#446 How to free yourself from negative emotional patterns and transform emotional trauma to empowerment, with Rebeccah Silence.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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Rebeccah Silence 0:00
We have survival or we have alignment, and when we're surviving our way through our lives, we are being someone who's trying to fit in to circumstance and to life and to other people's agendas. Survival is me not being me. It's me being who I think I need to be to manipulate outcomes and to just get by, and we're not here to just get by.

Agi Keramidas 0:31
You are listening to personal development mastery, the podcast that equips you with the simple and consistent actions that will help you create a life of purpose and fulfillment. I'm your host, Agi Keramidas, and this is episode 446, have you ever wanted to free yourself from negative emotional patterns? Then this episode is for you. As you listen to today's conversation, you will discover how to transform emotional trauma into a source of empowerment and inner freedom. You will discover how to embrace your inner power and brilliance, and you will also begin to see those moments when your partner triggers you in a completely different way. So mastery seeker. If you are looking for inspiration and actionable tools on any of this, keep listening before we dive in. If you enjoy this podcast and appreciate what we're doing, the quick favor I'm asking of you is to click the subscribe button as this helps us make the podcast better for you. Now, let's get started.

Agi Keramidas 1:56
Today. I am delighted to welcome Rebeccah Silence. Rebecca, you are an award winning author, coach and media personality and a powerhouse in emotional healing and family transformation. With over 20 years of experience and countless success stories, you are passionate about transforming family dynamics and healing generational trauma, and your mission is to create a world where people are careful with each other's hearts, and where kids have healed. Parents. Rebecca, welcome to the show. It's such a pleasure to speak with you today.

Rebeccah Silence 2:38
Agi, I'm honored to be here, and I'm ready for a life changing conversation for your gorgeous audience,

Agi Keramidas 2:45
this is such a great thing to say as a preference for this, and so am I. So let's do this. Rebecca, the main lens that I would like to see this conversation through is something I read that you talk about, you say that healing is freedom, and I find that concept very much intriguing, and I'm looking forward to explore that with you. Okay, before we go there, tell us a few things about your healing journey and what led you to do what you do and become who you are, in particular those milestone moments. So give us some background of who Rebecca is. Yeah,

Rebeccah Silence 3:34
I knew really, really young, that people had more choice than they acknowledged or even realized. And I grew up in an alcoholic home with a lot of domestic violence and abuse on every level, and there was something in me that just wanted people to behave better. And I really decided very young I would be the best I could be no matter what. And I also, I think at the same time, had a dream of family the way I imagined it could be, and decided very, very young, that I was unwilling not to create that for myself eventually. And then, you know, milestone moments were getting a master's degree in counseling and having a 4.0 grade point average, and still finding myself in a domestic violence marriage, married to an alcoholic. And it didn't matter that I understood trauma and that I had studied it so thoroughly, and really, I was already a human behavior expert on a lot of levels, but I wasn't living what I understood. So I had this concept, this idea of what could be, and yet I was repeating patterns, because we attract what we haven't healed yet, period. So I ended up getting out of a domestic violence marriage with a two year old and go. Bankrupt and reinventing myself and recreating my life. And then I was very achievement oriented. For years, I built a business very, very quickly, got on a top 40 radio station in New York, and took off practically overnight with the company, and I was booked, and I was busy, and I got married again, and on paper, it really felt like I had beat my past, and I was doing my best to be my best, but I was so focused on achievement that I couldn't really be fulfilled or knowing my best was enough yet. And then I got diagnosed with cancer while I was pregnant with my second baby, and I was only given a 5% chance to live, and that became I had done hundreds of seminars, hundreds of, you know, experiences where I was striving to be my best. I was the eternal student. I was, you know, doing my best to live what I taught. But then cancer happened, and I realized this is going to be the ultimate seminar where I get to put my money, where my mouth is like, who am I going to be now, right? Because it's easy to be my best achievement focused or not, when my life is beautifully set up exactly how I wanted it. But what about worst case scenario? How who was I going to be then? So cancer really became my ultimate seminar, and it taught me so much about the power of healing as freedom, which we'll talk more about in a minute. But more than anything, it taught me the power of alignment me connected to my own spirit and to what I call God and my my ability to choose to rest in unshakable wholeness no matter what, and to allow my guidance and God's guidance, moment to moment to moment, kept me alive. And so after cancer, how I live and how I work completely changed, and it became all about alignment and me being as powerfully relaxed as possible, no matter what was going on around me. And from there, I published a book, created what I call the emotional survival kit course. Just really took everything I had learned that kept me alive and that really mattered to me, and poured it into this book and this course so that I could share it with all of you.

Agi Keramidas 7:27
Wow. Thank you for compressing this in such a short time. There were so many things that you said there that brought up many questions for me. The first one, I'm curious. I will start with something that you said at the end about the seminar allowing you to align, and you mentioned God. My question is, were you spiritual before that time? Yeah. What's changed then? In what way did you spiritually change afterwards?

Rebeccah Silence 8:08
Here's how I describe it, Agi. So my definition of healing is freedom. What I mean by that is you don't need anything to be different than it was or is for you to really be okay and your best right when you're free, nothing needs to be different, and it doesn't mean that someone didn't hurt you, or that there wasn't a diagnosis or that there wasn't a wound or a life circumstance that was devastating. But I can get to the place where I don't need anything to be different, for me to be me, and for me to fit in with me. So the way I look at it is this isn't easy, but it is simple. We have survival, or we have alignment. And when we're surviving our way through our lives, we are being someone who's trying to fit in to circumstance and to life and to other people's agendas. Survival is me not being me. It's me being who I think I need to be to manipulate outcomes and to just get by. And we're not here to just get by. You know, the biggest problem I solve for people is helping them heal through what I call high functioning unhappiness, where they're achieving and they're successful on paper, but inside, something isn't right. We're not fitting in with ourselves. Yet. We're unfulfilled, we're dissatisfied, and we create our survival self. Really as early as age four, it's between ages four and seven that we decide who we need to be to fit into our family system, and then we don't even realize we're still pretending that's who we are. So alignment is very different. Alignment is you fitting in with you. You starting every. Decision every moment from the place of, what do I need, what do I want, how do I feel? What's my agenda, what's my intention, what's my vision, and who do I need to be to create it? So one of the things I love to say is, if you can survive survival, you can survive alignment. And the reason we stay in survival is because we truly know we can survive we don't know we can survive alignment. And what I want to reassure people is that the only thing that happens when you're connected to the truth of who you are and to your power is you get a ton of information. People show you who they are when you're real with pure intention. You're not wanting alignment because you want to do harm. You're not wanting alignment because you're selfish and you don't care about others. If you're listening to a show like this, you want alignment so you can be even better for people, right? The point of alignment is you healed, making a healed difference. I want to make that very clear. It's not just you, all about you, but if you're not taken care of, you will burn out, you will get sick. And I don't say that to scare anybody. I'm just saying you don't need a breakdown to break through. You don't need to wait for things to get worse, to decide alignment a life that fits in with me. Me being honest and transparent and real with myself and others is always correct. And then the last thing I'll say about this is I don't want you stressed out if you're listening to me right now and you're thinking, I don't know who I am. Rebecca, this sounds great in theory, but I don't know what's aligned. For me, it's so common for people to not know what's aligned. And so what I want to normalize, and I work with clients on this every single day, 1000s of clients in my private practice have learned the art of graduating themselves from achievement to alignment with the understanding that there's no threat, there's nothing to fear. We're not trying to threaten the high functioning part of your life, but we have to threaten the misalignment and the unhappiness if you're really going to be free and just one more time for your nervous system, you don't need a breakdown to break through. And if you can survive survival, you can absolutely freaking lutely Survive alignment. I

Agi Keramidas 12:38
like what you said about you don't need a breakdown to break through. It reminds me of that phrase that people either change out of inspiration or out of desperation. So it's better to do it before it happens. I will bring us back a little bit now, let's talk a bit more about this alignment. You said earlier. You were talking about repeating patterns. And I think many of us find this or other situations as repeating patterns. You were saying that you had understood trauma, you had studied trauma, but you were not leaving all those things. The other thing I remember you said was that we attract what we haven't healed yet. So I would like to bring all this into one question, and that is, let's say someone listening right now realizes that, yes, I know what Rebecca is talking about. I have this situation, whatever it is for different people, that keeps on repeating in my life differ with different people with different situations, and now I suspect that that is because of what you said, that there is an unresolved trauma from the past. What do I do now? Where do I look? How do I bring that into awareness so that I can begin the healing journey?

Rebeccah Silence 14:27
So in my emotional survival kit course that I mentioned earlier, I go through what I call the practice of emotional healing, seven mini lessons that are life changing if you want more after this podcast, but let me, let me give you a taste of that, because everything in the survival kit is what I live and what my clients have in their back pocket, no matter what they're going through. That keeps them emotionally clear, emotionally regulated and emotionally. Free. So the solution to breaking patterns is what I call the practice of emotional healing. It's so much more than mindset work and strategy work and trying to find a way to manage and cope. We have to understand that it's the experience we're having that's the problem, not what happened. Let me just say that again, it's the experience you're having that's the problem, not what happened. So many times in traditional therapy, we're trying to heal our emotions through the mind, which doesn't change how we feel. And we don't need more understanding. We need a new experience so that when the situation pops up again, it doesn't trigger us. Okay. In a trigger is me, re experiencing this moment the way I did during a trauma in the past. So, yes, we attract what we haven't healed yet. I call it attraction 101 so attraction, 101 is I'm experiencing what I don't want to experience again, and you will have that experience until it's healed. So maybe for you, it's betrayal. You keep finding yourself experiencing betrayal in relationships, personally and professionally. Maybe you have abandonment issues, maybe you're jealous, maybe you feel misunderstood or disrespected, but I want you to think about what is it for you? One word, just one at a time, right? Because we're not trying to tackle, you know, 100 different issues at once. I want you to get to the root the issue that is the catalyst for all the other symptoms, right? Like anxiety, depression. These are experiences we're having that are very healable, very healable. They are not life sentences. Okay, so pick one for yourself, right now, one experience. So maybe for you, we'll just pick anxiety for an example for everybody. So if I'm experiencing anxiety, I've got to first commit to I want better than that before I know how I'm going to get better than that. Then I need to know the experience I want to have instead. Okay, so maybe instead of anxiety, I want to feel powerful, and I don't want to be afraid of my power. And maybe it's a double bind, because I'm very comfortable with anxiety, even if I don't like it, and I'm afraid of my power. So the idea of more power might give me more anxiety. I want us to know, okay, I don't want anxiety anymore. I want to feel powerful unapologetically and fearlessly instead. Now, from there, I teach. There are only five emotions. Everything else is learned. So by the way, you weren't born knowing anxiety was even a thing. Somebody modeled it to you. And I'm not saying it isn't real. I've been clinically depressed to the point of being suicidal three different times in my life. It's real, but what you need to understand is you learned how to cope like this, and it's not who you are, even if you haven't known who else you could be yet, right? So anxiety is learned, and it's not your fault. It's not the fault of the person who modeled it for you. They learned it too. But if you want to be free in between knowing the experience you don't want and the experience you do want, there's an emotion to become best friends with, to get closer to, to connect to, to feel all the way through and release so you can have that experience of healing is freedom and close the gap between the experience you're having and the experience you want to have. So the five emotions I teach and we go way deeper in the emotional survival kit with this are anger, fear, grief, joy and excitement. Anger, fear, grief, joy, excitement. And my understanding that these are the only emotions that are naturally occurring and human, a baby is born with them, and no matter what's going on in my life, no matter what's going on in my client's life, I've had clients that had, you know their spouse, cheat on them, and it devastated them. They've lost children to unexpected, tragic deaths or diagnoses, or professionally, life turned upside down. Whatever's going on, get to the emotion underneath it all. That's always the answer. And nobody else is going to teach you this. It is that simple. It is not easy. But if I know really what's going on underneath the anxiety is stuck, fear, I can breathe in the fear i. Yeah, and I can breathe out the fear. And the thing about emotional healing is we want to get you to the point where joy and excitement are the rule you live by. Let me just say that one more time. We want to get you to the point where joy and excitement are the rule you live by. And the darker emotions, anger, fear and grief, when they pop up, there's no threat. You feel them, just like weather, and get back to joy and excitement just like the sun coming out. And it really is so doable. And the thing about emotional healing is it's never about the other person or the situation that's causing your emotion. This is just your humanity. So so many of you are trying to accomplish and achieve, and you're you're basically dismissing your humanity Instead of embracing it. So if you want the full life experience you want the most out of your one precious life, we have to feel our emotions more, and we have to feel less of the experiences that we're used to that have become a pattern and a habit that don't serve us.

Agi Keramidas 21:09
That's great. Rebecca, there is something that you mentioned that I wanted to ask in particular, and it was about the triggers, the emotional triggers. Yeah, my question is, as we all very well know, when an emotion like, for example, grief or fear or anger arises, it is quite easy for one to be, let's say, absorbed by the emotion, or, you know to be hijacked by the emotion so much that there is no awareness of that. In other words, the emotion takes over, hijacks our thinking, our behavior. So what is one strategy, or perhaps one technique that the listener can implement to identify that the emotion has been triggered and deal with it while it is still in her early stages, before it really takes on And you become, for example, from angry to enraged, or you become from sad to really depressed? I hope my question makes sense.

Rebeccah Silence 22:29
It makes perfect sense. So I'm going to share with you a client story example of a woman who didn't know the difference between when she was triggered and when she wasn't, and then I will give you my make your triggers your bitch formula. I literally have a three step process to make your triggers your bitch so that they don't have control over you anymore. So I had a client who was at her wits end, very successful, professionally, really unhappy in her marriage, really resentful and guilty and shameful about that of her kids and her husband and her team and her clients, and how much she was giving, and she just felt really unfulfilled, and no matter what she was feeling, all this guilt and shame. And then she called me one day and said I was in the shower, and I just felt like I was going to have a panic attack. I felt like I was going to lose it. I was so triggered, and I didn't know why. And really, what was going on is more of what we were talking about earlier. Her life didn't fit in with her at all. She was giving herself away in the name of love, and hadn't realized it yet, and was sick of feeling resentful and sick of everybody else's needs getting met and not her own. So you know that's that's a quick story to just help you hear how deep the triggers run. So it's more important to know when you're clear than it is to know, am I triggered? And so when you're triggered, it's you going into that fight, flight, freeze mode. And the other fourth option that nobody else talks about is healing. You're free. You're able to access possibility, right? So we have to normalize the trigger. We have to go. It's not a bad thing that I'm triggered, but we also need to understand the trigger is the access point to the healing. The trigger is the access point to the healing, and the trigger isn't new. So this woman had been living like this for decades, and it was only this moment in her shower that she was safe enough to feel it and to own it and to call me after and the thing about triggers is they don't go away until they're resolved. Patterns, negative experiences. You feeling drained and exhausted and pressure and stress. This isn't healthy. Me, even though it's normal and so many people go through it. So I want you to know the difference between when you're triggered and when you're clear. And I'm just gonna lovingly suggest you're triggered more than you're clear. If you haven't taken my emotional survival kit yet or worked with me, and we're not trying to change the scenery to resolve the trigger, the make your triggers. Your bitch process is going, Hi, I'm Rebecca, and I'm triggered. And sit with it. That's step one. You've got to own it and sit with it. There's nothing to do yet, just own it and sit with it. And if it feels off, even at the Whisper level, you're triggered. If you're not, oh my goodness, this moment is so beautiful, and there's nothing I can't face, move through or conquer, you're triggered. So step one is sit with it, own it. Step two is breathe it in. Breathe it out. Get closer to the emotion underneath the trigger. It doesn't matter why you're triggered, because this situation helped you access a pattern that's running your life already. So if it wasn't this, if we don't heal the trigger, it'll just be something else, the trigger will keep popping up like whack a mole in your life until it's resolved. So we want to thank the moment genuinely for showing us the trigger that's been running our life. I want you to get really brave and really willing to find your weak spots and to see your blind zones so that you're in control of your life. I want you feeling more alive, more powerful and more fully in control of your life. So step one again, you own it, you sit with it. Step two, you get closer to it. You breathe it in, you breathe it out, and you feel the emotion underneath it. So anger, fear, grief, joy, excitement, which emotion underneath this upset do I need to connect to get close to so that I can be liberated and free. And then step three is a new commitment. And I don't care if you have a full on emotional release or if you moved all the way through the emotion, we just want to get the emotion moving. Emotion. Get it moving so it's not stagnant and toxic and dysregulating you more. So step three is, what's the new experience? And you know, maybe again, if the trigger was anxiety, and now you want to get to power. Great for my client in the shower that day, it was about her taking her life back. She felt powerless, and she wanted to take her life back. She wanted to take control of her life again. So spoiler alert, we ended up sending her to Spain for a month, working remotely, kept her family together, actually ended up getting her a promotion at work. We just turned the tables so that her life was hers, on her terms. And it took this moment in the shower for her to realize my life isn't mine. And enough of that

Agi Keramidas 28:04
I love this. Thank you. I will repeat something exactly as you said it because it made an impression. You said the trigger is the access point to the healing. Yes, it is definitely something that one realizes. It's something to be thankful for, because that's the way to heal, to find out first, to reveal it. So thank you for that phrase that you said. And I also wanted to ask, when you were describing the three steps in the second one you were saying, breathe it in and breathe it out and get closer to it. So does that also involve identifying where in the body you feel it?

Rebeccah Silence 29:02
Yes. So we connect our mind to our heart. Your mind will give you what you're thinking, and it will help you see it. Am I in the right direction? For me, there's not a right or a wrong, but there surely is a right and a wrong for you, and it's about, again, as simple as survival or alignment. Am I trying to fit in, or does my life fit in with me? And so it's so important to understand that, again, there's no threat to you, connecting to you, and your right way is available to you, and I think it's as simple as just finding one next step, one next step for yourself and your mind, connecting you to your heart and how you feel and what you need to feel, can connect you to your body, which gives you all the information. Information you would ever need about what you need, and from there, you can connect to your spirit, which gives you the information about what you want. And I am the coach that talks about healing and trauma in a very liberating way. I want you to experience enjoyment and pleasure and the best of yourself and the best of relationships and the best of life, but if we're not in the pursuit of what we want, we're going to be dissatisfied. And your body and a new relationship with your body is so beautiful. One of the chapters that I get the most feedback on is my body chapter in my book, coming back to life, a roadmap to heal from pain, to create the life you want. I had to have a whole new relationship with my body that had been through so much abuse and trauma, to befriend it, to break through and beat cancer with a 5% chance to live. But I just wanted to share it's so much more than just, you know, going to the gym, the emotional healing, the practice of emotional healing, will give you a next level experience of your body, which will give you access to God and guidance and everything you could ever want.

Agi Keramidas 31:15
It's incredible the more one thinks about it, how everything connects at all points towards the same direction. So thank you very much for your answer and for this conversation. I believe it has been insightful to start wrapping things up. I want first of all to ask you, where will you direct the mastery seeker listening right now. Who wants to find out more about emotional healing and the guide you have for us?

Rebeccah Silence 31:48
Yeah, so you can get a free gift from me right now. And it's the three must know secrets to heal and save your family master class if you want to take a next step with me, that is a perfect next step. But if you're ready to just jump right in to the practice of emotional healing, you don't want to miss out on my emotional survival kit. It's 20 years of clinical experience and my life experience just boiled down for you into seven transformational experiences where you get to take your life from mediocre, or, you know, sort of fulfilling, to a dream come true, right? Because I'm not knocking how hard you all work and how hard you all try, but I want you experiencing a magically delicious life, so you don't need to spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars and almost beat cancer and go through decades of training and learning with the world's greatest just take my emotional survival kit. It's $599 and there's a money back guarantee. I believe in it so much so if you're ready for everything you would ever need, what I did, what I teach my clients to transform their lives. The emotional survival kit is available at Rebecca silence.com and you don't want to miss it. It's extraordinary.

Agi Keramidas 33:15
Thank you, Rebecca, I have two final quick questions that I always ask, and the first one is, what does personal development mean to you?

Rebeccah Silence 33:27
Oh, my God, it means life. It means life. It means my. Life is mine. I don't know if you've seen the movie Pretty Woman, but to me, personal development means I get to say, who I get to say, when I get to say, how much, no matter what?

Agi Keramidas 33:45
Great answer and a hypothetical question, if you could go back in time and meet your 18 year old self, what's one piece of advice you would give her?

Rebeccah Silence 33:57
Oh, I would tell her, Rebecca, never be afraid of your power. You are brilliant, and you are divine, and your light and love will change the world. And your only job is to be all the way you. And you're not going to wake up one day and know who you are, but you're going to wake up one day and go enough with survival, and you are so extraordinary, there's nothing outside of you more powerful than you. That's what I would tell

Agi Keramidas 34:32
her. Rebecca, I want to thank you very much for this conversation. It was truly wonderful. I want to wish you all the very best with carried on with your mission and helping others, and I will leave it to you for your final part in wisdom.

Rebeccah Silence 34:54
Yeah, well Please download my master class, purchase the emotional survival kit. It, and above all else, just be careful with each other's hearts.

Agi Keramidas 35:07
And before I leave you for now, I have one last question for you, do you seek to master your life and live with purpose and fulfillment? I'm sure that by now you have realized that personal development is a lifelong journey, and it's great to be able to share this journey with like minded people to support and to be supported. Join our free community, the mastery seekers tribe, and be a part of a growing group of people who value personal development like you.

Agi Keramidas 35:42
Go to masteryseekerstribe.com Until next time, stand out, don't fit in!