our lives. So what is a parent? You're creating an internal working model of that as you are being parented as a child. Then that becomes your model for what is normal. If your parenting was not normal, then that's your internal model. So you can consciously overcome that, that it requires a bit of work. And then

The minute you slip into your kind of unconscious patterns, which happens all the time, then it's like the tape that's playing is that tape that your parents played and you just see the same thing.

I always like to think of it as like, you've got these apps running in the background that are, you know, you know, doing updates and doing, you know, doing whatever they're doing in the background. You actually have no control. have no visibility of them, but they're actually quite important because they're what's driving the whole machine at the end of the day.

Yes, exactly that.

So some people might think of the word trauma and they associate it with maybe a big event, a car accident or someone who's gone to war, that's a big one. Or some big life changing event, but it's not necessarily the case. So I'd like to understand as someone who's worked with trauma for quite a long time, what would you say your definition of trauma is for those people that maybe think that they haven't experienced any trauma?

This could be eye-opening for them to realise, actually I have.

Well, I mean, that was me. And that's part of my passion for this work is I thought I had a happy childhood. I was like, yeah, everything was fine until I started digging into childhood development, attachment. And I was like, wow, okay. I had an enormous amount of neglect. And not to blame my parents, my parents were essentially teenagers when they had children.

They didn't know what they were doing. you think about people who are in perimenopause and going into menopause now, when we were parented at that time, the advice that was being given to parents was things like let the child cry it out. Don't spoil them. Don't give in to those kind of tantrums things. So we didn't have the emotional nurturing and the containment that

this generation are having now. So I suppose my definition of trauma is a little bit broader. Most people when they think of trauma are going to think of the earthquake or the car accident or the sexual assault or something like that. And so to me, those are potentially very traumatic events. But I just broaden that to include things like developmental trauma, which is


Often the things that didn't happen, rather than the things that did. So the person that wasn't there to hold you when that difficult thing happened. And the baby who was left to cry when they were hungry. There are a lot of things that look, they look really innocent from the outside. But when we really understand childhood development, we look at, you know,

Trauma is often a life-threatening event. But what is life-threatening to a six-month-old baby? They're completely dependent on the adult for protection, for food, for safety, for everything. So a parent that's not responding to the needs of their child, that is life-threatening. And it is experienced as a trauma. And just because babies don't remember these things consciously, doesn't mean

being remembered in the body and in the emotional, the way that we're emotionally set up and the way that the nervous system is set up.

Yeah, that's so true. And I heard I was listening to an interview with Bessel Von de Kolk, who's written the book, The Body Keeps Its Score, which is great. And he said something similar. it really because up until that point, I was also thinking, oh, the trauma is the event. And how you've just explained it, it's not actually the event. It's the no one came to help me. Yes. It's that feeling abandoned or that not like no one was there for you.

kind of that that's the trauma.

Well, exactly, because actually, you know, as human beings, we're pretty resilient creatures and we can go through really, really difficult stuff. But if we have the support and the containment as we go through that, we do recover. So the lack of recovery comes in when there wasn't somebody to help you through that, where your hurt and your needs were not heard. And that's actually the trauma.

is after the fact, what is happening, who's there to support you, how are they supporting you to get through that? Because we can get through difficult stuff. And we do, you know, I don't know a life that doesn't have like really difficult things that have happened.

Yeah, that's so true. Yes. And when he said that that was so impactful for me, I actually started crying because I was like, my gosh, yes. That's what that's what the real issue is for me. It's that there was no one there to help me in that situation. I was left alone to handle it on my own. So that can be very impactful. And so a really good thing for people to think about as they look back on their own lives, their own childhoods, and rethink what they've been through and

maybe realizing that they did actually have some form of childhood trauma. But that's okay because there are ways that we can heal this now with the emergence of attachment theory. One thing that you've mentioned, maybe you can talk a little bit about attachment theory. Maybe not everyone is aware of what that is.

Yeah, so that started with this psychologist by the name of John Bowlby, who was looking at attachment and what happens, I some of the early things they looked at were children who were going into hospital. So they were removed from the parents or the parent was going into hospital and they were separated. And what was going on with these children? So children would go into hospital and the parents were told not to visit. So you'd have a

two-year-old going in and the parent would come and visit once a week or something. The child doesn't know what's going on. That's trauma. I'm looking at that and what happens when the parent then arrives to visit and how these children were reacting quite strangely to the parents. they might cling to them or they might reject them completely or there was this kind conflict.

fusion in how they were reconnecting with the parents. And this led on to a lot of studies around what happens in a very famous experiment. The mother and the baby are in the room together and then they're playing, a stranger comes into the room, the mother gets up and leaves the room, leaves the baby with the stranger.

called strange situation. The mother gets up and leaves the baby with a stranger and then the mother comes back and then look at what is the baby's behavior towards the stranger for a start taking love with someone they don't know at all. And then what happens when the mother comes back? Does the baby go to the mother and get comfort, which would be natural response is that he would be very upset to be left with a complete stranger.

the mother comes back, you'd still be upset to climb onto the mother's lap, get some support and recover, right? Nice secure attachment. But what happens with babies who are insecurely attached is either they become incredibly clingy and inconsolable, or they may reject the mother completely when she returns. And they don't want to be comforted by her. They may actually even turn to the stranger or

attention and comfort. So there's a whole branch of psychology that's developed from looking at these and what happens to these children who are securely attached or insecurely attached as they grow up and how that then plays out into their adult relationships, into their friendships. And yeah, mean, it's incredibly impactful if you have

learn to attach securely trust people or

tends to manifest in our adult life more so than at any other time. What would you say, what are some examples of how would we manifest in our lives as adults?

Well, you see things like, there's two different kinds of insecure attachments. On the one hand, you would have about who will have recorded like positive effect, but it's not real. So you're pretending to be happy, to be okay. Meanwhile, the negative emotions are all squashed up into the time.

to have those. And people are very compliant, people pleasing, performers, know, people who are getting the straight A is doing really well. These are the insecure attached kids often that we miss, because they do really well at school and all the adults love them. And they seem to just be, you know, Yeah, but actually, they're just pushing down all of that negative affect. And then


something will happen, they'll explode and then they'll feel so guilty and embarrassed and you know try to pretend that didn't happen, don't understand why it did happen. Obviously you can't keep everything down forever. That's on the one hand and then of course that plays out in relationships because you can get into abusive relationships because you keep on pleasing and you're doing what the other person wants and a lot of abusive ones will take advantage of that.

And it's missing, of course, those are into parenting and friendships and everything as well. Then on the other side, you have more of the children who end up in therapy because they're acting out. So the negative emotions very much to be on the surface, they're trying to get attention. And what they really try to do is actually keep the parent close and safe, know, they feel safe. But

They know they can be really coy and engaging one minute and then completely losing the plot the next minute. And that constant changing is keeping the parents' attention on them all the time. So again, that plays out in relationships in all sorts of ways with, know, adult tantrums, you think of it like that. And, you know,

being really sweet no pushing away and pulling clothes.

both scenarios it's basically what comes down to seeking that attention whether it's in a positive way by being the over performer overachieving look at me I'm doing really well aren't you proud of me or the opposite where it's I'm gonna lash out I'm going to be negative you know aggressive I'm gonna be all the bad things because I want your attention you need my I need your help so it seems to be that seems to be like the call is needing more

The core is safety. Your attachment strategies, and that's what they are, they're strategies to keep the parent's attention on you so that you can stay safe. So it's not that we would behave like that all the time, but under threat, those strategies come out. And the child has learned what kind of parent they have and how to behave to keep the parent's attention on them.

So some you need to perform, or some you need to throw your toys. But you're trying to stay safe. So it's not bad behavior. this is because I work a lot with parents and with children, I'm like, there's no bad behavior. There's information, there's communication, there's feedback. And that child has learned to behave like that, your attention.

The whole family system needs to shift if you want to shift that.

Yeah, that's so true. And it's talking about our own children and how our trauma can affect them. So once you realize that you've got these patterns, you've had this traumatic event or something, this trauma from your childhood, how can this prevent you from showing up for your own children? So how do we make sure that we are still showing up for our kids, even though we know we're on a healing journey and we don't want to pass that trauma on to...

So then we want the cycle to end, but we're still on our journey.

Yeah, mean, unfortunately, childhood trauma is going to interfere with your relationship with the children. Like it interferes with all relationships, because it's really difficult to be present. The whole thing about trauma is the way that is stored in the brain and to try and keep us safe. We get triggered, you know,

the brain's triggering us to notice certain sights, smells, feelings in the environment. It's like, oh, I noticed that. That's a link to that earlier trauma. And then it's starting to trigger those past memories into the present moment, which means you can't be present, which is really what our children need. They need our presence. They need safety. They need relationship with us. That's really the whole of parenting.

And so if you can't be present, that's going to interfere with your children's attachment to you with their own sense of safety and everything that's going on in relationship. course, it takes time to deal with your own trauma. And it's not that, now this has happened, now your children are forever or something. And this is where I can talk about attachment strategies again, is

that the strategy, the secure attachment is not necessarily the best one because children who have the A or the C, which are the other versions of the insecure attachment, if they earn the B, secure attachment, by dealing with the trauma and everything, actually have more flexibility in the world. Because they have more strategies to draw from in different situations.

problem is if you're stuck in one strategy, then that's all you've got. So, it's not necessarily a bad thing if you've not been the perfect parent and your children don't have a secure strategy. I don't want parents to think like, I've messed this up, it's all due. It's hopeless. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:20.854)
And the more you work on your stuff, and the more you come to a place of wholeness and presence, your children will go on that journey with you. Right. And as you heal, they heal. Right.

So really comes back to that, like you lead by example. So yes, you may have caused some, because in effect we're not perfect as parents. We don't know what we're doing. No, I don't know what I'm doing half the time. But that's really true. And that is comforting to know that like, if you go on this journey and you let them see you go on this journey, I think that's probably the important part is that they see you going on this journey and that you're vulnerable enough to say, you know, I'm not perfect.

But I know I'm not perfect and I'm trying to heal myself if they can see that. And yeah, then they do get those other strategies that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Thank you, Lujan.

And lot of, you know, when we look at parenting and people want to be perfect parents and there's actually no such thing. The research I've done looking at, you know, parenting, how much of parenting is what we would call good parenting. And it's probably about 30%, the best parents getting it right about 30 % of the time. And the rest, the other 70 % is what we call retching and repair.

So you're messing it up, and then you're going and saying sorry. Or you're fixing it in some way, or you're really making it up. And that's actually the magic. The magic is in those times where you've messed it up, and then you go and make it right.

Speaker 2 (23:00.428)
And they learn from that, don't they? Because they learn from you because they see you're not perfect and they see, well, you've made the mistake and this is how you're fixing it. And the importance of that going in and fixing it, think that's that's really impactful. Well, that's really that's really just hit me quite. Yes. Yeah. Because you don't think about that when you're in it, when you're in it, you're like, you just want to do the best job that you can.

And I don't think we're compassionate enough with ourselves. I don't think we give ourselves the space and the permission to not be perfect. And that's really important, I think, as a parent's journey.

is to realize that...

Yeah, like your imperfection is actually good for them as long as you're learning from it and you're, you know, you're making it right or attempting to make it right. They're learning too. Learning doesn't just happen in schools, it happens in everyday life.

Yes.

Speaker 1 (23:52.236)
No more is happening in everyday life. What are the important things you want to learn? Part of that is what does it mean to be human? And if you're perfect, you're playing the perfect role, you're not giving your children permission to be imperfect. So they're putting the pressure on themselves to be something that is absolutely impossible.

Yeah, it's

Speaker 1 (24:18.304)
when they see you being human and flawed and messing up and having bad days, they're like, okay, that's normal. And that internal working model is going, yeah, all right. I'm like my mum, I'm like a bit of a mess sometimes.

It's okay, it's okay. know, we're a work in progress all the time, aren't Wow, thank you for that. That's been, I mean, I don't know if anyone else listening has really felt that, but that has really just hit a chord for me because I know that I do, beat myself up a lot around how I parent and am I being a good enough parent? But I do always try to, when I see that I'm messed up, I always do try to make right. So that gives me some comfort to know that I'm doing it.

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:03.882)
You know, I am doing it right. Perfect, but right, you know, following the right strategy. So what else is it important for us to heal our childhood trauma besides the attachments?

Yes, it

Speaker 1 (25:14.734)
Yeah. So, I mean, if we step away from children at the moment and just think about yourself, know, childhood, any adverse childhood experiences can lead to long term chronic health conditions and some psychological conditions. So the research that I've drawn for that is some called ASIS research from Filiity and colleagues from the three of us.

So maybe just explain for the viewers, the listeners quick is, so ACES is like a score, it's a questionnaire that you can do. And if you score certain points that it's sort of basically says that you've had an adverse childhood, you've suffered adverse childhood experiences.

So yeah, what what Filiity and his colleagues were actually looking at where they started out was with women in weight loss flats. They were losing an enormous amount of weight, but then they would go away and put it all back on again. It's like what is going on here? And started digging into that a bit and discovered that most of these women have childhood trauma, often childhood sexual trauma. And

that was affecting their ability to heal in terms of weight loss. And they then expanded that art. think they studied 17,000 people in what was in the California area. And they looked at, okay, they looked at the medical records of these people. And then they gave them this ACEs questionnaire. So it's accurate childhood experiences. Did they have any trauma, any neglect, any...

dysfunctional family things, parents who's gone to prison or domestic violence, we're looking at things like that. And the higher the ACE scores of how many child abuse, child abuse parents who they have was correlated to higher risk of every, every chronic health condition we know, cancer, diabetes, disease, all of the big ones.

Speaker 2 (27:26.968)
And that's right, there is a link between those two.

And such a high correlation, mean, we're talking high correlation then say between smoking and lung cancer, that it's just absolutely insane that everybody doesn't know about this. looking at somebody say with an ACE score of six or higher is likely to die 20 years earlier than somebody with an ACE score of zero. That's huge.

Yeah, that's insane.

I often hesitate to bring it up because people become terrified then. Well, I had a parent who went to prison and one who was an alcoholic and there was domestic violence and there was this and so I'm going to die. We want the conclusion that we want people to come to. The thing is to know that if you know that about yourself that you've had these difficult experiences in childhood, it's really, really important

to actually go and address that. I meet so many people who they're terrified of addressing it. You know, they just like, I'm not opening that box. I put that stuff in a box in my mind. I've locked it up. I'm never opening it. I don't want to go there. I don't want to think about it. But you don't have a choice really, because it is affecting you. It's affecting your relationships, it's affecting your health. You need to address it.

Speaker 1 (28:54.482)
I really would encourage people to look into and nobody said you're going to talk about EMDR, which I'll explain in a moment. But there are therapies like EMDR where you don't have to talk about it. You don't have to sit and talk about it and rehash that trauma because so many people who have trauma, enormous amounts of shame.

It's really difficult to start that journey because I'm going to have to sit in front of someone and I'm going to be judged and they're going to hear about these terrible things and I don't want to say it, I don't even want to think it. But just to encourage people that there are ways of dealing with that, you don't have to do that. You don't have to be that vulnerable within yourself, but you don't have to be that vulnerable with your therapist

or maybe working with them that you have to talk about.

Because not everybody is comfortable. know for myself, I love talk therapy. That has always been my go-to, but I know other people that are, you know, they don't see, they wouldn't, they would never try it. They would never, because they're not comfortable with it. So it's good to know that there are other modalities out there that they can use that can still be helpful for them. And I like to, I always like to, and I'd like to get your view on this because, you know, earlier we talked about you started out in

Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:27.406)
in therapy where people were talking about their issues and it was just rehash. And so I've come to the conclusion in the last two years that therapy is really great for validating an experience that you may have gone through where we don't get the validation ourselves, or we don't give ourselves the validation, we question ourselves, we doubt ourselves. But really it's not going to heal you. You have to take the next step. And there's so many different healing modalities out there like EMDR that will actually

Thank

Speaker 2 (30:57.058)
help you heal and you will see the difference between that and going to traditional talk therapy. Not to say that traditional talk therapy is not helpful. It is and it has its place. But if you want to heal, there are other modalities. So maybe you want to talk a little bit about what EMDR is, how does it work and how it can help.

Well, I'm still coming from what you just said, because that was exactly my experience was years and years of therapy and like, okay, well now I know that this was actually a traumatic experience. understand that we brought it to the night we talked about it, but I don't feel better. I don't feel okay. Yeah, anything I feel worse because now it's all on the surface instead of the hidden away. And that really was my journey into EMDR.

was partly that and partly some very young children that I know who, I mean, strange enough, three young children who experienced witnessing their mothers being murdered by their fathers. One. And very, very young, just two, three years old. How do we treat them? What do do? So I ended up doing my dissertation on EMDR for infants and toddlers with trauma.

because it doesn't require the verbal slides. don't have to be cognitive. don't have to think about it. We don't have to talk about it and we can still process that. but also for myself, having been through the talk therapy and finding that I wasn't really going anywhere with that. EMDR was absolutely amazing. Just in a very short space of time taking that and something, you know, if you think about distressing

experience that you had, even if you just think about it now, you bring it to mind, you find you start tearing up or your heart starts racing or you're having a visceral experience of that, even though you may have talked about it for years in therapy, but that is still there. And what the EMDR does, and I literally watch this, it's like magic in front of me, somebody who's

Speaker 1 (33:12.366)
you know, having a really, really strong response to something that happened and within an hour or an and a half of doing this EMDR, then I feel fine about that now. You know, we'll scale it on a scale of zero to 10. How distressed are you feeling when you start and then maybe at eight or nine out of 10 level of distress. And by the time we finish, they're at a one, which is a huge

That's amazing. Yeah, that is amazing. Okay. And my next question is going to be what is it about the perimenopause phase that tends to make us feel this? Well, I have anyway, this need for healing becomes louder and yeah, it's like you can't suppress it anymore.

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:00.662)
Yes, so I think of that in terms of the window of tolerance, which is a term coined by Daniel Siegel, looking at like we all in terms of our nervous system, we have capacity to take on so much at any given time. It changes from day to day, it changes from hour to hour. How big is your window of tolerance right now? Or what is going to push you over the edge?

And some days it takes a lot to push you over the edge. You're like, yeah, I've got this. Okay, bring it on. then the other day, it's like, I don't know, somebody uses your favorite cup and you fall into a meltdown. So it's like, okay, well, what is a window of tolerance at the moment? And when we go into perimenopause and we've got all of that hormonal stuff happening, think about a teenager.

you know, when they're going through adolescence and how volatile they are and every little thing is a huge drama and it's the same sort of thing. We've got all of this hormonal change going on and a window of tolerance is just smaller. So if you've got childhood trauma, if you've got all of these things sitting in the background, your ability to regulate your nervous system, to

keep that stuff with us, it's just not as easy as it is when you don't have that going on. It's like, you know, think about how your window of tolerance will shrink if you're hungry and you didn't sleep well last night and you know, maybe something happened this morning that wasn't great and then you didn't get your cup of coffee because you were running late and

you know, all of those things add up. So it's, it's like that. We've just got this extra thing that's adding a stress to our nervous system and making us more vulnerable to those things that are happening under the surface anyway.

Speaker 2 (36:10.144)
Okay, that makes sense. That does make a lot of sense. Yeah, because I've definitely felt that in the last two years as I start to enter in perimenopause, things that I thought weren't an issue have not become an issue. And I want to deal with it and, you know, move on and change and heal and grow. So I can definitely resonate with that. now trying to start a healing, a healing journey can be, it can be quite overwhelming.

So you get to this point where you have identified, I've got some childhood trauma. can see how it's showing up in my adult life and how it's negatively impacting my life. I want to change that. want to heal this. We've talked about a couple of things. We've talked about therapy. We've talked about some other modalities that can help. But it can be quite overwhelming for someone who wants to start on their journey. So what would your suggestion be? Like where can they make a start? How do they get on this journey?

the

Speaker 1 (37:07.886)
Yeah, I mean, I'm biased because I'm a therapist. I'm not a good therapist. And it may be that, but that may not be your thing. know, everybody is different and your journey is going to be unique to you. So for some people, you know, it may be more of a physical journey. They need some good massage, you know, or

Maybe they need some psychedelics. don't know. My go-to would be to start with a therapist. Start with someone who's going to listen, who's going to help you unpack. Like what are all the things that are going on there? Is it childhood trauma or is it actually something else? Or a character's life?

It's such a confusing time and when you've got hormones kicking in and the brain fog is there and everything and it's difficult to go. Okay, is this just general stress that I'm dealing with right now because I've got young children and aging parents and all of those nice things or is this something from the

everything else.

Speaker 1 (38:29.998)
I need to actually dredge at a point and deal with what's going on. You may be able to do that if you've got a or a really good friend who can help you out. You can journal, that's another good way of doing

That's a really good one, yeah.

I like to have somebody to balance things off. I find that really helpful to talk to somebody else and have them go, yeah, but actually, you know what you said just now doesn't really fit with what you're saying right now. Just call me up on some of those things.

It's just about having that validation at the end of the day, isn't it? It's that you want everybody one has this inner need to be heard. So that's where the therapy can come in and really be helpful. And if therapy is not your thing, I think something else that you mentioned is pretty good. It's. Feeling safe in your body and I know in the book, the body keeps score. talks a lot about this, about feeling safe in your body again, because maybe in childhood, that's where the trauma stems from. It's not feeling safe in your body. So how can you.

Yes.

Speaker 1 (39:26.254)
Thank

Speaker 2 (39:38.604)
make yourself feel safe, what strategies can you introduce in your day to day that will help you make you feel safe in your body again and regulate your nervous system.

Yeah, yeah, like you're not going crazy. Yeah. It's not it's a really difficult time. It's a really difficult time for everybody that's going to you differently. But you are going to make it out the other side. And if you can see it as an opportunity where things are coming up, we're not coming up

Exactly.

Speaker 1 (40:14.934)
to torture you, so that you can heal that, so that you can move forward, that the second half of your life, because there's still another half to go, the second half of your life can be magical.

It's about growth at the end of the day. It's about growing and growth is never, it's not comfortable. It's, you know, this depiction of like this healing journey is going to be wonderful and there's rainbows. No, it's going to be hard. It's going to be uncomfortable at times. But when you come out on the other end, you're going to come out a different person and a better, more whole person that can live a, you know, the second half of your life can be far more fulfilling than the first half potentially, depending on your situation, right?

Yeah, and you can think of it also as a gift that you're giving to the next generation. The one after that and the one after that, you know, that's going to echo down through time. That is the gift that you are passing on is that gift of wholeness, presence that is possible for everybody.

Beautiful. Thank you so much. It's been so great talking to you today. Thank you. So if anybody wants to look you up and find you, where do they go?

So probably my website's best place to start. is transformationalparenting.guru, G-U-R-U. Everything's on there, contact details and bits and pieces and what I do and how I work and it's all there. So that's probably the best place to I'm on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and all those things as well. Yeah, all those things are on my website too.

Speaker 2 (41:54.702)
Great. And we'll link those down in the show notes so people can find you that way too. Okay, great. Well, so great talking to you. Thank you so much. appreciate it.

Thank you. Thanks a lot.

powerful conversation. My biggest takeaway today and maybe yours too, is that it's actually okay to mess up as a kid. In fact, it can even be a gift because when our kids see that we're human and imperfect and then watch us take responsibility and repair, they learn resilience and new ways of handling life's challenges. That reminder really lifted a weight off my shoulders and I hope it did for you too. And I also love what Mia shared about EMDR.

parents.

Speaker 2 (42:36.118)
Knowing there are therapies that don't require us to retell our trauma over and over again, but can still help us release the pain and find peace is such a reassuring thought. It's a reminder that healing is not only possible, but it can be gentler than we imagine. If you've made it this far, thank you so much for listening. I appreciate you more than you know, and I truly hope this episode resonated with you. If it did, I'd be so grateful if you'd share it with someone who might need to hear it too.

you

Speaker 2 (43:06.402)
This podcast is a true labor of love and it means the world to me to be able to share it with you every week. If I could ask just one small thing in return, it's this. Please take a moment to follow, rate and review the show. It helps more than you know in keeping it going and helping it reach others on their healing journey. I truly cannot do this without you. We're only just getting started, so make sure to click that follow button or the little bell so you're notified when the new episode drops.

If you want to stay connected between episodes, come follow me on my healing journey on Instagram or TikTok. You'll find the links in the show notes or just search them at Life Awakening. Until next week, be kind to yourself and take care of your heart. And remember, it's never too late to begin again. Bye for now.