Welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host. I'm Darlene

Childress. I'm a life and parenting coach. And this is part

two of our how to heal series, where I am

walking you through a six part sort of hierarchy

of healing and giving you some really actionable

steps of how to heal from emotional pain, how

to figure out what's not working in your life

and how to make changes to get to a different

state of being, whether you want to feel happier,

show up as a calm mama, or not be so reactive.

Maybe you wanna improve your relationship with yourself, with your body, with

your partner, in work, make you know, reach more

goals. Whatever it is that you want in life, you

are probably going to have to go through a process of

healing from something that might be blocking you,

an obstacle that might be blocking you from getting you to

that next state of life. Today

on that pod, I'm going to teach you about radical

self trust, and we're gonna talk about why that's

important and what it means. Before I even get

into it, I wanna ask this opening question to you because I was

thinking about this. How like, I was thinking, how do you tap

into this concept of self trust? Like,

what's the entry point to feeling

this experience of self trust. And I was

thinking really it's by having had an experience of

feeling very safe with somebody. So I

wanted to ask you, is there anyone in your life that you

feel completely safe with that you can admit

anything to where you're willing to say

the, like, shameful,

embarrassing, negative thing out

loud to them, and you trust that

they can handle that, like,

that vulnerability with unconditional love.

If you can think of someone like that I mean, just think about how lucky

you are. If that's your spouse or your best friend or a parent

or or a sibling, a lot of people don't

have someone in their life that they can completely trust,

who they feel completely safe with. And what I

mean by feeling like being able to trust is

that you feel safe enough to share something vulnerable,

where you know that their love for you will not

change. So that's why last week's episode was all about

this unconditional self love, this radical self

love, and getting to deeper and deeper areas

of loving yourself unconditionally

because that's the foundation. If we think of this hierarchy of

healing, self love is the basis. It's the

foundation that we need to be looking at

our behaviors, our patterns, our thoughts, our

negative feelings. Anything that we're wanting to shift,

we're not gonna be able to shift into new

places of healing and, you know, self actualization

if we don't start from a premise of self love. And

then the next part of that is self trust.

So what do I mean by radical self

trust? It is this idea

that you remember I said last week that I was gonna give you a set

of statements for each concept. So here's your set of

statements for radical trust, and it is,

I am safe with me. I

unconditionally love and accept myself.

I trust that my love for myself is unconditional.

I'm gonna revisit that in a little while. But right now, I want

you to just kind of start to understand, like, this is the

idea that we're working with is that I am safe with me,

and I trust that my love for myself is

unconditional. Okay. So let's get into

a little bit of, like, what are we healing from and talk about healing in

general. Because I think it's helpful to just

understand, like, what is it that I'm talking about when I talk about

what are you healing from? Like, what's this healing all about?

So when I think about healing, I'm talking about emotional

pain, And I'm talking about

going back and looking at possibly

moments in the past, whether that's childhood, young

adulthood, your, you know, your twenties, your thirties, your forties. I

mean, it could be happening now. But a moment where your

core emotional or physical needs were not met.

Now let me talk a little bit about core emotional

needs because this is helpful as a parent. You wanna know how to,

like, trauma proof your kids and not create trauma for them. Right? So

they don't have to heal from their childhood.

Remember, one of my life missions is to heal the

next generation in advance. And what I mean by

that is really creating an experience of life

where they don't have a lot of trauma or they don't have wounds, primal

childhood wounds that they have to go back and heal from. Now a lot of

you have childhood trauma or childhood wounds

that you're going back to heal from. So what are we talking about

when we talk about these emotional needs and these wounds that

were created when our emotional needs weren't met?

So the first emotional need a child has is determining

whether they are safe. It is our core

genetic species based need

because babies are born and they're very vulnerable

and they know that they are not able to take care of

themselves. And so a child, a baby, that's its

first foundational developmental question is, am I

safe? And that core

is this a core need? The second core need

is, am I loved unconditionally? So sometimes

when I talk about this in, you know, the podcast or in

my programs, in my group program and in my one on one coaching program,

we talk about the developmental questions that kids

have. So the first one is, am I safe? The second one is

am I the boss of my body? The third one is

am I good when I'm bad? Now we don't

think of our children as good or bad, but we do sometimes think of

their behavior as good or bad, And we kind of say to our kids, like,

you know, that's not good. Don't act like that. And what happens is

a lot of times a kid can interpret by saying I am my behavior

because they're not able to really separate themselves from their behavior. So

we want our kids to start to understand, hey. You know what? You're

loved no matter what. You are unconditionally loved and accepted,

and your core need for authenticity is met.

So our kids have this core need of attachment, which is safety, and they

have this core need of authenticity, which is love.

So if you have any point in your life have not

felt safe or have not felt unconditionally loved,

you probably will have a wound from that.

And so when we talk about healing, we're going back and we're healing

some of those past times where our core emotional and

physical needs were not met. Now what happens if you grow up not

feeling safe? This was true for me because I experienced

abandonment because my dad left my family when I was a kid. I

experienced sexual abuse as a child. I experienced

a mother who was emotionally unstable

because she had pretty severe depression as well as

undiagnosed ADHD. And so she was a lot of times

not available for me. She also put me in positions

that with like, she chose men that were not safe for me. And

I my body got hurt. So along the way, I started

to decide the world's not safe. Like, look around.

Like, the adults are unreliable. The adults hurt you. The

adults leave. The adults aren't taking care of business. And

so I have a core wound of not feeling safe. So what does that look

like? It can look like hypervigilance, scanning for hazards, looking

to see do I fit, do I belong, am I okay? Being

insecure, like, literally insecure is, like, the lack

of security. And one of the things I worked on all last

year in 2024 was internalized

security. I wanted to teach my body that I was safe

and that I was I was okay because I didn't really

wanna have that anxiety come up all the time, that pressure and that feeling in

my chest and, you know, that, you know, that anxiety

feeling. I wanted to train myself to not

go there, not not create a sympathetic nervous

system response. I wanted to teach my body at a primal level that I was

safe. That was partly because of that wound that I had.

Right? Being very controlling is a symptom of

not feeling safe. Having the need to, like, know everybody's business,

know what's going on, be in charge, direct the traffic of

your life. Needing power or feeling powerless

or being really rigid and feeling like if something goes off

schedule, everything's gonna go bad. Right? Not having that

response flexibility being in that rigid space, that is

really about not feeling safe. Now, of

course, if you don't feel that you're loved unconditionally, that

can also look like people pleasing, pushing others

away, over performing perfectionism, over

planning. So you see how when we

have a core wound, it shows up in our

behavior. And those behaviors are really

maladaptive strategies that we used in

childhood to cope with pain, to cope with

discomfort. Maybe you develop some maladaptive

strategies in your, adulthood that you don't

even realize were there to mask a wound or to fill a

hole. And what happens,

especially when you become a parent, is you start to realize

that some of your current life circumstances,

like a kid not going to bed on time, or a kid, you

know, refusing to eat a meatball or whatever,

that you have like a a chandelier type response, like

an overreactive response, like chandeliers are in the

ceiling. Right? So, like, you kinda hit the roof. It's just this

intense reactivity that doesn't really make sense based on

the current circumstance. Like, you're overreacting.

Right? And that is an indication that you might have

some something to heal from, some trigger, some

reactivity going on that you want to change.

And so that's how why we want to heal is

because there's, like, current life circumstances that

if we're responding to them from past emotional wounds,

we may be creating more pain either for ourself or others. I

have so many examples of this in my life. Like, the first is

just being aggressive with Lincoln when he was little and, you

know, wanting to use my body and even hurting his body. I

hit him twice when he was little. And I was like, uh-oh. Woah. This

is not safe. This is not okay. It's even shameful to admit it to

all of you here. But it was, like, scary to me. I was

like, oh my god. Who am I? And instead of deciding I'm a

monster, I decided to say I'm a person struggling.

I'm a person in pain. I'm a person having an emotional

reaction. I need help. And that

we have to feel safe And we have to feel loved

in order to go take that action to be vulnerable, to admit

that we are struggling. But that behavior

is like the the hint that

discomfort, that feeling of shame, that feeling of guilt, that feeling of

discomfort, or that feeling of pressure, that feeling of, you know,

not being satisfied, feeling of resentment, feeling of anger.

Like, if you have an intense emotion or you're

ashamed of your behavior, I'm not here to judge you. I don't want

you to judge yourself. I want you to see it as a hint, as an

invitation to grow, to heal. So we

look at our behavior today and we

start to get curious about what could be going on

that is driving this behavior. What wound,

what unmet emotional need could be driving this

behavior. So when you think about healing, in

many ways, it's a form of reparenting. We've heard this phrase

on Instagram and TikTok, like, what is reparenting?

I think of it not as going back to childhood wounds

necessarily and reparenting yourself. I really think of it

as being the parent that you need

right now. Like, showing up

for yourself today as the parent that

you want right now, which all of us

want our parent to say you're safe and you're

loved. I've got you and I'm here.

And that's what I want you to do for yourself is

become the parent that you wanna be for your children, become

that mom to you right now. Hey, girl.

You're safe and I love you. There's nothing you can

do that would make me love you less. There

is no danger here. I am the adult. I'm right

here. We talked about core self from last week. It's that core

self that is love and goodness. And

that's her. She's the one who is parenting

you. And we wanna teach you that

you are safe with your core self, you're safe with her.

Isn't that cool? So you get to become the loving and supportive

parent that you strive to be for your kids, you get to be that for

yourself. That's what I think of as reparenting.

So now how do we do it, right? How do we actually

heal? I've kind of talked about this. Healing

means just looking at patterns in your life that might be causing

pain And then gently shifting those patterns

towards new ones that cause less pain.

I was thinking about sharing this and I wasn't sure, but I've said,

you know, I experienced sexual abuse as a child. And

then that was from it's so hard to talk about it, but it was from

the ages of five to 10. And then when I went into adolescence, I

didn't want to be victimized any longer. And I

was very promiscuous. And it was like I wanted power. I wanted

choice. I wanted to be the boss of my body. But instead of

actually listening to myself and actually connecting

to what I wanted, believing that I was worthy of saying

no and that people would listen to me. Like, I had so many wounds

around this, but that promiscuity really was a

maladaptive strategy. It was a pattern in my

life that made me feel safe, that made me feel

loved, but was actually causing me a lot of

pain because I was allowing myself to be

unloved and unappreciated and also unsafe at

times. So we wanna look at our

patterns. But the truth is that any of the patterns

of behavior that you have, you will

not be able to look at

those patterns and be honest with yourself because the

next part of, healing series is

honesty. So if you wanna be honest with yourself,

the prerequisite is feeling safe with yourself.

I can't be honest with how shitty I act

or why I'm doing something if I don't feel safe

and loved. So remember, this is a conversation between you and you.

This is a internal dialogue. And a lot of

us hide our own behavior from ourselves.

We get we keep it subconscious. We don't wanna take a look

at it. We don't wanna examine it. We don't wanna

wonder why am I doing that? Where is this behavior

coming from? What wound could be here? Or what

emotional need might not be being met? We're afraid

to look at some of our behavior because we are

ashamed of it. We don't want anyone to know.

So we wanna just put on some lipstick and move on. But that's

not gonna get you to the shifts that you want. We've gotta go

through the dirt. We gotta go through the junk. We gotta be honest

about it all. We gotta take action. We gotta get help.

That's the truth. But you can't do that if you

don't feel unconditionally loved and unconditionally

safe with yourself. Yeah. It starts with you. You can't

change anything in your life if you're not honest about it, and you won't be

honest about it if you don't feel safe and you won't feel safe if you

don't feel loved. That's why this is a hierarchy. We start with

love. We go to safety, just trust, and then we go to honesty.

This hierarchy of healing, the foundation is love, and then

trust. I think of it as radical

trust. So if you wanna change something in your

life, you have to teach yourself that you're safe.

Even if you don't do that thing or even when you are doing that thing,

you're still loved if you're being promiscuous. Now, I

do wanna say something about promiscuity. For me, it was

not a behavior based in self esteem

and self worth. It was a behavior that was

based in fear and self loathing ultimately.

So I'm not over here slut shaming anybody. I'm just

being really clear that you have to know why you're

doing something. If it is like sexual expression and you're

just, you know, the boss of your body and you're making it work for you,

like, awesome. I I go for it. You know, I'm not

here to say I've talked about this before, like,

people have behaviors, they have patterns, they

have strategies that on the surface could look

unhealthy but are truly healthy and or on the surface could look healthy

but are unhealthy. An example of a maladaptive strategy

for me is dieting. To others, it looks like self

control. It looks like discipline. It looks like really beautiful

self care. But deep down, it's self loathing loathing and

insecurity and restriction and control. And it's

because I don't feel safe in my body that I wanna make me

hungry so that I can be in a hypervigilant state.

Fascinating about my eating disorder is really rooted

in creating just enough hunger that

I am paying attention to my body so that I stay safe.

But if I teach myself I'm safe, I don't have to do that strategy.

So I say all that because I'm not here to judge your

pattern. But I do want you to be judging

your pattern, not from negativity. I

want it to be looked at from self compassion, from self

love, from trust, And looking at yourself and

being like, I'm doing that thing. I wonder

why. What's going on? And I

have a lot of conversations that are like, Darlene, what is going

on here? And it sounds like I'm being mean, but I'm just like, you're

good girl, but we need to be honest about this. Radical trust

is really this this deep relationship that

I cultivate with myself that you get to cultivate with

yourself that says, hey, you are safe. You can be

honest with me. You are loved no matter what your

behavior is. You can trust that my love for you

is unconditional. I also like to make

promises to myself. I promise I won't be mean to

me. Right? So it's like me talking to me. I promise I won't

be mean to you, darling. You are good. You are

worthy. You are lovable. You are safe. You can

tell me the truth. If for some reason I hurt

myself, I trust that I'm gonna forgive myself. That's another

aspect of it. I also love to trust that I can

handle the future. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about a strategy to

do that. But if I believe deep down that I am the

grown up I've been waiting for, that I'm her, and

then I can handle things. My brother and I have this joke of,

like, who's your grown up? And really, a lot of times Kevin

is my grown up. Like, what do we mean by that is who do you

go to when you kinda need a grown up to, like, help you think through

something, make a decision, maybe rescue you a little bit? My

brother is, like, I'm your grown up and I'm his grown up. So I have

two grown ups, my brother and my husband. And

I also have myself. And I've been working on being my own grown up for

a long time. And sometimes I think of it as being my own muse, like

of different phrases. But the grown up that you're looking for

is you. And you get to trust her. She unconditionally

loves you and you are safe with her and she can handle things.

So that trust is not just I trust that you're safe, but

also I trust that I've got it.

If I can trust that I can handle anything, I said this a

couple episodes ago, that I deeply believe

that I can solve any problem that comes my way

except for death, and death is none of my business.

Anything that comes in life, I'm ready. I could handle it. I

can figure it out. I can resource myself. I can ask for help.

Like, I have taught myself that I'm safe. I've

also taught myself I'm safe because I say, I know how to drive

and I have a credit card, which is a way that I teach

myself that I can get out of any scrap that I put myself into as

long as I have, like, money and a way to escape.

Okay? So you get to pick what is

it for you that you know you're safe because of

what? Like, I can trust myself because

what do you know about yourself? What do you know is true about you?

What do you know that you know about yourself so deeply

that makes you feel safe? If you were to say, I know I'm a

an adult because what are the reasons that you know you're a grown

up? My sister and I were joking because we don't know how to fold a

fitted sheet. And we're like, this is like a failure of

adulting. So maybe you don't know how to fold a fitted sheet or

maybe you do. And you're like, hey, I'm really quite the grown up because

I know how to fold a fitted sheet. But you know how to do lots

of things. Right? You know how to make money. You know how to go to

grocery store. You know how to cook something. Hopefully, you know how

to do the laundry, take care of some things. Like, what do you already know?

What do you know how to do? I'm sure there's lots and lots of stuff

that you know how to do. So build up that confidence that you can trust

yourself because you can take care of things. Now, let me give you

a couple of strategies that I like that help me

develop radical self trust in me. These

are strategies that I have used and that I think are

really helpful. So the first one I'm calling

inventory of resilience. And

what that means is making an inventory,

making a list of times where

you have been resilient, things that you have overcome.

And this is really important because if you wanna trust yourself

today, you need to look for evidence that you're trustworthy.

And so going back and looking at the past and seeing

things that you have done that you

have learned or grown or overcome or that used to be

hard for you that you eventually figured out how to do.

It can be really simple. Like, I didn't know how to drive and then I

did know how to drive, if you know how to drive. You know, I used

to not know how to cook and now I do know how to cook. I

used to not how know how to ask for help, but

now I do know how to ask for help. You know, whatever it is that

you've overcome. Inventory of resilience. Just

like, what are you proud of? What do you know is true about

you that you think is like yeah. No. That used to be

hard and now it's easy. And it might be difficult for you to think

about. Like, parenting used to be hard for me and then I worked on

it and it actually became pretty easy for me. The relationship

pieces and, like, you know, dealing with children is always kinda challenging. But I

had clarity once I created the Calm Mama process. I was like, oh,

Calm Connect, limits that correct. It just like, for me, it made

it easy. Whenever I create a system for something, I'm

like, oh, okay. Like healing. Okay. Now I know how to heal because I know

what it takes. Right? I know I have to love myself, trust myself, be honest,

listen to myself, accept myself, and then take action. It's

like, yeah. So what are some examples of

areas in your life that you have overcome, that you've been

resilient? I used to not know how to do a podcast

and now I have one. I used to not know

how to, like, it's gonna sound weird, but, like,

sell parent coaching. I was a parent coach. I was qualified

and I had no idea how to tell people to, like, help

them. I didn't know where to meet people or how to talk to them about

it and then I learned how. I didn't know how to run a business. And

now I know how to run a business. That my marriage was a real in

shambles in 2017. I didn't know if we were gonna make it.

And we kept at it. I learned a lot. I grew a lot.

And now I know I can trust myself that I can handle

whatever comes. So give yourself a little pat on the back

and tell yourself a good story. Inventory of

resilience. So that helps you build evidence that you

are trustworthy. So you could say, I am trustworthy because

or I have overcome the following things.

Some kind of prompt like that. I've been resilient in the past because

I didn't know about this, and now I do. Something like that. The

second strategy is this conversation that you

have with your past self and your future self.

So I want you to tell a good story

about the past. Now let me explain what I

mean by this. Right now, you are a person, you're whatever

age you are, and you're in whatever life stage you are, your kids are whatever

age they are, and you're making decisions. This is February,

so you're making decisions about the summer, maybe summer camp. You're

making decisions about next school year. You're making decisions possible

about where to live, whether you should work full time or part time or not

go back to work, whether you should have your kids do a medical

treatment or not, whether you should get them tested for

something. Like, right now, you're being faced with a

decision. K? Now how you talk

about your past decisions is going to

make it easier for you to make decisions

today. So right now the

person you are is present, whoever you are. You're in the present.

But there was someone in the past, also you, ten years ago

who made some decisions. And if you look at those

decisions that she made in the past and you think, oh my god, what were

you thinking? You're such a loser. That was so stupid. You should never have

done that. You have a lot of regret. You have a lot of non

forgiveness. You have a lot of resentment towards the past

you. That means that right

now you're making a decision but ten years from now,

future you will look at today and think

negative thoughts of her. If you're thinking negative thoughts about you from

the past and you don't change that right now, in the

future you're gonna think negative thoughts about yourself as you are

today. You know this about you. If

you don't trust past you, future

you won't trust present you. I know this sounds meta, but

just think about it. So fifteen years ago, I moved my kids to

a small town. And if I look at that person and I'm like, that

was a big mistake. We should never have left the city. You didn't really make

good friends. You should have stayed there. And, like, you know, whatever.

I could have a lot of regret about that. But then I'm making

decisions now for the future where we should live or

whatever. And it's like, if I mean to

past me, then that means I'm pretty much being mean to present

me. I cannot trust myself if I'm mean to

myself. Whether it's decisions I made in the past or

decisions I'm gonna make in the future and how I'm gonna think about today. I

need to be kind to me, all the

versions of me, past me, future me, present me.

The kinder I am, the more love I show,

the more self compassion I show, the more kindness and

appreciation I show for all the parts of me, all

the life experiences, all the decisions I've made, the easier it is

for me to trust myself. If I'm shitting on my past

decisions and past me, future me is

gonna shit on me today, And that's not developing trust.

Future me needs to believe that I always have her back that I'm I'm here

hooking her up. I'm setting her up for success. I'm doing the best I

can for me in the future. I am

smart. I am wise. I am making good decisions. Am I

making the right decision? I don't know. I know that I'm doing my

best and I'm do I'm getting as much information as I can, and I

can trust myself that I have to trust past me too.

I have to trust current me and I have to let future me trust me

too. So it's kind of this like very strange future me,

past me, present me conversation. But I

do want to invite you to start building a relationship with your

past and with your future self. So

doing that inventory of resilience is really good to reinforce this.

Like, hey. Look at all the good stuff you've done in the past. Look

at all the decisions you made and all the things that were hard that you

solved, that you figured out. The kinder you are to the things that

you've done in the past, the easier it will be to be kind to yourself

today and the easier it will be to be kind to yourself in the

future. Okay. Hopefully, that makes sense.

Message me on Instagram or reply to an email. Let me know if it's

super confusing. The last strategy is really

so basic, but so hard. And it really is about taking

care of your nervous system. So what does that mean? It means that

we have our parasympathetic and our sympathetic nervous

system are activated and our rest state. Right?

And we're supposed to flow back and forth between

a sympathetic, like an aroused state, to

a parasympathetic, which is a rest state. And that's

how we are meant to be. Right? We're not supposed to be at rest all

the time nor are we supposed to be activated all the time. I talk about

this in episode 97, your nervous system

explained. So go back and listen to that one. Now

how do you take care of your nervous system? Episode two where

I talk about the pause break is really, really helpful. I also do

did a series where I break the pause breakdown, and we'll

link all those in the show notes. But it's like moving your mind, moving

your body, moving your emotions. When you have an activated

nervous system in the present, right, that's your fear

response, that's your unsafe response, You're

noticing it. You're soothing yourself and then you're

shifting. So we do that with the pause break. We stop what we're

doing and we go and we reset our nervous system.

So the pause break is stop

and reset. Stop. Do nothing. Don't talk. Don't do it. Go take care of

yourself. So you're in your activated system.

Now a lot of us don't even notice that we're in an activated

stress response. We are not paying close enough attention partly because

of shame, partly because of disassociation, different

reasons. It's doesn't really matter whenever you

notice. You don't have to judge that you didn't notice or did, but just

notice and then figure out what it is that your body needs. Most of us

need to move and then do some mindset work. So I always say move your

body, move your mind. In the toolkit that I offer

for free on my website, if you don't have it or you haven't looked at

it for a while, the stop yelling cheat sheet goes through the

process of how to do this. So this is a really important thing.

But recognizing your nervous system is activated and then going

through and taking care of it is really important. So those are three

strategies to help develop trust in yourself.

Remember, we're going to be working for the next four episodes.

So this was episode two of a six part series on how to

heal, And they all build on each other. We're

started with love, radical self love. This

is radical trust. Next, you're gonna be

radical honesty, which is vulnerability,

radical listening, figuring out who you are, what you like,

what you want, radical acceptance, true deep acceptance of

who you are in your circumstances and just being okay

with today. And then radical action.

Like, we have to do stuff in order to shift. We have to do stuff

in order to heal. We have to create new habits. So I'm gonna talk about

that as well. So this is the episode. Today was all

about trust, remembering you're safe with you. You can trust

that your love for yourself is unconditional, promising that you

won't be mean to yourself. If you are mean to

yourself, you can forgive yourself, trusting that you can handle

problems when they come up. I'm gonna leave you with this final note

from Sharon Salzberg who wrote the book loving kindness.

I referenced it last week. It's very good. She says,

love for others without the foundation of love

for ourselves becomes a loss of boundaries,

codependency, and a painful and fruitless

search for intimacy. The intimacy

that you are longing for, the appreciation you're longing for,

the respite, the care, the love, the safety,

the grown up that you're longing for is you.

And I think she's really, really great.

Alright, mama. I will talk to you next week.