In This Week's podcast I'm talking about why it's so hard for us to see, admit, and feel our own pain as a result of family dysfunction and childhood trauma and offer a different perspective on pain. 

Work With Me: https://www.shylacash.com/workwithme
Email Me: [email protected]

Show Notes:
What I notice so often that trips people up, is that they don’t want to acknowledge and provide grace and space to their pain.

They don’t want to feel their pain. They make themselves wrong for feeling it. They torture themselves for feeling it. And often this judgement and ridicule that we give to ourselves for being in pain as a result of our pathological families and childhood trauma and adverse childhood experiences  is a result of the judgement and ridicule that our parents fed us when we tried to be emotionally honest with them.

When we expressed our pain.
When we asked for our needs to be met.
When we cried.

They may have said things like: “I’ll give...

In today's podcast, my client Valerie Martinez of Valerie's Revival joins me to talk about some of the work we did together in coaching, her experience cultivating grounded spirituality, the effects of trauma on physical health, perfectionism, living authentically and so much more. 

You can find Valerie on instagram at:
https://www.instagram.com/valerierevival/ 
and https://www.instagram.com/valerierevivalpodcast/ 

Valerie's Website is: https://www.valerierevival.com/ 

Email me: [email protected]
Work With Me: https://www.shylacash.com/workwithme 

How you think about trauma determines whether you will heal or not. I'm sharing with you some of the most common ineffective thoughts about trauma, and some alternative ways to think about it. 

Work with me: https://www.shylacash.com/workwithme 
Email Me: [email protected]

Oftentimes, I feel like a weak little girl.
And then I resist, and defend against the archetype of the small abused girl who just needed a mom.
And in my thrashing against her, she takes hold.
Chokes out my power.
And makes sure that I see. That I remember… she is me.

But she is only part of me.
It is in my resistance to her presence that I find myself at her beck and call on either side of the spectrum (resistant, defensive and rigid OR small and frail and unable to direct the flow of my own life).

The shadows take hold when we refuse to acknowledge their presence.

She is only part of me - she is neither bad nor good. Simply a neutral part of my emotional, physical and spiritual body which demands to be explored and most importantly… integrated. We all carry with us these fragile frail parts. And the first instinct is always to resist.

The stable, powerful adult woman seemingly has no need/time/energy to open the door to the fragile, unprocessed pieces of distant...

There’s what happened… and then there’s who you ARE…

It’s hard to separate the two. What happened. The circumstance. The object. The swirling of life around you. And the past events that shaped who you are. Versus YOU - who you are, what you VALUE, yourSELF, your CORE, your POWER.

Life pushes fast fast faster against you and everything has a sense of constriction. Constraint. Pressure. Before long we’re going through motions that we never meant to go through. Living from a paradigm we did not choose.

I find nothing more terrifying than when I notice that I’ve confused what’s happening or what happened with myself - my values - and my power. I coast along complaining about how hard it all is until life and God grant me a reality check that slaps me in the face and wakes me up from the daily slumber of pity.

The deeper truth is that nothing that is happening outside of me, and even nothing that happened to me IS me. I am not my job or...

I wonder why you’re here…

Here with me… letting me invade your social media feed or your email inbox with all this stuff about healing, and creating the life you desire… 
Listening to the ramblings from my heart. 

Reading… watching…

I say that I wonder - but I think I actually know.

You’re not necessarily here for me… sure you like me (at least I hope you like me since you’re reading my stuff! LOL) … but it’s not really about that is it?

What it’s really about is you. 

If you’re reading this… if you’re my client or you just enjoy my writing and my general situation…. I think you recognize that what’s coming out of me, what I'm writing about, what I’m teaching about and what I truly believe in at my core… I think you recognize yourself in there (CAUGHT YA!)

There’s something in me… that is reflecting back to you… what  is...

To me, there is absolutely no recovery from childhood abuse and neglect and trauma without spiritual power. They simply co-exist together. Because everything is everything - the body, the spirit, the psyche, the emotional body… everything IS everything.

Ya.. but WHAT IS spiritual power EXACTLY?

Well… it’s the thing that carried you through the horrors you survived-  for one.
But also, it’s the thing that is ACTUALLY going to move your life forward beyond survival and into abundance, joy and most importantly receiving love.
And I’m not talking about the soggy weak spirituality of fake love and light which pretends everything is okay behind glossy dissociated eyes. 

I’m talking about the spiritual power that comes from integrating the WHOLE thing. From your head down to your toes, and from your toes back up to your head. Because spirituality without connection to the body is the kind of spirituality that actually perpetuates the...

I cried while I was running today. When I first started seriously working out (swimming twice per day), I was on the cusp of some major breakthroughs in my life and I swam twice a day to cope with what I was losing (a codependent relationship, some unhealthy friendships, my own irresponsibility tendencies and emotional leeching). I didn’t know it then, but I was running from myself. It happened to be a rather healthy way to “escape” - or at least it seemed to be for me at the time. This was before I knew what I know now about nervous system healing, emotional scaffolding, titration, and the physiological survival response of trauma. I was doing what I could with what I had. I was trying to hold onto my core - or find my core self. Find my independence after being enmeshed with unhealthy parents and carrying that forward into my life as an adult with friendship and intimate relationship dynamics that mirrored the trauma bonds of my upbringing.

What I started...

Pursuit… in and of itself - that is the magic. That is the divinity. That is the WHOLE point.
Not the pursuit of dreams from false-self. Not the pursuit in favour of validation or what we think we need to pursue to be worthy of existing.
But the pursuit of your divine vision - your inner calling and resonance, whatever that is for you.

THAT pursuit - is gold. And the pursuit itself will even HEAL you. At the deepest level. The healing and unfolding always happens in motion. The nature of life is change. The nature of life is movement and so is the nature of healing.

THAT pursuit will humble and electrify, and sculpt and mold and absolutely show you your own self more than anything else.

And by the time you have what you have pursued - you will continue the path ANYWAY. Because it was never about what you “wanted” it was never about the “goal” It was the doing itself - the reckoning of that. The making and the creating and the persisting and resisting and...

Are you scared and intimidated around people you perceive as strong, powerful, smarter, or more accomplished than you?

I have felt this way sooooo many times

In fact it’s an area that I am CONSTANTLY working on within myself.

The little traumatized child in me wants to quiver and shake and fawn because that’s what I did as a little one to survive in my home around a mom who couldn’t handle the threat of someone’s light shining in her presence.

Thankfully after stumbling around in the beginning, I’ve managed to find some footing here.

What most of us do is feel weak and small and contemptuous - and then jealous - and then angry at ourselves and then feel like we shouldn’t feel that way and try and puff our chests to seem like we’re really not that vulnerable. I’ve done that a lot in my life.

And then? We think it’s so disgusting that we could allow ourselves to feel that way AGAIN after a childhood of making ourselves smaller - we...