00:00:09 Nazish: Welcome to Inner Peace Better Health, where we explore the connection between emotional truth, inner calm and the long term well-being. I am Nazish, and today I am joined by Misty Nesbitt, memoir author, entrepreneur and survivor. Misty s work centers resilience, breaking generational trauma and redefining healing beyond cliches. Today we are talking about healing and what that really looks like, especially when life didn't start gently. If you have ever wondered whether healing is possible without erasing the past? This conversation is for you. Welcome to the show, Misty.

00:00:54 Misty Nesbitt: Thank you so much for having me.

00:00:56 Nazish: Wonderful. So, Misty, before we talk about our definitions of framework, what does the word healing, mean to you? Compared to what it meant earlier in your life?

00:01:08 Misty Nesbitt: Well, I don't think earlier in your life you really understand the word healing because you're you're looking for a quick fix, a solution that takes the pain away. And once you understand that there's no such thing, healing is about letting it go where it doesn't control your future and it doesn't. Your past stays in the past. Or you can look at it and say, I survived that. I'm that strong. But for so long, I looked at trying to figure out what's wrong with me. Why can't I heal from this? And it's because I was expecting a quick fix and I was expecting it to go away. And that's not really what healing is. It doesn't go away. You learn to live with it, you learn to survive it, and you learn to not let it come into your future.

00:02:02 Nazish: Absolutely. That sounds like such a relief hearing it from you. You know, many of my listeners are going to relate with it. And that distinction between what we hope healing is and what it becomes through lived experience feels so important to name it.

00:02:21 Misty Nesbitt: It is, it is. And once you realize that you're the one that chooses, nobody can do it for you. You have to look at yourself and say, okay, I'm just going to let this go. I can't fix it, I can't change it, but I can start anew today. Let me just start writing a new chapter of my life because I'm the one in control of that. And so I'm going to let go and realize that even if I made the mistake back then, I still can't fix it. Doesn't matter who. Who made it? Somebody made it to me or I made it to myself. Can't fix it. You can't change it. You just gotta let it go.

00:02:56 Nazish: You know, so, uh, tell us when someone grows up in survival mode, what patterns tends to form beneath the surface that later gets mistaken for personality?

00:03:09 Misty Nesbitt: Well, I can give you a perfect example. We've been snowed in for a couple weeks here, and I am completely safe where I'm at. But my body doesn't know that when I get still in my mind, it's still my. My body tries to steal, move, change, change scenery. It wants to get out of the situation. Because when you grow up, where your body is, is basically built in survival mode because you have to you have to survive, um, when everything around you is could potentially be something that's going to cause trauma because somebody is you're going to set somebody off, or you don't know what kind of mood they're in. You still in your everyday life. You still walk into a room and you look around and you judge the atmosphere, and your body doesn't always know, hey, it's okay to sit still for a moment. It's okay for this situation because it was trained to not it. Moving meant survival.

00:04:13 Nazish: Absolutely. Very well said. You know, so much of what we judge in ourselves started as protection and naming. That seems like first act of compassion.

00:04:25 Misty Nesbitt: Well, I think as humans we are prone to forgive others for their mistakes. We we will look at somebody and say, somebody hurt me, I'm going to forgive them. But we never look at ourselves and forgive us ever. We never.

00:04:41 Nazish: Said.

00:04:41 Misty Nesbitt: Hey, I'm going to forgive me.

00:04:46 Nazish: I agree, and so many of us needs to hear that today because we be so hard on ourselves.

00:04:54 Misty Nesbitt: We are our worst critic.

00:04:56 Nazish: Yeah. So I'm curious how does this plays out day to day? Like how do survival patterns show up in adult life, in relationship work or self worth, often without us realizing what's driving them?

00:05:09 Misty Nesbitt: Well, for me, I have issues of I try to fix everything and control everything for everybody because I know what what it was like to not have the control. And so even without knowing it, I'll try to, you know, jump in and be everybody's fixer. And it trauma still lives in your life no matter what. There's no getting rid of it. But you have to say, okay, so I see that I'm doing this. Let me figure out how I can fix it and stop doing it because it is a it is a defense mechanism of trauma.

00:05:48 Nazish: Absolutely. Absolutely. Very well. Uh, you know, uh, it is like, powerful to hear how awareness turns confusion into choices and how noticing that pattern creates a pause.

00:06:02 Misty Nesbitt: Yes. You really stop and look at your behavior. And so, yes, for so long I have I had so much anger for what it really was was it was hurt. But the only way I knew how to express it was anger. And, you know, people would say, you're so hateful. You're so miserable. I was because I didn't know how to express the hurt. Somebody hurt me and I didn't know how to express it. So I was trained that you had one emotion I would in the house that I grew up. You had anger, and you showed you showed your emotion through physical violence or destruction. That was the that was the only acceptable emotion because that's what I watched. So it's really taken a long time for me to say, hey, okay, I cannot react. I have to stop and think about what I'm doing without just reacting to it.

00:06:57 Nazish: I know many people go through what you just talked about and you know, you saying it made them may must have made them also realize what they are missing and what they can do.

00:07:09 Misty Nesbitt: Yes.

00:07:11 Nazish: Yeah. So exactly. For someone who tried of who's tired of quick fixes, what does an honest approach of healing looks like? Like something grounded, sustainable and real?

00:07:24 Misty Nesbitt: Well, some people can do therapy. Uh, I can do therapy, plus others. For me, it had to. I had to stop and say, you know, writing my book was probably the biggest healing. Writing down what I went through, looking at what my what were my mistakes, but also what mistakes I was carrying of somebody else's because those weren't mine to carry. And stop looking at myself the way that people had made me think. You know, when I looked in the mirror, I seen the things that somebody told me about myself. Not what I seen, but what they seen. So I really think that you have to just put your mindset that this is going to this is what you want to do. And you you really have to understand that healing is a daily choice. When I wake up in the morning, things are not perfect. Nothing in my life always goes right. And I have to tell myself no matter what comes today, I'm going to look at it positively, and I'm not going to let my past traumas interfere with my day.

00:08:36 Nazish: That is such a powerful thing to say. And you know the way you said it, no matter what, I will not let it interfere with my day. That seems that seems like a power thing, you know, to me as well, after listening to it.

00:08:50 Misty Nesbitt: Well, it's we decide if we're going to have a good day or a bad day by our mindset. When you.

00:08:56 Nazish: Exactly.

00:08:56 Misty Nesbitt: And things are not going right, and you're automatically annoyed because it's not going right or you're angry, everybody you speak with, you're going to be angry towards, you're going to be short with. But if you said, okay, that's not going to bother me, because really, in the grand scheme of things, a lot of the things that we allow into our daily life to affect negativity, you'll forget about them tomorrow. They weren't really that important.

00:09:20 Nazish: Yes, I agree with that. You know, it feels like deeply aligned with inner peace and not forcing calm, but building safety from the inside.

00:09:32 Misty Nesbitt: You know, a lot of people I couldn't I had to move your identity. You can rewrite your identity as many times you want to until you have got the person you want to be. Who you are doesn't matter. Tomorrow is a new day and you can choose to be somebody different. What happened to you doesn't matter tomorrow. You can wake up and choose to be somebody different. For me, I had to change scenery because I could not ever get past. People were not ever going to let me get past who I was. So the best thing for me was to move to where nobody knew me, nobody knew my past mistakes, and it gave me a freedom to build me, to build who I was meant to be, to become who I was meant to be without judgment and without past people saying, oh, well, you're only going to amount to this because I can do what I want. I'm actually the adult in control of my life, and that is one of the hardest things that as adults, we understand we are the adult in control of our life. And from this day forward, what happens is on us. We can't blame this person or that person because we're the ones in control of our life.

00:10:47 Nazish: I completely agree with that, you know. So tell us, for someone listening who feels tired of quick fixes and who you know, thinks that healing isn't linear, and when those old responses resurfaces, what helps them stay steady rather than seeing it as a failure?

00:11:08 Misty Nesbitt: Well, so. And this is why I titled my book The Girl Who Kept Breathing. Because some days the only win you can have is because you kept going. That's that's the win. Let that be the win. Find the win in each day. Stop looking at what you didn't do right and look at what you did do right. So there was many days in my life. The only thing that I accomplished that day was I kept going. That was it, I kept breathing. So I think if you're setting your standards of you're expecting this to be an overnight thing, you're always going to let yourself down. But if you look at it from a different perspective and say, okay, what did I do right today? Great, I did this, I did that, and guess what? I'm still here. I have another day tomorrow, so we'll try to do better tomorrow. That's a win. You're here. You're fighting. You're trying. That's a win.

00:12:05 Nazish: That is actually a win. And it sounds like a big win for people. Trust me. You know, that reframes setbacks as information, not proof of brokenness and can change everything. Mhm. Yeah. So for anyone listening who is still in survival mode, what would it be like to honor how you survived, uh, without making it your forever identity?

00:12:31 Misty Nesbitt: For me, and it was the best advice I've ever been given. And it wasn't to write a book. It just ended up being that way. It was. I want you to write down everything. The good and the bad, all the mistakes you made and all the things done to you in a notebook. And I want you to read over it. Don't don't analyze it. Just write. And when you've told your story, you go back and you read that story. And you look when you thought I wasn't strong, but you survived that. You thought I just messed up my life. But did you really have any other option? I mean, there were things in my life I looked at and I say, oh, I have regret for that. But you know what? Looking back at it now, that was survival. That's what I had to do. I had no other options. These were the choices I had in front of me, and I chose the best one. So I stopped looking at it as I was resenting myself for the decisions I made, and then realized that, hey, this decision that I made was the best option because here was the options and I picked the best one. So guess what? That's a win.

00:13:36 Nazish: It definitely sounds like a win. And miss T, for our listeners who like, you know, healing isn't about becoming unmarked by the past. It's about choosing awareness, self respect and steadiness in how you move forward.

00:13:50 Misty Nesbitt: Yes, and you can choose to live in survival mode, but surviving is just keeping you alive. Can we really call it living? I mean, when you when you're in survival mode, you're just surviving. You're not enjoying your life. You're not looking for the good in every day. You're not understanding that each moment in your life one day is going to be a memory, and it might be a significant one. So when you start healing, you start living life. You're not just trying to figure out a way to survive, to get to the next day. You're not counting down the hours until you can hide from this day, because that's really not any kind of life that you want to live. I've spent probably I'm forty seven, and I've probably spent thirty nine years of my life in survival mode, and all the time that I wasted because I was so hard on myself, because I didn't look like what everybody said healing looked like. Well, I was expecting to wake up and just be happy because that's not really how it is. You have to make yourself happy. You have to look for the happiness in everything.

00:15:05 Nazish: Absolutely. I agree with that. So, Misty, for our listeners who want to connect with you and learn more about your work. Where can they find you?

00:15:17 Misty Nesbitt: Um, my book is available everywhere. Online books are sold in, in every country. Um, and I also have a website author, Misty Nesbitt dot com, and I do a blog, a monthly blog on there. And you know, people can feel free to reach out to me. I'm on every social media platform there is author Misty Nesbitt. And, um, you know, I've talked to a lot of lot of different people who just need to know where to start. The starting point is, is is literally just waking up.

00:15:50 Nazish: sounds wonderful. I will make sure to include all these details in the show notes. So a lot of people can connect with you and learn more about this beautiful practice that you have to offer. Misty, thank you so much for joining us today. You brought such calm to our conversation. Thank you for joining us on Inner Peace, Better Health. Thank you and listeners. If this conversation resonated with you as well, take a moment tonight to breathe and recognize that survival itself is evidence of strength. We'll be here again, creating space for truth, compassion, and healing that actually lasts.