Healing through divorce with Life Coach Sy Neary (Part 1)

is to understand what the heck is behind mom's criticism. Why does her love feel sharp like a razor's edge? What happened to mom that has her view the world and her loved ones through the eyes of this critical nature?

What's that about? So we want to start lean in to get curious instead of furious. It's a little bit of a dance around how can I stay in my center?

Well, I'm with the people that trigger me the most. A big part is also giving yourself permission to say, "If I have a week recovery after visiting for the holidays, maybe I send a gift basket. Maybe I say I'm just not able to come this time.

And I take that space to work on preparing what I need to do for myself so that when I do share lunch with them or do go for a visit, I don't feel like I've been hit by a truck." Hi, welcome to another episode of the Healing Podcast. This is the place where you learn and get inspired to heal in, to achieve higher levels of satisfaction in every area of your life.

I am Karen Miller in your host, and I believe that what we resist, her cysts, and that we cannot change what we don't face. And it was finally when I accepted this reality and invested time, energies and money into myself, in professional support, that my life was completely transformed. And now I'm on a mission to demystify this process for you to inspire you to do this work yourself.

Today, I am super excited to introduce to you a new therapy modality for me and for this podcast called "Inherited Trauma and Family Consolations" that provides us with clues or a deep dive into where else might fears or anxieties that we are experiencing come from. Are they coming from me? And something that I remember, I experienced in the past, and that I can actively heal, or is it coming from somewhere else?

Because I believe through my many years of experience that one of the first steps of a healing journey and something even effective at once is gaining awareness of what happened to us and why we are doing what we are doing, or why are we not doing what we want to be doing. And if you listen to the many episodes of this podcast, we cover many healing modalities like coaching, CBT, EMDR, IFS, hypnotherapy, attachment-based theory, that most of the time can get those answers for us in areas that we can actively heal, but as it has been my experience, sometimes we have tried those, but we still get activated or anxious or fearful or we feel stuck. And if you're someone like me that perhaps have tried some of these deep healing modalities and are still experiencing symptoms, or you know that your family's experience a lot of complex trauma or big T-trauma and are considering trying therapy for the very first time, you are going to love this episode and we'll find it extremely interesting and helpful.

So to have this conversation I have with me today Johanna Lin, who is the founder of the Family Institute Training, and who has over 15 years of experience in this modality, since becoming certified in them with the Family Constellations Institute and the Inherited Trauma Institute. Before this, and focusing on Inherited Trauma, she was a clinical hypnotherapist certified by the National Guild of Hypnotherapist, and she also has a Master's in Neuralinguistic Programming. The Family Inherited Institute Training is a transformational program that combines inherited family trauma, epigenetics, and attachment sciences.

For therapists and coaches, as it covers the overlooked dynamics and root causes connected to many of the emotions, behaviors, and reactive patterns that we all experience. On this episode we spoke about the history of inherited trauma and family constellations and why and how it works. We also spoke in detail about one of her expertise, which is how to use family constellations when healing our money issues, and why can't we save money or why can't we stop spending?

Is this our fear or our anxiety or where does it come from? We talked about how despite us trying to avoid family sometimes, especially over the holidays, there is no avoiding that epigenetically, biogenetically. We carry our family with us and hence the importance of staying curious versus furious, as she said, and how to successfully navigate this important territory.

You can learn more about Johanna Lin and find her courses at JohannaLin. ca or on social media at the Family Inprint Institute. I truly love this episode and if you love it too, please do me a favor and share it with a friend or a colleague or anyone you think will find it helpful to simply help us in our quest to help others feel better, do better and be better.

Welcome to the Healing Podcast, Johanna. I'm so excited that you're here. Thanks for having me, Karen.

I was so grateful when you reached out to me. I was actually sending a lot of previous whole previous guests and clients, you know, do you know anybody in inherited trauma? I had heard of the modality when I started the podcast three, four years ago and I remember being like, you know what, we have enough issues dealing with our own traumas and what happened to us and what we remembered happened to us who wants to deal with our families and healing them or obviously misconceptions on inherited trauma.

And then I came across family constellations through my Latin American friends. I think it's some modality that is used more in Latin American countries and I'm like, what is that? And it just sounded like they couldn't explain it to me other than, you know, it involves bringing your mother and your father and your siblings and your aunts and I'm like, okay, no, it was too triggering and traumatizing except recently I am very open about healing my own traumas and I do, I've done a lot of therapy and coaching for the last 20 years and there are things that I can't explain.

There are anxieties, fears I have that are completely unexplainable that I've looked at everything that could have happened to me. I've done a lot of EMDR. I actually, I know you practice hypnosis.

I actually was afraid of doing hypnosis and I had an episode with a hypnotherapist that I actually worked with to tackle a fear I have of subways and crowded areas and parking lots that are completely unexplained. Did that felt a little bit better, kind of have some insight of some stuff that happened to me that could have affected and I'm still afraid of subways. So I started getting getting more and more interested in inherited trauma and I had just two weeks ago a really interesting thing in one of my therapies.

Another fear I have is a fear of losing my husband which is unexplainable because he's healthy and you know, in the therapy after working through so much in the EMDR it was like, you know, this happened to my mother. Like she had a real fear of losing my father because he was sick and I just that understanding and like feeling the pain of what it must have been like to be her and and and having that awareness and being like, you know what, this was awful but it's not my issue in this lifetime. It's not what I'm facing right now and Johanna was like so healing.

And I've told my therapist it's just two weeks ago and I saw her this week and I'm like, I am, you know, my husband now text me, he's like, I'm work safe and sound then I'm like, okay, good for you. Like, he's got that anxiety that, oh my god, you know, something's going to happen to him. So I am so excited to dig into this conversation and learn more and more about it.

But before we do that, would you mind sharing with my audience just a little bit about your background and what got you into the line of work that you do today and what got you into inherited trauma? Well, absolutely. I think a little bit of your story relates to what I'll share about myself because I was seeking context.

I was seeking to understand what am I carrying that as I've learned through this work isn't actually mine. And the gift of context, the gift of recognizing, oh gosh, that is my mom's fear or that's my dad's anger or that's a closure that happened to one of my grandparents. And so it began to create such a ripple effect of understanding that some of the things I wasn't able to overcome in my own work on myself had a larger reason.

And so it was just such a sort of a-ah-ha moments. And before I found this work, I was lucky enough to be working with integrated doctors in a clinic. And they had invited me in to very, let's call them complicated cases where it was end-stage cancer or very serious mental illness.

And to be honest with you, Karen, I was out of my depth because at that time I was really only practicing clinical hypnosis therapy. And the best I could offer them was to really relax the body, change some of the stress response. But I didn't feel I was able to really get traction on the why they're suffering or the larger context of how they find themselves where they are.

And so it was just the perfect timing that who became my most influential teacher was running a workshop in the maybe two hours away. And it was just this one of those moments where you think, well, that's for me, that's the direction I'm changing to. And that was 15, 16 years ago.

And I've been lucky enough to just be immersed in this work and worked with thousands of clients within this discipline. And it's just I gain gain so much when we get into that beautiful healing place where clients are, gosh, they've seen every expert they can try to track down. And this gives them something bigger because it includes all of them, not just looking at them as the individual.

And so what is the history of inherited trauma like who came up with a concept? What is it about? Yeah, so there are sort of two histories, if you will.

We could look at the traditional science trajectory and epigenetics. Maybe it's been around, oh, gosh, really in the news, maybe 20 years now. One of my favorite researchers, her name is Rachel Yehuda, out of my Sinai university.

And she was a descendant of Holocaust parents. And started to study this with such an interesting perspective because it was something personal to her. And to discover that the same stress markers in descendants were the same as carried as if they were actually in the Holocaust.

That's how the DNA gets affected and imprinted and carried on. And so she's one of kind of the people that I look up to as a researcher to really learn the mechanics in the ins and outs. Now the other sort of pathway is the creator of family constellations.

He's a German psychotherapist, his work has been around, gosh, maybe 55 years now. And he's written probably 30 books, the different ways of how we carry our family and that history in the body, everything from relationship to parenting to health in these different areas and the thread that runs through it in all that we carry, that we just think, "Whoa, this is just me, I'm just a bit anxious," or "This is just the way my relationship goes." But it gives us the new lens to consider that larger context.

Yeah, I remember, share with our audience, I remember that he or was in Mark Walling as well, that in their own search for healing went to South Africa, to the Zulac tribes. Yes, to bring, he was a priest actually, to bring missionary work and to help these people. And he started to look around the families in the community and thought, "Wow, no one's suffering with depression, there's no violence, there's no mental illness, what is this community actually doing?"

He stayed there, I believe, 16 years and really learned so much from them. And this was a very influential to the creation of family constellations, that the balance within the family, the really holding no grudges and sorting out any harms in the moment, instead of carrying them forward to the next generation. It was something that he thought he was coming as the teacher, but he was completely the student and left with such richness and then really carried it forward to bring it into Europe and you're right, Latin America really embraces this work.

I think it's because family is a higher value or a little bit more revered than we see in other cultures. So interesting. And tell us about epigenetics, for anyone in my audience who how is it possible that we can inherit our parents and our grandparents, traumas and societies and fears?

Yes. So genetics is something we all know about, that's what gets passed on in the DNA, the actual letters in the DNA. Epigenetics wants to understand how those letters are being read.

So our environment greatly influences how the DNA is read. And so epigenetics looks at how the system is adapting to the environment, how your body moves through stress is greatly influenced by what your parents and grandparents carried as stress. It's almost like epigenetics, the science of it, is helping us to understand how the body gets prepared to deal with something our parent or our grandparents has overcome.

So if grandpa came from a war torn country, you may live with a lot of hypervigilance in your body called anxiety, even though you're an upstate Connecticut, perfectly safe, perfectly abundant, but you might live with this sense of it all be taken away or the sound of a firecracker makes you feel, you know, I'm going to jump right out of where I was sitting, that we carry a different, we're predestined for different things depending on what our parents and our grandparents have gone through. Now what we understand and this is a real point of difference, if our grandfather made peace with being in a war situation, I'm just thinking of the worst thing someone could imagine. If he really resolved it and settled it, it's much less likely to be carried on in the next generation.

So for your listeners with children, there's this awareness that as I come to set down the grudge with my aunt, the problem with my sister, when I settle the trauma that happened when I some terrible thing happened when you heal, that's it. It's less likely to be passed on. It's how we make sense of the things that happened to us that has the greatest impact.

How we change our biology, by healing it, by reducing that stress, that anxiety will have a imprint in our DNA, as well as we're not passing on that anxiety to our children. For example, I'm afraid of subways and I don't go to the subway at all and when I go to the subway, I'm stressed and anxious. So I'm probably passing on that same anxiety to my child if they're with me.

Even if they're not with you, this is the DNA part of it. Yeah. Okay.

So it's that so concept of nature, nurture. We recognize, well, oh my gosh, I'm half my mom. I'm half my dad.

These imprints are within me. This is the confusion where we think, oh, this is just me, I'm afraid of subways instead of really looking at where might that have come from. It's a little bit similar to the story you shared when we started, that when you recognize, oh my gosh, I've been carrying my mom's fear because she actually did live in fear of losing my dad, her partner.

And so this has become my fear. This is the freedom that we can access when we start to understand where it's connected to. And we can actually give it back to the source instead of carrying your forward and living it just continuing you through the years.

And Johanna, when do you know? So if anybody's experiencing anxiety right now, and anxiety is an alarm system in your body, is something in your body saying we're not safe, something's going to happen. When do you know it is something related to inherited trauma versus something that we experienced?

Well, the only thing I can share with you was in the early days of the pandemic and the clients that I would be seeing. It's a very stressful situation for all involved. And yet my clients from Europe were much more alarmed, were much more upset, were much more in the fight of the contrast.

Instead of just the, well, I don't want to be locked in my home or I am afraid to catch this terrible scary thing that the news is talking about. So because of their epigenetic history, of we all know the history of Europe, very varied and complex, depending on where they in Poland, or which area they were in as to what was carried and what felt eerily familiar when we look at pandemic protocols. And so we can all be, you know, a million of us can be faced with a stressful situation.

And those of us who carry epigenetic imprints of war, of famine, of complex trauma, the descendants, whether it be a child or a grandchild, will respond much more intensely to any stressor currently. And so I'm really looking for, yes, this is a stressful experience. And now I'm going to listen to the language, how they're describing when you hear this news report, what happens in your body, when you come across this challenge, what are you making it mean to find the language of the system?

So we can start to resolve how it's been carried not only with the client, but their parents and their grandparents, so that we're really feeling that freedom of all of it throughout, so that we can kind of handle that stressful situation without feeling bold or over by it. No, it's amazing. I have, as I mentioned, six episodes on EMDR because one of the most important parts of healing is that awareness, like where is this coming from?

Where is the road? And feeling it and going back and feeling it and feeling that angst and then letting it go, processing it. But that only works when you know what happened, when you have a specific memory, when you're trying to process something traumatic that happened to you, whether it was one event or complex trauma, but you heard it trauma.

It's just so exciting because when that is not available and you don't know where something's coming from, it's a place to go. So Johanna, how do we heal? Like how you have someone, I know you talk a lot about the DNA of money and that's a very hot topic.

I have a lot of clients who have suffered from scarcity, money scarcity and whether they spend too much and overspend or they save too much and you know live whether you know there's people who have the means and kind of save or someone who is afraid of being successful. So let's use that as an example because it's something that you talk about how do we heal? Like how what's the process with the you know family constellations?

If someone's interested and curious like how does it work? Yeah, yeah. And so if we look through the lens of money, this can be such a hot topic, right?

It can be so intertwined with feelings of self-worth, of the ability to make the choice of where I belong, which which community or connection point can I find my belonging based on inherently what I feel, my value is you know can I hang out with the rich people or do I stay you know and the point really is, can I be myself across the board regardless of my perception? And that is really healing the deeper piece of that inner relationship with money. So the recognition again, where did that sense of wanting to save all the money and try to be as frugal as possible?

Or not looking at the bills and just getting what I feel I really want because that feels fulfilled something in me. Again, we're looking through the whole context of the system to find out where that knee jerk decision comes from. For some people dead is a part of life and for other people it's the worst thing that they could imagine.

So we're really outside of the realm of right or wrong and much more trying to understand your inner language of how things work or don't work so well with regards to money so that you can make more intentional choices instead of repeating painful parts of the past or what I see very commonly is what I call an unconscious loyalty. So let's say you've gone to university, you've got a beautiful career, things are really going well, but there's this sort of almost like edging up against a glass ceiling. It's an unconscious loyalty that says, I don't dare do better than my parents.

How could I have more? And so there are ways that we balance out in the system and we just want to be sure what's kind of running inside us unconsciously when it comes to healing our relationship with money. Because it's not everything, but it ranks right up there with oxygen.

It's pretty darn important and we don't want it to be a lifelong struggle or something we feel we have to hide away. You know, it was really early on in my practice that I started to work with significantly successful people and I thought, oh, they're actually not more comfortable or at ease about money. They just have more zeros behind the commas, but they're just as tangled up.

There's just maybe even more problems because of the way they're relating with their money. And so that really blew the doors off for me. I was kind of in this perspective at the time that, well, you earn more money, it solves all the problems.

And so that had me really look through the lens of epigenetics to recognize, of course, you know, how could I be so naive? This will come through in this very important tool called money that we live our life and make our choices. In our culture, it's so tied to self-worth and all kinds of other things like shame or jealousy that can keep us really bogged down and stuck within our money choices.

And to imagine, this is all running unconsciously. This is all behind the scenes. And I think most of us spend a good deal of time maybe reading a money book or creating a budget or trying to figure out the best investment strategy, but until we deal with that inner stuff, we're sort of just recreating pieces of the past that perhaps worked and perhaps didn't, or worked back in the 50s and don't work in in this time.

And so we just want to shine a bit of light on what are those influences so that you're not running my default, but much more choosing and living my choice. So what would be your approach? I was trained as a coach with cognitive behavioral therapy.

So when I have this client, we work on their thoughts, right? Money, what comes to mind? And we dissect every thought and yes, most of the time is, am I worthy?

Am I worthy of money? And so like we dissect that how true is that? Are you worthy?

Why are you worthy? And when that is ineffective and they still have the same behaviors or they can't, you know, stop overspending or hoarding, what is your approach to you? Like what specifically do you ask them to list the lineage of mom, dad, grandparents, or when I felt this way before, what does this remind you of?

Or what's, how do you get people to not only increase that awareness, but feel, right? Because it's in the feeling that we change. 100%.

Yes, it's much less mental than what you're describing. And so it's a very unique process, but every single time is different, depending on who the client is, and what their needs are. So I really love that.

It can be even neat each and every time. And before I explain the process, I'd love to share the famous Einstein quote that none of us can solve a problem with the same mind that created it. And I've just come to appreciate that about this work that we're really kind of above the issue because we're looking at the client through the whole context.

And so now we're looking at it from a fresh perspective. And another big part of my training has been body-centered psychotherapy because we can't just understand it at the level of the mind. Nothing really changes in our behaviors because we've got to include the body.

And so constellation work is very experiential where we are, okay, the first step to answer your direct question about the process. The first step is I build a three-generation geneal gram for the client. I get very curious if we go through the money lens.

Where did money stop flowing? Where did it get tangled up? Did anybody kind of like rip somebody off on fairly?

Did somebody get maybe one sibling got all of the inheritance and the other sibling got excluded? What's going on there? I'm looking for that flow.

I'm looking for the full picture across three generations. Often I'm lucky enough that a client will have a children. And so now we can see four generations across.

And how do they relate with money, with their children? If do they say no right away if the child asks for a loan? Or here's a car for your 16th birthday.

Like how does that go in the next generation? From there, now that I've got what I call their map of the inner world, I'm able to really begin the experiential process. And this is where the body comes in.

And I think perhaps one of the greatest contributions of Bert Hellinger, who has been called actually one of the greatest psychotherapists of our time. And perhaps it's because of this contribution. He was so wise with what he calls healing statements.

There are usually, you know, six or seven word sentences, very brief, very almost to the heart that just allows the person to drop in to the truth, to the body, to the sensations. And it's so interesting what can unravel from there. We're sort of opening, we're blowing open the unconscious loyalties, we're seeing what's been hidden, kind of like what's behind the curtain.

And oh, that's how it's been influencing me. So that we're getting people some clarity around their reference points that keep returning to in these very important scenarios with their money, with their marriage, with their children. So that they're in an experience that you can't unsee what you see.

And therefore you return back to your life very different. Free of some of those cumbersome patterns that have really held you in for so long. So when you say three generations, you're looking at our parents, their parents.

That's right. Right. And sometimes they have children.

Okay. Yeah. And we do, most of your clients, I imagine, have to go back to their parents and ask for their stories, right?

Because not depending on the topic, a lot of the time we don't know what happened. And I would say 90% of the time, because this work really deals with the facts of the family. So things like did mom and dad stay married or get divorced.

The client knows that was there a miscarriage. Sometimes the abortion will stay more secret. Did a child die young?

We're really looking more for the facts of the family. I also really appreciate that about this work. It doesn't dig into story.

Because when clients re-tomatize. They retraumatize themselves. The same stress chemicals fire off.

And the physical body can't tell the difference between a trauma that happened 13 years ago. And when I'm retelling it right here in the therapy office. So that's a way to protect and do you guide them with questions?

Like, yes. All the facts, like all the facts that your family suffered. Yes.

If someone had to immigrate due to safety, did they lose much of their savings? That's going to be a big piece of the money. I've had many people, you know, three generations later will not save any money or just don't know why they can't save because their grandparents' savings was taken.

And so it feels unsafe to save. And so we're really, I'm asking very specific questions to sort of dig up what's there because the client might know, but it's just never connected it. Oh, that's why I want to say, like keep telling myself next month, next month, but I don't feel safe leaving it in the bank or leaving it in an investment.

Even though it's a very different situation for that client than it would have been for their grandparents. Right. It is so interesting because a lot of the times we know the facts, but we haven't really felt them.

Right. Like there's things that we say, oh, I got divorced or, you know, my dad got kidnapped or you know, you say it's such a matter of fact. Yeah.

And it is until we do this work and we allow ourselves to feel it and to connect it to where it is in our bodies that we're grabbing, having that anxiety that we can then release it. That's right. You know, we just want to put that big question mark around, huh?

This fear is it mine or where does it come from? And we're trying to, we're trying to pin the tail on the fear, so to speak. We're trying to find out where it originated.

And is this work that you can do on your own or I have heard that sometimes family members getting invited or that there's sort of figurines that okay, pretend that's mom, what's coming up for you? Like how how does that work? Yes, I have many colleagues who use figurines, trying to think if there's another mode.

No, I believe that's the main primary one. I really like to use footprints. I really like so they're just little foam footprints.

And so let's say I'm on Zoom with a client and I'll have the footprints here in my office and I could ask them to use a tea towel or a t-shirt or a throw pillow because I want to have their body involved. If we're looking at a table of figurines that are moving around, I don't know if we're as embodied. So for me and just the way that I like to work, I want to have my clients step into mom's shoes.

What is that experience as your mom, as you look back at yourself? So we sort of have that gestalt concept where we're seeing through mom's eyes. What is dad's position on this?

And I the client get to step in and explore so that a lot of the times right away we're generating compassion, right away we have a different understanding instead of trying to get it intellectually or feeling it, it's moving or metabolizing all that's been stored there out of a beautiful, you know, 10, 15 minute experience that changes everything. So when you talk about footprints it's really getting into their shoes kind of visually or emotionally and saying what was it like to be my grandma? What was it like to live?

No, no, no, this is where the healing sentences come in. So I might say as your grandma talking to your mom, when grandma says, it must have been so hard for you, all of my drinking. I was so numb and maybe her name is Melissa, Melissa it was never about you, but you were just a little girl.

Of course you took it personally. It was all about my pain. And so now we've got the client releasing tears.

Now we've got, you know, this is movement around, I never thought of it that way. I was just a little. But this is what the client says.

This is what I would say. That's right. That's right.

So we're talking really put myself in her shoes so that we are through empathy and compassion, understanding what it was like, releasing forgiveness and releasing it out of our bodies basically. Yeah. And I even go so far as to avoid the word forgiveness.

Okay. I find a much more powerful word. So we have I forgive and I think the two words that are even stronger and move towards healing are I understand.

So grandma, I never thought to look behind you and all that pain and all that you lost. Of course you were using alcohol to numb. Of course you couldn't meet me emotionally.

Now I see it. So we're giving the gift of that context because if we hold it as personal, it's a little bit like Olympic freeze. Our whole executive function in the brain just shuts down because she wasn't there for me.

I didn't get what I needed. We hold it as individual and personal. There's not a lot of movement towards healing there until we include the larger picture.

Do you find that this is some modality that in an ideal world people should go to first or second, or when nothing else has worked when they've worked with a therapist with cognitive behavioral therapy and elective therapy and EMDR and they still feeling anxious is that when they should come to you or anyone who practices or yeah over my name, if they have the choice, like if someone's listening to this episode right now or would it be incredibly effective to go to it first. Over the years of working with clients, I've had a mix of people who were lucky enough to find it first and didn't have to feel, oh I tried this and I tried that. And maybe if I look back most often, we almost don't hear about other modalities until we start with a modality that we know.

And so I like to sort of trust the client's journey that okay they were ready for talk therapy and that got them this far and they were ready for whatever their next piece was. And now you know this work is very much a deep dive. This work is very much you need to be, it's almost like we've got to give up the story to allow in the healing.

Are we ready to give up the story if I'm the hurt daughter or I'm the traumatized whomever to welcome in the complex part of healing. What do you recommend to them? And I'm talking from the scope when I was ignorant about this modality and I thought oh we got to we need you know my mom won't go to therapy or my dad won't get it or my brother is you know refusing.

I know now that just doing this work ourselves is all we need to show up differently, to handle things differently and to actually inspire them to elevate themselves. What do you recommend someone who wants to heal, who is tired of spending Christmas after Christmas or Hanukkah after Hanukkah with all this anxiety and avoiding family, right? A lot of people avoid their family.

I know that I made decisions to not go spend time with family just because he was too stressful. Would you refine that balance because the truth about epigenetics and this has helped me to face difficult situations in my own family is there is no avoiding. There I've you know moved provinces and countries to try to get a bit of space and wherever we go they are within us.

You know epigenetically biochemically we are half our mom and half our dad and so the more we cannot interface because of difficulty the louder these traits get in us. And so the biggest step is to be able to step in with a very secure and resilient boundary and that sometimes takes a little bit of time for us to work with.