On Friday, June 14, I was back on the air with KBOO’s Once Upon a Time! This time, I joined as a guest alongside my friend Lynn A. Haller, a trauma-informed therapist and educator who’s working on something remarkable: a workbook that uses Painting Celia as a case study. Host Consuelo invited us both to talk about the emotional themes in the book, especially Celia’s childhood trauma and how it plays out in her adult relationships.
We covered everything from nervous system regulation and journaling to EMDR, IFS therapy, and the power of stories to help us heal. Lynn shared how fictional characters can be used in therapeutic training and classroom settings, and I got the chance to read from Chapter one and reflect on Celia’s inner journey. If you’ve read the book, or are just curious about trauma, healing, or the psychology behind character arcs, this was a conversation full of insight and hope.
TRANSCRIPTThis is KBOO Portland. Thank you for joining us this Friday evening. It’s time for Once Upon a Time with your host Consuelo. Song plays: Gold by Paloma Faith “I got a burning in my heart when it’s dark CONSUELO Good evening everybody. Here we are again with two wonderful guests and they will introduce themselves. One of them, she has been here before, but this time we are going to talk about her book from a psychological perspective. So that will be different. And she’s ready. Here is Maya. MAYA Hi again, Consuelo. Yes, I’m Maya Bairey. I’m the author of Painting Celia. I was on the show few months ago and we talked about one of the reasons I wrote the book. I wanted to learn to express myself through art and with not having any idea how to do that, I decided to write a book about a woman learning to express herself through art. I hoped at the end that people who read it, not just women, would feel empowered to examine some of the things in their life, how they could express themselves, what was the use of it. Did it, would it make their lives better? And I knew that that was my goal. I had, I have a business plan. It’s written right there, to empower women. But I wrote the book and I started to promote the book. And that was sort of the end of my little mission because I didn’t know where to go from there. But I met a woman who read the book and said I have an idea. CONSUELO Wonderful idea. And here we have Lynn, introduce yourself. LYNN Hi, Consuelo. Thank you for having me. My name is Lynn Haller, and I am a trauma-informed psychotherapist, educator and author. And I’ve spent the past 30 years, yes, 30 years, working in mental health with people with intellectual disabilities as well as the juvenile justice system. CONSUELO It doesn’t look like it. LYNN And early on, I did a lot of clinical writing like assessments, treatment plans, court reports. But one of my favorite projects was creating a newsletter that I developed with youth that were incarcerated. And that project kind of spurred me on to want to do more creative work. And then I read Maya’s book, and that motivated me and inspired me to want to write a workbook, using her character like a case study, like a client, to help people deal with their trauma, learn about trauma, and heal. CONSUELO An excellent idea, isn’t it? They go, complement each other very well. MAYA I would never have thought of it in a million years. CONSUELO Yeah, I thought that when we were talking and that will be and I agree and that is the reason because she’s here, too. And let’s start and define what trauma is. LYNN Trauma is something that happens to somebody, an overwhelming experience that overwhelms their system psychologically, emotionally and physically. And that trauma is stored in the body and they need help to work through that. CONSUELO Yeah, I need some research, when I like psychology too. There are three kind of different. Acute, the chronic, and the complex. In your analysis of the character, in what of the three is she located? LYNN She definitely has complex trauma. CONSUELO Okay. Yes. Define complex trauma. LYNN She has some relational trauma from experiences throughout her childhood. CONSUELO Yeah, such as? LYNN Such as a physical and verbal abuse, I believe are the only two things that are noted in the book. CONSUELO Yes, yes. MAYA And the suicide of her father. LYNN And the father, correct. CONSUELO The abandonment, the crisis, and the abandonment. But what else did interest you in, to bring your expertise to the novel? I mean, to work with the novel using your expertise for helping human being? We were not going to say only women because men also have trauma occur. LYNN Correct. CONSUELO So what was it that give you the feeling that I can do this, I can put these two together. LYNN I just read the book. I felt very motivated, motivated by what the character went through and like, we can make a workbook that students, new therapists, and anybody that’s interested could learn about trauma, see it in the character, and it it’s like ‘one removed’ so so they they can observe it through this workbook and through this character and learn what it’s about. CONSUELO Yeah, it seems that now we are going through so many new trauma. Anyway, before we keep going, I would like to ask for your collaboration and support to this wonderful station that allow us to have this program within many others. So you can just go to KBOO.fm/give to become a monthly sustaining member. We have this until June 29 and our goal is to reach $50,000, so we do need you, all of you, including us here. Okay, we keep going. So explain a little bit more. Do you want to explain about the, a little bit of the plot of the book? MAYA I could because it’s probably going to help people who haven’t read it, yes, which, why not? CONSUELO And so this way they will read it. MAYA Yes, exactly. Yes, Celia definitely has a very hard childhood. Her mother is not a great mother. She has her own generational trauma of her own, but she hits her child. She abuses her child emotionally. Celia learns very quickly that she needs to be quiet and unassuming, not cause problems. And to keep her mother happy at all costs, which no child can do, they’re not going to win. But of course, internalizes the whole time that if anything goes wrong, it’s her fault. She, she should have been able to be a better child or whatever to, you know, to stop from being hit, honestly. And she takes that with her. She’s grown and she’s learned, she’s no longer a child, but that, that stays with you inside, you know. And when something unexpected happens, you will react in that same, you know, childhood way. Unless you see Lynn, maybe, or someone else in your community who can help you work through those things. There’s a romance in the book and that is essentially what is testing Celia. But it also gives her a chance to learn. And she does learn and she does grow, and it’s a romance. She learns a lot of different things. I don’t want to give it away. CONSUELO No, of course not. I think it’s, how can you make a wider relationship? Because the relationship with her mother, Celia, is fundamental to the book. And can you tell us, all of us, and our audience that there are many women, why the relationship between mothers and daughter, it is so difficult? Do you have any idea? LYNN I don’t think it has to be for everybody. Some, like I have a wonderful relationship with my daughter, but sometimes there are conflicts. CONSUELO Yeah, I have to ask them too. LYNN Well, we can call her. CONSUELO No, no, no, no. Because in the, in the, my experience has been that is one of the hardest relationship, especially in the teenager year and then when we mature. We get much nicer, I agree. We are. And following the situation of the book, because that is a central problem, her relationship with her mother. LYNN It is. CONSUELO So why, do you think? LYNN Well, in the case of Celia, it was difficult because Celia’s mother, that’s how she, you know, reacted. It’s probably from her own trauma, and she took it out on Celia, verbally, physically and emotionally, just the way she responded to the child’s needs. Unfortunately. CONSUELO Yeah, because you sent here, you sent the workbook that you have in her. What appealed to you, the character, what was appealing to you from Celia? LYNN Pretty much everything. Her coping mechanisms were very interesting and the way that she, throughout the novel, learned and tried out new behaviors through her art and through the relationships that she was developing. So she decided to try new strategies. And she overcome some of the things that she was struggling with. CONSUELO And she tried this new strategy. No getting professional help. LYNN Correct. CONSUELO So she did, through her own experience and her own needs, what is very remarkable. LYNN It is remarkable. CONSUELO Yeah. Yeah, because she come, she looked for, she wanted to be better. LYNN She did. CONSUELO And, and she did. Okay, so that was one thing. And, and here there is a question, in what you wrote. You mentioned why you didn’t follow the cognitive behavior therapy and you need the eyes movement. Can you explain a little bit about that because it’s fascinating. LYNN Okay. Well, I, Okay so. I’m actually using, it’s called internal family systems. It’s called IFS. The cognitive model is a great model, but for trauma that’s stored in the body, we also want to do more than just cognitive. We want to work with somatic body-based exercises, mindfulness. Exercises, that goes beyond just the thinking part. CONSUELO This, for example, that is very good coming from you. LYNN These are different types of… CONSUELO Yeah, but in some ways they reflect what kind of problem you can get here. For example. You see so, I am, I am showing you to see the relationship between the trauma and the consequence in the body. LYNN Right, right. These are some of the things that can happen. CONSUELO So you can talk a little bit about that diagram because I thought it was very interesting. LYNN Sure. Sure. Okay. So let me, hang on one second. What this was, Consuelo, was some paperwork regarding the ACES study. CONSUELO Yeah? LYNN Yeah, so the ACES study was a big study between the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, and they studied adverse childhood experiences. And it’s one of the largest studies of childhood abuse and neglect, and it was done between 1995 and 1997 with over 17,000 people. And then what they did was follow those people throughout the years of their lives. And what they learned from that was that people that experienced these ACES, which are childhood experiences that might be abuse, neglect or dysfunction of a parent, such as mental illness, incarceration, substance abuse, divorce. They had higher rates of many things in their lives. CONSUELO Yes, yes, I watch a movie, No a movie, a Documental. A British that they did exactly the same. They took the children and seven years old until they were almost 70. And they follow their relationship, their marriage, their divorce, their children. It was very interesting to see the progress and how the children who were at the school in a kind of quiet, uh without know, know, trouble, troublemaker, they finish their life the same way. It’s more or less what they are talking. LYNN Right. So some of the some of the findings were that people had an increased rate of diabetes, depression, heart disease, cancer, stroke, all of the big physical ailments were correlated directly with the number of childhood, negative childhood experiences that you have. CONSUELO Yeah. Yeah, we all agree that there is there is a very strong relationship between our heart or our mind and or the rest of the body. We are not disconnected. LYNN We are not. CONSUELO We are not disconnected and, and how do you, your system work? I mean when, when you, a patient come to you and, and how, or how somebody who’s listened to us can take that approach. The approach that you are suggesting? LYNN Okay, well, some of the things that the basic things that we start with are the zones of regulation. And that’s it’s an easy way for people to understand what’s happening with their nervous system. So we identify colors to coordinate with the different states. CONSUELO Yeah, I like it that. LYNN Right. So blue would be low, and that would mean like tired, sad. Green is when your system is regulated. Yellow would be an activated state, like anxious or fidgety, and red would be an intense reaction. So in the workbook I would help new therapists, students, understand. What type of zone somebody is in, like Celia in these cases. So that’s the first step is to learn what their emotional state is. CONSUELO Yeah. So they will have to identify also their, their state of emotion. And in in relation to the color, they will have much better perspective and idea how they’re feeling. LYNN Right. It’s, it’s like a common language. And so as people work through the workbook they can see, by the way Celia thinks, by the way she feels, by the way her body sensations are, where she’s at. Is she activated? Is she calm? Is she shut down? Is she triggered? So they start to learn about that and then they can help their client learn about that. CONSUELO Nice, nice. I think also if they don’t do it through, they do it through the novel, in this case, Celia, yeah, they can do it through their journal. So this way when they write every day, they can identify their emotion say in the morning. No? LYNN Yes, absolutely. You’re 100% right. That is one of the homework assignments that I have for clients, is this exact tool where you, anytime you’re triggered, take a moment. Write down ‘What am I feeling? What am I thinking? And what are my body sensations.’? CONSUELO Yeah, I do that every almost every night. My, my journal is a gratitude journal. But with that purpose, purpose, yeah, I think it’s that when I believe strongly that word are helping tools to heal. And this is one way that you can identify, and what is very interesting, and you must know more than me, is when you read the past and you are in the journal, you read your past pages and you recognize how you felt and something that was so in one moment now is calm. LYNN Right. You can learn what your triggers are and how you reacted previously, and then how you’ve made changes. CONSUELO Yeah. And also that can prevent trauma? MAYA Oh. CONSUELO I mean, a person who does that, for example, will be more conscious about her emotion and how they, she deal with that. So she will be, if she is a mother, she will be more tolerant patient because she will recognize so much in herself that she can apply and say this is not the moment to speak to my children because I am in yellow. Pow pow pow, yellow. LYNN Absolutely. 100% right and you know it’s, it’s something that my sister and I actually talked about a lot that we need to recognize when we were in the yellow zone with our children and don’t act at that time. Step away. CONSUELO Very good, very good. You go away, you, or you close the door. LYNN Right. Instead of yelling or name calling or… CONSUELO Overreacting. LYNN You know, any number of things that people might do out of frustration. CONSUELO Yeah, I think to control our impulse is very hard. LYNN But it’s not impossible, and you can learn. CONSUELO Okay, so teach us. LYNN Okay. Do you want us, do you want to do a breathing exercise? CONSUELO Yeah, Okay. If you want. Whatever you want. LYNN Absolutely. Okay, so this is called the 4-7-8 breathing. So we will put our hand on our belly. So we’re going to breathe in, we’ll breathe in through your nose for a count of four, and then we will hold it for a count of seven, and then we will release it slowly for a count of eight through our mouth. CONSUELO You have to do it too in your places, okay, follow follow! LYNN Okay, so if you like, you may close your eyes, it can maybe help you be more internal as you’re doing the exercise. CONSUELO Yeah, okay. I hope nobody call in this moment. LYNN Well they can join in the breathing. CONSUELO Okay, that is better. So okay, let’s go. How many? Seven minute? LYNN No, it’ll just take a couple minutes. So we’re going to breathe in for a count of four. And hold it. And release slowly. Breathe in for four. Hold it. And release. CONSUELO Yeah, it does, it does help, but I am afraid that I will fall asleep. LYNN So you would want to do four to six of those. CONSUELO But I will do, I will do it. LYNN Four to six, and if you would like to do it twice a day, that would really help train your brain that when you are stressed, when you are triggered in the yellow zone, it will know what to do. So kind of like sports. You know, you practice so that when you’re in the game, you know what’s going to happen, you know what to do. It’s the same way with this. CONSUELO Very good. And in what other approach do you, have you used or, you have create, you create this approach? LYNN Oh no, no. CONSUELO They were before, and, and you, and you applied to the book. LYNN Yes, I used them. Yes, through training. Another really important thing, Consuelo, is the overall umbrella we work with is called is, like a trauma-informed approach. And there’s principles that go along with that. And the main ones are safety. Trustworthiness and transparency. Peer support. Collaboration and mutuality. Empowerment and choice. And then also always considering cultural, historic and gender issues. So those are the umbrellas that you want to always, you want to work under that. And then you’re going to have your other modalities like the zones of regulation, somatic work, IFS work while keeping these always at the top of your priority list. CONSUELO What do you think, Maya? MAYA I’ve been in and out of therapy a lot and I’ve, I’ve had the luck to have really good therapists. I’ve never, I’ve never had someone who–okay, actually I’m thinking of one–but almost all of them were wonderful. I did feel dismissed by one before and they would probably have been failing at one of those umbrella topics there, though I can’t, it’s not coming to mind which one that would be. But, that would make a person feel a little less safe. And you know, when you don’t feel as safe with someone you’re trying to be vulnerable with and authentic with, you’re, you’re not going to trust them. You’re not going to do those things. CONSUELO No, no, it would not work. MAYA It would not. Underneath those, I did, EDMR. LYNN EMDR. MAYA EMDR, thanks. I do it backwards every time. Where you maybe tap, you know both sides, or in my case, I did it over zoom. I didn’t know you could do it, but you, you watch a ball that goes back and forth across your screen and, and that’s sort of it’s bilateral stimulation of your body while you’re, while you’re thinking of, you know, processing, you know, some traumas you are going through, that changed how my body felt about it. CONSUELO How interesting. MAYA I mean, yeah, I mean, I highly recommend if anybody has an opportunity and needs some trauma processing it, it was magic. I thought sure, I mean, how great can it be? It was magic. But then that’s not quite what Lynn does. She does IFS more. LYNN I do IFS more than EMDR, but EMDR is an excellent model as well. It’s, it works with the both sides of the brain that integrate memories. Yes, it’s a great model. CONSUELO How? How do you do? Can you explain? Because I don’t think that everybody knows exactly, what does it mean and how it work. LYNN IFS is internal family systems and that is working with your internal systems. So we all have parts of us that carry, maybe, carry burdens from our trauma. CONSUELO Yeah. LYNN And we learn about those, those burdens through the therapy. And then we also have protector parts. And those are our survival strategies that we developed when we’re children to get through the tough times that we had to go through. So it’s learning about those parts, as well, and learning to work with those parts. CONSUELO Sure. LYNN And then maybe realize through the therapy, I can try something different, like maybe I don’t need the drugs and alcohol anymore, maybe I don’t need to be a people pleaser. Maybe I don’t have to overwork. Whatever the particular strategy that you use. CONSUELO Yeah, to become happier or to have a more balanced life as we were talking before. It’s a little bit what Gestalt said, the father, the judge and the child. MAYA Exactly. CONSUELO Yeah. Those three are very, I would say, we can see in ourself, in the way we act or our priority, or even our value sometime. And, and in my personal experience, sometimes said ‘oh, the judge. Yeah. Get out. Get out.’ LYNN Well, what we would do in IFS if we had a part of us that was judging, we actually would want to learn about that part and listen to that part to find out what it wants to tell us and, and help understand ourselves better. You can only push down the parts for so long or they’ll come up either physically or some other way. CONSUELO Yes, but when you have been living as much as I have and you, already know that part, because you have. So you can say whatever, and you know where it come from, and you know also how to put some limit. It’s not that you are eradicate right now in my case, but you put some limit. You said now is not the moment. Okay? I am tired. I don’t need you to tell me that I have to cook for tomorrow. No, no, no, please. So it is very interesting how we have been develop different tools to help to be more integrate with ourself. Our mind, our body, is nothing new. The Greeks said that long time ago, but our life is so in a rush and, and so, trying to communicate with Peter, Paul and Mary. And so we have very few time to go inside. And this is what? Coming back to the character, I feel, reading, that she this is her transformation. She is start looking, and putting in the first 10 pages! She said ‘No mother, I am not going to do this. No.’ Okay. So when she put the limits, already is telling us that she is in a different spiritual setting. Am I right or what do you know? What do you think? MAYA I’ll say, Celia does… she’s learned a little bit about boundaries, and she’s learned to set them, but she still beats herself up over them. She hasn’t, she’s not, incorporating them, she still feels like the bad guy for, for setting those, and like she’s not worthy. She really shouldn’t be setting those. She’s a long ways to go and she’s— CONSUELO Yeah, but she does. MAYA She, she keeps working. She wants to change and she, she knows she needs to. CONSUELO Yes, yes, yes, she does in some way this kind, you know this kindly, this kind of transformation take years in a lifetime. MAYA Absolutely. CONSUELO And even if you go forward, then you go backward and then yeah, because it’s so complex and painful, too. MAYA Very. CONSUELO So that is the reason because not many people have the courage to confront something like that. LYNN It’s, it’s hard work. CONSUELO Yeah, you learn how to… do people learn how to live with the trauma? LYNN Well, I think you learned to process what you’ve been through. You can’t get rid of what happened. What happened happened. But you can heal through the impact on your nervous system and your body. You can heal from that. But like you said, it does take a lot of hard work and intention and you know, you’re going to have times in your life, maybe where you’re stressed, things come up that maybe you react, you fall into old habits. CONSUELO Yes. LYNN And, and maybe you have to regroup and you know, take some time and get back to what you’ve learned. CONSUELO Yeah, that is the harder part in my opinion, to take out what you learned because you learn from mainly from your parents at the beginning and this kind of behavior of the way how you react. In face of how you react when you are in a stressful situation. You see, in my particular case I start yellow, completely yellow. Yellow. Yellow. LYNN Are you sure it’s not red? CONSUELO Red, yellow, red, yellow. Both, all the color, all the color. And when I am really like the other day somebody faint in front of me, where I work, I was absolutely calm. I called 911. I did everything with other people help. Obviously, I wasn’t alone and the, the people were surprised. And I said no, it’s very weird. I said for a small thing, I go ballistic and for the important thing I, because I need the brain, so I need to think. LYNN Yeah, but it’s pretty common. I’ve seen that a lot where you know, you’re kind of programmed to respond to certain triggers in your life. You know, based on what you’ve been through. But then an emergency situation comes up and it’s not particularly triggering to you and you’re able to maintain that calm demeanor and do what you need to do to get help. CONSUELO And that is the reason, because the trauma come, come very vividly when you react in a situation, its because, not the situation itself, it’s because something triggered inside of you. LYNN Exactly. CONSUELO And that is what is very difficult to manage. Some advice please? We need the exercise that you did. We need. LYNN Definitely. Breathing, meditation, journaling, writing, any type of art. CONSUELO Sure, I agree. LYNN It’s wonderful. Exercise? And mindfulness practices, all of them. MAYA I like to fish off my deck. CONSUELO Ah, a beautiful one you’ve got, view and everything. LYNN Nature, nature is, yeah. MAYA I can’t do it for long. Because I get bored. But 15 minutes out there, looking at water instead of a phone? Yeah. Can just wipe away a lot. CONSUELO Oh, that is great. If you can leave the phone inside, that is wonderful. MAYA Only 15 minutes. Yeah, yeah. CONSUELO I think also in my case is to, I go for a walk with Griffin. That, yeah. And when I embrace him, I feel that that. LYNN Who’s Griffin? CONSUELO Dog. LYNN Your dog. CONSUELO Yeah, he’s not my dog. It’s a dog that I take for a walk. Okay. And but, I love him very much and we have been together for two years and that is my therapy. Every time when I go to pick him up, I look at him as ‘this is nice’ because it give you a sense of calm, because he’s very quiet and very control in himself. Very interesting character, yeah. LYNN Do you have any other strategies that you use? CONSUELO The music. When I’m the writing, obviously. Yeah. Okay. But it’s about you. What else, tell us? Tell us. LYNN I can tell you what my coping strategies are. CONSUELO Yes, Okay. LYNN Number one would be exercise, every day, and I like to either walk outside or on the treadmill, so I’m getting a little bit of the EMDR through that as well, and I find through that it sparks my creativity as well and I’m always getting my phone out and putting in notes during that time too, so exercise. Doing restorative yoga. Which is gentle stretching and some yoga poses and a lot of breath work. It’s very helpful. CONSUELO Yeah. Coming back to the trauma, at what age do you realize that you have that? Symptom or that pain or that situation? Because when you are a child, you don’t realize this is a trauma. You don’t even have the name. How to call your feeling. It’s perhaps you are going kinda in a life that doesn’t make any sense or because you are intelligent enough or very perceptive and you realize that you need help. Because there are a lot of people that they don’t look for help. LYNN Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty interesting. CONSUELO Because they don’t recognize that they have that internal pain. LYNN I think we’re starting to see a little bit more in the schools where they’re recognizing children that need help from trauma, and also another key places that that they’re, their primary doctor. Yeah, they’re starting to do some like depression screenings, anxiety screenings. Yeah. So it needs to start young, you know, identifying children that need to help early on. CONSUELO Yeah, because sometime is, is, is the whole family who is toxic, what we call now toxic is not only one person. The mother sometime is. Also, I will be fair. Some of the behavior of the 50s, 60s, 70s, whatever. Were mainly directed by the—(sneezes) sorry, sorry—directed by the culture. Yeah. And for example in my case all the Italian are louder and this and that so when we were at the table, it was very hard because everybody was speaking at the same time and when to listen, so, was so to me, to growing up in that kind of family to speak louder, what I do and still today, because I am who I am and I like it too. It was normal. What wasn’t normal to me was to listen, because and that particular thing has brought me a lot of problem in my life. Especially in this culture. Not in Chile, because in Chile you don’t supposed to listen. When you are in a party. I am talking in a party, when you are drinking, when you are eating. So everybody talk until somebody say ‘Okay, Okay, listen, listen’ and we listen, you see. So it was very hard to identify the beginning. When I came to this country that, that kind of behavior, because it was so, and it’s still, so normal. So how you detach, what is culture for what is really toxic? LYNN It’s a, it’s a, you know, going to be an individual practice for each person. Yeah. But I mean, I think the important thing would be in schools that we start having regular classes for, like emotion, teaching about emotions, teaching how to, to manage your emotions, what to do, how to ask for help, all those different things. CONSUELO Glad. Very good, because the tantrum, I was expert in tantrums. Yeah. LYNN You were? No. CONSUELO Yeah, yeah you can be ironic? I was, and very strong, but anyway. I think, can we have a life without trauma? LYNN I think it’s pretty hard to get through life without some form of trauma. You know, as as you’re… CONSUELO Is there a way to grow to? LYNN To what? CONSUELO Is not the way how we grow, when we identify what it is and we try to work it out in a way and that bring a lot of experience and new feeling and, and we get.. LYNN Well, I would think growing from just regular, not traumatic problems might be a better route to go than during trauma. But I think it’s very difficult for somebody to go through life, whether, whether the parent unintentionally does something that’s traumatizing to a particular child, or even through school. You know, bullying, mistreatment by any number of people there. I just think it’s really hard for somebody to go through life, not experience that. CONSUELO Yeah, I was bullied in the school, terrible. I suffered terrible at it in my school. LYNN I’m sorry. CONSUELO And because of the color of my skin. And when I came to this country, one of our friend, it was interesting. She touched me and she said, she was Nordic, by the way, so she was very white said, okay, very white, and she touched me and she said ‘what kind of product do you use?’ I said, ‘none, It’s natural.’ ‘How? How nice.’ And I thought, how interesting, how perspective work. LYNN Absolutely. MAYA There are other kinds of trauma, too, that can often happen. Even if everyone involved is, you know, wonderful, and they’re doing great. But I mean, there can be a car accident, and that could break a family in a lot of ways. CONSUELO Yeah, that is an acute kind of… LYNN An illness. You know a parent gets ill and all of a sudden the other parent has to now work or be a caregiver, and then the children maybe have to go to daycare or, you know, other situations and maybe they’re not treated right there, or the, the workers are overworked. So any number of things can happen. CONSUELO And it does. LYNN It does. MAYA It will. And some are, some are harder. Some are lower level. CONSUELO Yeah, I think what will you, when you mentioned all of this, that there is aspect in some way that they sustain you. As a person, when you are in a crisis. MAYA Like your protector parts. CONSUELO Yes, yes, yes. I was talking with somebody the other day and I said for me the most important is health. Work, affection and work. Those are the three aspects very, very important that really… LYNN Oh, so you mean, so you’re talking about what your personal support system is? CONSUELO No, in general, not only for me. In general, I think if you are not healthy, you cannot do much. If you are not with people who care for you and you care for them, also. And then if you don’t have a meaning in your life, it’s empty. I mean you need to have something that, a drive that’s take you? LYNN Something you’re passionate about. CONSUELO Yes. Something that your passionate. And, and because the person who was talking to me, she said ‘Ohh, people think because we have a splendid financial situation that we don’t have problem. They don’t know you.’ Of course everybody has one thing or another. Okay? Okay, what else will you tell us? About your method? LYNN Well. How do you feel about reading a little bit from Chapter 1? CONSUELO Oh, nice. MAYA Oh dear. LYNN Just a little bit. MAYA I could do a little bit, yeah. You’ll have to… did you have a specific part in mind? LYNN Just the conversation with the mom. CONSUELO Yes, that is a very important part. LYNN And then we’ll talk about the worksheet and what we noticed from Chapter 1. MAYA All right. I will do this. CONSUELO Yes, go ahead. MAYA Selfish? Really? “We’ll have to talk later, Mom.” Celia ended the phone call, cutting off her mother mid-objection. Her fingers trembled, clenching the phone tightly. Nothing made those calls better. Hanging up was getting easier with practice, at least. What more could she do? She bankrolled her mother’s comfortable life and tried to act the part of attentive daughter. It wasn’t enough. There was always a new need. Today’s request was a first. Mother wanted her to pay for two friends to join her on a cruise. A cruise! She’d already told her friends it was no problem. Celia explained it was indeed a problem, then braced for the browbeating. Mom did her shouting, and Celia ended the call once the name-calling started. The usual. She needed to do something productive, clear her mind. A spot of grease on the gas range caught her eye and Celia whisked across the kitchen. Heat from the oven had baked it on, but a hard scrubbing won out. The timer showed nearly two hours to go on the ribs slowly roasting inside. Celia watched the number tick down one minute, then two. But you can afford it, her mother’s voice echoed. How can you be so selfish, Celia Rose? Right. Snap out of it! Was there anything else to clean before Andrew and the rest showed up tonight? A couch pillow at the wrong angle, a teacup to put away, or…a scan of her vast white living space put an end to that hope. Not one item out of place. She hated that moment each day when she ran out of jobs. Even worse was when it coincided with one of Mom’s calls. CONSUELO Okay. Thank you. LYNN So, the first thing we want to do is maybe talk about what body sensations does Celia display there. Did you notice any that she talked about? CONSUELO Yeah, of course. I think her caller, was trembling, trembling. LYNN Yes, trembling hands. CONSUELO Yes, yes, I got it, and also probably her heart was pounding because she was disturbed and a lot of pressure, to say no to her mother that took a lot of courage that she, already, we know, she is kind of insecure. LYNN So what we would do with the worksheet is teach the students and the new therapists, what did she say were the body sensations? And a lot of people don’t tune into that, so that would be the first thing, is like, in a situation, write down what are what are you feeling right now? Take a moment. Maybe close your eyes. What am I noticing? Do I have tense shoulders? Like you said, Consuela, is my heart beating faster? Am I clenching? What’s happening right now? CONSUELO Yes. Yeah. LYNN But those basic things that, like it seems like it’s obvious to you, are not obvious to a lot of people. CONSUELO Yeah, because I learned a long time ago, at least 40 years ago, that very few people really want to know who they are. They’re scared. LYNN It is scary, yeah. I’m doing a training right now. I’m doing a training right now by an IFS trainer named Frank. Yeah, that’s where all the stuff is inside. CONSUELO Yeah, the pain is, more than anything is the pain and, and they don’t want. And also another thing that I have discovered when I was younger that all my friend, women friend, marry young. Yeah, 20, 21. And they start having children. So they didn’t have the time and they didn’t take the time. This is another generation, I have not your age, okay? And in Chile. And they didn’t have the time and they didn’t make the time to get to know themselves. Or some of them were working outside of the house too. So when the children left, this kind, they discovered ‘Ohh, this is who I am’ and I, I look at them and I said ‘what is going on with you? I discovered that long time ago’ and this is what happened. LYNN So the next thing we look at is, what feelings was Celia having during that interaction? CONSUELO Very confusing feeling, in my opinion. He was in a constant.. how we say it… She didn’t. She was confused. She didn’t know how to approach. She wanted to be, to say no, and she did. But to go to that place took a lot of effort. LYNN Well, and she probably had fear. CONSUELO Yes, of course. LYNN And anxiety. CONSUELO Yeah, we know. Because of her body and her heart and her breathing. LYNN Right, it’s obvious to us, but when, you know, somebody’s first learning about that, it’s not obvious to them. CONSUELO No, no, but in this case we are analyzing the novel. I agree. I think it would be great. And it’s great when you do that to help people to identify themselves from within. LYNN Right. CONSUELO Not only what they thinks, you know? What are they feeling? LYNN Right. But what they think is also important and that, and that’s the last one. So what was Celia thinking during this interaction? CONSUELO She was feeling, what she was thinking, that her mother was manipulating her one more time. LYNN She might have been. She said that she already pays for her lifestyle. And there’s always something new. She talked about ‘it gets easier hanging up’ the more she does it. But there’s probably a lot of other thoughts that are going on that she’s not readily identifying. CONSUELO I agree. LYNN So that’s something that we would also work on in the process. CONSUELO Yeah. Yeah, because the phone call took her by surprise. Indeed, after that she complained about that because she was wanted to prepare the dinner for her friend, and, and she felt that the mother killed the mood, because after that she felt uneasy and disturbed. LYNN So then the next thing we would work on is what we talked about earlier, the window of tolerance. So where do we see Celia in her window of tolerance? Is she in the green zone at that point? CONSUELO No, no. LYNN So then, is she what we call, up above would be the, the hyper arousal where she’s agitated, angry, upset. CONSUELO I think she was angry, agitated. Agitated. She didn’t show it that much. I would hang up. LYNN Or, she could also have also been in hypoarousal, which is more of a shutdown state. We don’t see it there, but we do see it throughout the novel. CONSUELO Yes, I think she was in everything, in every place a little bit, because it change. We do change in a conversation, we can start being disturbed and then we come down, and then we are excited and then we are laughing. And in her case, how she has so many things inside against her mother. Unfinished business, as Freud would said. LYNN So then another thing in the process, and this wouldn’t be right away, and this would be down the road, as she’s gone through some therapy, is learning to identify what are her core negative beliefs, maybe about herself? About other people and about the world in general? CONSUELO How old do you think she is? MAYA Celia is 41. CONSUELO Oh, yes, she said. She mentioned ‘I just celebrate my 40.’ Yeah, you’re right. 41. Right now is the time women usually have a crisis and is trying to start thinking who she is. LYNN Right. So some of the things for Celia, she may have had beliefs like ‘I’m not good enough’ or ‘I’m unlovable.’ CONSUELO Yeah. She asked her a question. She asked her a question to herself in the book. Yeah. LYNN So that would be, that would be one of those exiled parts of her that’s holding on to that idea that ‘I’m not lovable’ or ‘I’m not good enough.’ And that’s held in the body. And it takes a lot of work to heal that. CONSUELO And how do you, you have a group of women or you do it one to one? LYNN One-on-one. Yeah, because a big part of, I think Maya touched on this earlier, a big part of therapy is developing that therapeutic relationship with the person. CONSUELO Yes, very important. LYNN And the trust and the relationship we have is actually the number one predictor of the success of the therapy, even over the modality, it’s that relationship. CONSUELO Good, good. But I thought it would be interesting to have a workshop for a group to help them to learn how to identify their own feelings. LYNN Absolutely. A group, group process would be a great addition for anybody, absolutely. CONSUELO Yes, because it’s not that personal. She get how, through the exercise, that you apply. Also what other tools you can provide and they can use it, like we have been talking about. LYNN Absolutely. Just initially, I don’t think starting out in the group might be the best way. They, they need to develop some skills. Some safety within themselves and have a basis before they’re going to go out with other people and, maybe, start sharing all of that. CONSUELO Yeah. Yeah, it’s, yeah. MAYA To me, when I wrote the book… I’m not going to say I lived this, but obviously it came from some personal experiences which are fictionalized, you know. But when Lynn came and read it and she, she saw Celia and, and got her, and because she understands a lot of the things I put in there. And so of course I felt great. And she felt great. And she told me about ‘I want to use Celia to teach this to other people.’ And it just blew my mind. It was like, ‘but this is a, this is a romance. This is a, a love story.’ CONSUELO I think it’s beautiful. MAYA And she pointed out so many things that, I mean, even I hadn’t realized were in the book. And you know. I’m very grateful. CONSUELO Me too. I think it’s great and I, I wish we could do something similar with other novel, other novel that may be kind of classic. Like she mentioned that she like Shakespeare. And to give a kind of direction for people, like a map, like a map. This is the, the way you have to go. These are the question you have to ask yourself. Yeah, because we, we are here to be happy. Uh, like the songs you know, to feel good about who we are and what we became. That I think for me is the most important thing. LYNN Absolutely. And if you can help somebody and get to that place. Very rewarding. CONSUELO Yeah, it’s, it’s very rewarding, I agree. Okay. Can you tell your website where people can contact you? Is important. LYNN That’s a work in progress, but— CONSUELO But I saw an address here somewhere, no? LYNN That, that would be for the IFS Institute if they wanted to get— CONSUELO But, but here you have your e-mail. LYNN My e-mail. Yeah. CONSUELO You can give that. LYNN Yes, yes, yeah. It’s my name. lynnahaller@gmail.com. CONSUELO Very good. And you my dear? MAYA I’ve got my website. It’s bairey.com. CONSUELO And if they want to buy the book? MAYA Just go to bairey.com, it’s all there. CONSUELO Oh, you are selling directly the book? MAYA I sell it in many places, but if you start at bairey.com you can choose your path. CONSUELO Okay. But many places like what? MAYA Amazon, Barnes and Noble. I’m not in Powells yet. I’m not yet in Grand Gesture Books, which is downtown, and I’m dying to get in. But definitely online, and I’m working on local businesses. CONSUELO Yeah, yeah, because the people who are here, they like to support local businesses more than Amazon and other. LYNN Absolutely. MAYA Oh, I know. Yeah, absolutely. CONSUELO But it’s good they can start supporting you. Of course, that is the most important. So this way you are any planned for your next book? MAYA Oh yeah, it’s being written. I’ve got two actually written and being edited. I mean by me in my spare time, which is unfortunately slim. CONSUELO Ahh. MAYA But yeah, I also I publish not only myself, but I publish other local authors and poets and memoirists. And so while I have one book that I’m trying to write myself, I’m also working on six or seven other books for other people. So. CONSUELO Yeah. Yeah. See, you are full, very full time. Yes. Any advice for our audience before we go, in terms of how to deal, I know you have say a lot, but in terms of how to deal with pain or trauma? Or yellow or red? And how to be in, in because to be in green all the time, it’s kind of boring. So at least orange, orange would be LYNN A little orange? CONSUELO A little orange. LYNN I would just say that healing is possible. And, you know, ask for help. Find somebody that you trust that can help. It’s— CONSUELO It’s beautiful. LYNN Never too late. It’s never too late CONSUELO That hope. Give hope, that’s nice. Love it. You? MAYA Art. Try and express yourself through art. It doesn’t have to be good art, just mooshing some clay or fingerpainting, will help regulate your body and, and give you a little bit of mindful time where you’re concentrating on something pretty, rather than a problem. Just see what’s in you. CONSUELO Alright. I will completely agree. I am so very happy to have this time with both of you, very positive. And I hope our audience learn a little bit so they will start writing a journal, like I have been saying since the day one. And, or practicing their garden and or with their pet, or with their any kind of art. Music, dancing, whatever they want. And don’t forget, please also to collaborate with us. We have this wonderful goal to reach $50,000 June 29. This year, not next year, this year, and very easy. You can go to KBOO.FM/give to become a monthly sustained member and we will be very grateful and appreciative. I hope to see you—see you will be extremely hard—to talk to you June 27. I have somebody called Ariel. She’s a young woman who wrote a children book that will be very interesting. I do appreciate. Stay safe, enjoy the springtime and try to be happy. Goodnight. Thank you very much. Nice, nice. Song plays: Gold by Paloma Faith “But there’s a part of me |
