Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Love Yourself to Heal Yourself

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

On today’s episode of “The Language of Love,” Dr. Laura Berman talks about self-love and how self-love can help to heal the world. She tackles the difference between self-esteem and self-worth, explaining that self-esteem is conditional. Self-esteem is often based on other people’s perceptions of us and that external validation, such as whether you can perform well enough or achieve enough in the world’s eyes. Only then can you have pride in your accomplishments and feel confident in yourself. But, as the sex therapist explains, self-worth is completely different. It is totally unconditional love that you never have to compete for or earn.  “Self-worth is ultimately, at its core, the understanding that you are worthy of abundant love, simply because you exist. You don’t have to do anything or be anything, you’re actually perfectly imperfect exactly as you are and perfectly lovable exactly as you are. You are the unique, one-of-a-kind expression of spirit,” says Dr. Berman. So how can you begin to establish self-love? What are some ways you can create a self-love practice that will help you to elevate your energy and receive the abundance you deserve? And, for parents, how can you create a household in which self-love radiates throughout the family and your children feel loved and celebrated by you simply for existing? Dr. Berman also talks to a caller who wants to know how she can support her adult child who is going through a difficult time. How can parents of adult children help to model self-love and encourage their children to make smart decisions without being a helicopter parent? A caller also asks Dr. Berman about how to overcome childhood abuse and self-destructive coping mechanisms that are interfering with his ability to establish healthy self-love in the present and create positive relationships. How can you build self-love when your childhood was traumatic? Listen to Dr. Berman’s advice on self-love and how to create it on her this newest episode “The Language of Love.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, a sex and relationship therapist. And for the past three decades, I've been helping people learn how to love and be loved better. That's what we're doing here on The Language of Love, where I get to answer calls and emails from people just like you. My goal with The Language of Love is to help you discover more meaningful emotional and physical intimacy and to help you build more awareness of how precious and sacred your sexuality really is. Be sure to email me or reach out with your very own love sex relationship questions

and I might just answer them live on the air. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. I'm here. We're gonna talk about this topic of self love. So Dr. Berman, why was this a topic that you wanted to talk about today? Mostly because it's been up for me so much, but it's definitely seems to be,

I mean, look, we all know that self-love plays a huge role in our quality of life. And I think what people don't realize as much is that the love that we have to give, the compassion we have to give, the connection, the empathy, it all starts with what we give ourselves. And I think for most of us,

we were raised with this idea of being selfless and that really caring about yourself, loving yourself, connecting to yourself, honoring yourself is quote unquote selfish. I mean, I was certainly kind of, that was pounded into me in one way or another for most of my childhood. And I think it's something that most of us see as self-indulgent or maybe even narcissistic at times. But what I have learned, especially over the past couple of years, is that we are in an epidemic of low self-worth. People are really struggling with self-worth, self-esteem, which is different. And I can explain the difference between self-esteem and self-love. But it stands in the way when you don't have self-love, it stands in the way of how much love you can give

and receive, how much connection you can give and receive. But it also stands in the way of what risks you're willing to take, positive risks, I mean, how vulnerable you're willing to be, how much of your authentic self you're willing to be. And even on a sort of quantum physics level, when you don't have self-love, or certainly when you have the opposite of that, it almost acts as a repellent to other people. And you notice people who really care about themselves and honor themselves are like magnets. They really are attractive to be around because they're not judgmental. They're attuned. They're calm. They're grounded. They're confident. And it's not an act. They really are connected to that. So I've been talking about it a lot

online. What has really surprised me is that losing my son over the past, well, now it's been six months, losing him so tragically and working through the grief process. One of the keys to working through that grief has been really diving into caring and honoring and cherishing and holding and loving myself. And so I've sort of found entire new pockets of self-worth as someone who's worked on that in my own life for many years and with as many clients as I have. And so I've been discovering new things and I just feel like it's so up for all of us right now that I wanted to kind of put it forth as a topic. And I can certainly dive into other ideas around self-worth and techniques and tools and what goes into it and how it builds and all of that. But

I definitely want to open it for questions because for me, it's most fun to have these conversations in the context of what's up for other people around it. I do have one follow-up based on what you said, and that is the definitions. So you talked about self-esteem and self-worth, self-love. So how do we define these terms? Right. Well, self-worth and self-love to me are sort of the same thing. But self-esteem is I love myself. I honor myself. I'm proud of myself because of something. I'm good at this. I'm kind. I'm thoughtful. I'm a good friend. I'm good at this sport, you know, whatever it is. And a lot of education, you know, where they do attend to the emotional social stuff, which is not very well, but where they do attend to it in elementary

schools, for instance, it's a lot around self-esteem, right? Finding those things about yourself that makes you likable or lovable or proud or whatever. And there's nothing wrong with that, but that's externally sourced. And I think that's the key and the key difference between self-worth and self-esteem. As self-esteem, yes, it's sourced from the inside, but it's a decision, it's based on the construct of basically conditional love, that I am lovable because of something. And self-worth is ultimately at its core, the understanding that you are worthy of abundant love simply because you exist. You don't have to do anything or be anything. You're actually perfectly imperfect exactly as you are, and perfectly lovable exactly as you are. And you

are the unique, one of a kind expression of spirit that you are. And it's a very different construct than self esteem, which is dependent on a condition, basically, even if it's a nice condition, it's still a condition. And most of us, you know, there's sort of like this legacy of self worth, certainly in my life, but almost in everyone's life. I don't know one of us who, you know, including myself as a parent, we all accidentally and unintentionally step on our children's worth. But that's because we struggle with our own worth, you know, and it becomes a legacy because like I was saying earlier, if you don't have that love for yourself, it's unconditional love for yourself. It's very hard to unconditionally love anyone else. And so the reason I think we have an epidemic

of low self-worth or low self-love is because most of us were raised by parents or caregivers who also didn't, had their own wounds around self-love and didn't know how to give and receive love in a healthy way, didn't know how to accept unconditionally. And that's because they were raised by people who had their own, you know, and a lot of it comes from trauma as well. Not just big T trauma, like abuse or addiction or abandonment, but, you know, what I think of as little t trauma, like hypercriticism, or helicopter, you know, such a helicopter parent that you were never allowed to have any independence. And the message was clearly

given to you that you're not capable of operating in the world, or parents who are really critical and controlling parents who struggled with personality disorders, parents who are just unconscious, you know, and just struggling with their own self worth. And then that makes them incapable of really giving us the kind of love that continues our self-worth. Because I do absolutely believe we're born with all the self-worth we could ever need. It just kind of gets covered up, stomped on and shaded over by all of these experiences and all this feedback we get from the world around us. How can we, if we are naturally conditioned to almost push ourselves down. And because of often little T trauma or big T trauma, we don't give ourselves

the self-love. What are some tactical and very specific tips that you have to kick us off here that would be valuable for anyone listening right now to implement? Yeah, well, it's really a mind, body, spirit process. And I think the first is identifying and getting clear on where the disconnect happen. Now, obviously, none of us are going to remember every little incident that happened to lead us to where we are today. But most of us, if we're willing to be with it, can connect back to where did our, my, you know, the real question is, where did my story about my lovability begin? First of all, it may just start with what is my story about how worthy of love I am or not, how lovable I am. And, you know, where did those stories come

from? Right. Because many of us, like we were saying, it does come from those abandonments, those criticisms, those small and large abuses that we experienced early in life. You know, usually not that other things that happen later in life can affect us, but it's usually in those first eight to 10 years that are the most influential I find in that core connection with our worth. So part of that, you know, it's partly, you have to identify it before you can heal it, you know? So like for me, I had two parents who loved me as much as humanly possible, you know, and were great people and very giving and generous and very well-intentioned. And yet, you know, my dad was a pretty intense narcissist and could be extremely critical and controlling

and emotionally abusive and physically threatening. And my mother was extremely, you know, and he was raised by emotionally inept parents who abandoned him emotionally and were hypercritical. And, you know, he, so he developed from that. My mother was, you know, extremely codependent and struggled a lot with depression, especially in my younger years. So I never really knew what I was getting when I came home from school. Would she be in bed, unable to get up? Or would she be raging at me? Or would she be happy and loving, which was her core nature? But she was also really unable to hold the entirety of me. Both of my parents were just not emotionally able to fully accept me. In order to get love,

love and these are questions you can ask yourself how was love given and received in your family was it unconditional probably not for most of us it wasn't was it transactional like the times that I would really get love was when I was taking care of my parents right if I took care of them then I would get a lot of approval which for a child is love right so if you want to go back there think what how did I get approval where was approval conditional when I was little because is love and vice versa, because our parents are like God to us. They're the key to our survival. And if they don't approve of us and reject us, you know, we might as well be dead, right? When we're little, it's terrifying. And so was love transactional where, you know, the only time my

mother would read me a story is when I brushed her hair or I was cuddling her or whatever, you know, my, or when I was taking care of something, or was it conditional? Like with my dad, I only got the approval and the love when I made straight A's or when I accomplished something, then I would get his attention. Now, this isn't to criticize and downplay and destroy your family of origin. It's to understand that we all have our wounds and we're all doing the best we can. It's like I say to my now 23-year-old who I've had to have some of these conversations with in reverse. I've said to them, my kids, their whole lives that I'm doing the best I can and I know I'm still going to screw him up despite all my best efforts, because I'm human. And that's okay.

And they can be honest with me about it. So he has in recent years, talked to me about times in my, because parents are growing, we're growing up as we raise children. I'm a very different human being than I was at 28 when I had my oldest son. You know, I'm a completely different person. And what I was capable of holding and tolerating and my own self-worth and everything else was so different back then. And so the things that come up now as he is doing his own healing in his life, I have to hold with grace and honor and be like, yeah, I can see how that was harmful or hurtful or whatever. And that's a huge part of his healing is my ability and his path to self-worth is my ability to take responsibility for any unintentional,

because it's always unintentional, role that I played in stomping. Self-worth never goes away. Self-love, it's always there for us. It just gets covered up and buried under muck in stories we tell ourselves. Right. And to your point, I think the reflection and the self-awareness to understand your own personal journey and why things are the way they are play a key role in being able to uncover self-worth that's already there. Yeah. And then you do inner child work. You know, you connect with those pieces of yourself. You maybe remember, and this will sometimes come up when you're having a particular moment where, I mean, most of us know, like I am kind of lacking in the self-worth department, either because I let people walk all over me or because I'm

criticizing myself in my head all the time, or because I'm scared to take a chance in the areas of my life. You know, we kind of know that we're struggling there. It's not a surprise to most of us. But the question is really why, where did that begin? And one of the things you can ask yourself is when was the first time I remember feeling this way? I'm scared about going out on this date with this person, or I don't want to take the leap into this new business because I don't think I'll succeed. When is the first time I remember being scared I wouldn't succeed? And you just get really quiet and sit with that. And more often than not, a memory will surface of when you were five years old and you were about to go out and play in a baseball game and your father

said, don't screw it up, everybody's watching, you know, something stupid like that. But that was just a memory, one of many, where that feeling was reinforced. And then you can start to really get to know that part of yourself, because that's the same one, that little five year old is the same one whispering in your head today, when you're scared to take that leap. So as you get to know those shadows of your younger self, and sit with them and honor them and don't judge them, anytime that kind of shame is exposed to the light it starts to evaporate so the first step is in recognizing it and then you can start to heal it but not until you recognize it so you know that's sort of like the the meta approach to it and then you know we can talk about

different aspects but i also want to open it up so how do you as a parent like because my daughter is 28 29 mother of four and just got a divorce and it's like I just want to shake her sometimes and say don't do that you're the child that's been with me the longest you should know better learn from my mistakes yeah so how do I encourage her in a positive way to not make her feel um sick like I'm second guessing her parenting skills I guess that's what I wanted to know because we learn everything from childhood you're right I remember being you know told not to do something how would it and how I was I was scared to move out because I was told at a young age don't do that no no no yeah so how do we how do I give her self-love encourage her as she's going through

difficult time to love herself love her kids make good decisions when you're going through situations like this you don't make good decisions no and and as you already know having an adult child because you've been a parent long enough it's not what you say I mean that plays a teeny tiny role it's what you do right and so I guess my question is you know how much do you love yourself I love I have learned to love I've just learned to love me exactly where I am exactly where I'm at but you just got there right more recently I'm feeling yeah yeah it's not funny how it doesn't I have so many people saying, damn, it's taken me 50 years. But when you were raising her, you didn't have it, right? Or not as much as you have now. And so I think if you're gonna have a conversation,

you have that one, you say, you know, I know that when I was raising you, you know, when you were little, I really didn't have the self worth and the self awareness, I was growing up along with you in many ways. And I can see the ways, you know, taking responsibility for those things you can see. I can see the ways that I minimized you or criticized you or held you back or didn't reinforce your unique greatness or try to make you fit some sort of mold or try to control you or, you know, pick your poison here. We all do that stuff as parents. I want to own that because what I see you doing now, you're this beautiful, brilliant being, and you have all of this love to give. And all I'm thinking is that you don't understand how lovable you are. And that maybe

some of the things that the decisions you're making are coming from that place. And so I just want to invite you to have that conversation with me about things, memories that you may have about ways in which maybe you know like take it on yourself as her mom and claim it yourself and rather than pointing the finger at her because you know her self-worth started with your lack thereof and so on and yours started with your parents and so on and so forth so part of the process for us is not only building our own self-love but forgiving ourself for the places where we maybe because of our own limitations totally unaware and unintentionally sabotaged our children's right and i tell her all the time i did the best i could for where i was

the information that i had you know what i mean and um i was you know i poured everything into into her and her brother because i didn't have a mom so they were my whole world you know like i did everything they sure they had all the things i didn't have that's yeah and so but in the process one is very one is very spoiled and then the old jasmine that is like have to question her decision making because i guess i was a controlling parent and so with her she was the first one so that's how you do that yeah now she's like did i make the right decision or yeah and guiding her guiding her and coaching her and doing it for yourself too. You know, one of the keys to self-love is what I call embodiment because most of us who have had trauma in our lives and all of us with

self-worth issues have trauma in our past, we learn to kind of leave our bodies and we learn not to trust our own knowing. And we never really got to know our gut. And so for you, if you can start on that path of what we call discernment and being in your body and grounding yourself in your body and knowing your heart and knowing your gut you can guide her to do that and even model it for her so when she says did i make the right decision what you know you say okay well try each decision on in your body what do you feel inside your body when you try on both realities that you're choosing from so instead of telling the right decision you're guiding her to the path of believing in her own decisions.

And I think you're right that we all tend to parent the way that we wish we had been parented, which often means swinging the pendulum to the total opposite direction, which ends up creating more problems. But that's what we do. But I love that.

Have her try on both decisions. And I love that. That's good advice. I'm going to try that. Thank you. All right. Good luck. Good morning, everyone.

I'm from Sydney. and this is just this is phenomenal because it's so perfect I love what's being said because right now my body has turned against

me, I'm going through an autoimmune response I was, after two years I've been diagnosed with polymyalgia and of course the good news is it can be sorted out and it is being sorted out and I've

start the process. But Dr. Laura, what was interesting was that this only happened after a very successful five-year stint in my 60s, where I went and launched a book in Malaysia, in London. And, you know, I was just feeling so well, so good. And the trauma of the past had fallen away. And what I think is, I want to ask you is that, or if you can help me, is after all the success and the love language that we've had at home growing up, which was performance, perfectionism, you do this, we love you. And, and of course, I just heard Saja talking about a son or a child, and I've done the same with my, my son. I've been very kind with him he said dyslexia so i've been kind i've made sure i've broken the generational

bad behavior i've done some counseling but what's shocking me is the way it's come up with me now that i now need to love me and and i'm dealing with me there's nobody else that i can say i mean i can see the patterns in the past but it got triggered dr laura by very dear friends who should have applauded my success and perhaps that was an expectation but rather they became critical parents and quite rough with me expecting me to be even better you know to be more perfect so I'm now having to heal my body and I know it's got to go deep yeah it does and also I think you You know, The Body, there's that wonderful book, The Body Keeps the Score. Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score is a great book that I think you would really

will resonate with you. Another great one is Walking the Tiger by, I think his name is John Levine, about somatic experiencing, because our bodies really do hold trauma and very often start releasing the trauma once it's quote unquote safe to do so. So very often I'll see couples where, you know, they get married and then once, let's say one of them, you know, once they're in a really safe, stable, loving environment, it's like their system can relax and the trauma comes up and they'll start recovering memories of abuse or they'll start having physical symptoms. But what I think is really super interesting about what you said is that you described this period in your life, which was so wonderful and fulfilling. And what was wonderful and fulfilling was you writing this book and having this huge success, which in your mind, my guess is you consciously and unconsciously, especially because of the childhood you described and what was valued in your home. you connected this kind of success or accomplishment with being loved right and the child's worst fear is I'm not loved I'm not approved up okay in your little child's mind

inside your heart you thought okay now that I've done this this big accomplishment writing this book and getting these accolades now I am worthy of love I am now worthy of love everybody everybody give me that love, right? Which is now, that's what you were taught. And then people who you really trusted and cared about, you even called them critical parents, right? Even though they weren't your parents, but people who you felt very vulnerable and close to, like that child felt to her parents, not only didn't give you the approval that was due now that you've done what they wanted, but they rejected you. How the hell does that happen? Right? And so then all your stories about what would keep you safe and loved fell apart. And then you got sick.

Wow. Absolutely right, Dr. Laura. I'm in that process, but to hear it so clearly that it's just beautifully put. And I think for you, the journey is really becoming friends because I have the same issue, different flavor, but I was always, I was, you know, I've said this before, I was the ugly sister growing up. So I was never valued, you know, looks and body and everything was really important in my family. But I was, you know, I wasn't going to be the supermodel as brains were really valued too. So that's where I put my attention. I always got straight A's. I got two masters and a PhD. I, you know, and so I always depended on my intellect to make a good impression, to get love, especially for my parents to get approval.

And when we are, when we are intellectualizers and you are too, cause that's what was valued in your family, then we tend not to be in our bodies very much. We're up in our brains. yes and and you know your version is an immunosuppressive condition mine was breast cancer but something will happen in the body where the body is like hell no it's been 50 freaking years come back in here you know come back in and so your work is really on in the field of what's called embodiment i would love for you to do some somatic experiencing the guy that wrote Walking the Tiger, sort of invented somatic experiencing, but they're all over the world in the country, really beautiful ways of releasing trauma from your body, unconscious

trauma, becoming friends with your body, cherishing your body, meditating and grounding in your body. And the more you do that and recognizing where your true worth comes, because I promise you, And I think you already know this, given what you've been going through, that you can write a million bestsellers and it's still not going to make you feel the love that is available to you, because that's not really where love is found. You might get some approval there. You might get some applause, but you're not going to get love that way. New from Nespresso, blend wellness into your coffee routine with the Coffee Plus range, infused with functional benefits. choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins like coffee plus B12 to help support immune function and coffee plus B6 to keep your day moving or go with the flow and choose ginseng

delight our new double espresso with ginseng extract whatever lies ahead don't change your morning let your morning change you discover coffee plus on espresso.com wow wow absolutely right. Absolutely right. And I don't know, you can't see me, but I'm writing notes as you're talking. And I'm loving everything you said. And I am going to get the two books, The Body Keeps the Score and Walking the Tiger. Yes. And really work, maybe check out some somatic experiencing and make it your mission, not only to heal your body from this quote unquote disease, dis-ease right but to really rediscover you know because you were born you know in your body but it got sort of conditioned out of you by what was valued and pushed in your family so now your work

is to really reintroduce yourself to your body be in it love it hold it cherish it like you would that little girl who who left it because she thought that was the only way she could survive and get love in her family. Thank you so much, Dr. Laura. Thank you. Good luck. Thank you, Laura. Thank you so much.

I have a quick follow-up based on what you said. You said you were the ugly sister. And what that made me think of is this reality that we all live, especially in today's world, which is the comparison game. We are constantly, and I'm speaking generally, but as a whole, society is constantly comparing. We're comparing ourselves to one another.

Yeah. How does that play into this idea of achieving total self-love? Because I know it's a pretty big obstacle in the way of us having the self-love that we deserve. Well, it's almost reverse that when you have self-love, it doesn't matter. And you aren't comparing yourself because you're seeing that every single person is their own, like, unbelievably, perfectly imperfect, gorgeous fragments of the divine. You know, there's nothing in no one else like them or you or anyone else. And so to compare is really futile. And it's something that is a scarcity-based behavior that really has a lot to do with certainly how social media works in society, but also how many of our families worked. I mean, my parents were big comparers. And so that was sort of inbred in our family system.

You know, they would tell me I was interesting looking and my sister was beautiful. They would say my sister, you know, was popular and good at sports and I was really good at school and really caring and loving and nurturing, you know, like we each had our MOs and we do tend to do that in families, which I think is why we kind of continue it on social media. But I will say that for me, because I was raised by an absolutely gorgeous size two mother and my sister was really beautiful and beauty was such a big deal in my family. I did grow up sort of not feeling. I always have struggled with weight. For years of my earlier life in adulthood, I struggled with body image. And it slowly, as I worked on myself, got better

and better. But I would say even over the past six months after my son died, I had this epiphany because I've always been active and eaten relatively well, but you know, I smell a chocolate chip cookie and gain five pounds. It's just the way my metabolism is. And so over the past six months, I just said, screw it. You know, and I just ate whatever I felt like, and I couldn't move because I was so devastated. And then all of a sudden, I think I saw a video of myself and I, and I thought to my, I was shocked at how much weight I gained. And I started to immediately go into shame and embarrassment and, oh my God, I can't believe I posted that video. And what I did instead was post another video and say, you know what? I was

watching that video of myself the other day and I have put on a shite ton of weight and I'm realizing that I'm really not caring for my body. And I'm not going to lose weight because I think I need to look a certain way or because you're not going to want to look at me if I am not a size two or whatever else and what's been really interesting to me just inside myself it's a seismic shift but it's very small on the outside on the inside it's huge is that i think these standards i really it's not just that i think i know these standards of beauty are freaking ridiculous and nobody can meet them and i am very fine being one of the ones that doesn't meet them because that's not where my core worth is found in how perfect my body is. Now, I understand if you're like a fitness guru,

obviously it's going to be a bigger deal. But either way, I think that's where the comparison comes in, that we compare when we're in scarcity and when we buy into the matrix. Remember that movie, when we buy into the story that one of us is better than the other, that there's a scarcity of resources that there's a scarcity of love and that comes from the lessons we learned growing up so i have a very very long background which started in childhood i won't go too much into it but i want to give some i don't want to just you know ask a question without giving any context so um basically it revolves mainly around them trying to abandon me when i was a child and was and was born then there was a lot of abuse and neglect and negation and all these kind of things

which have then not shaped my belief system so I became a people pleaser I had some very difficult behaviors that came as a result of that because I was trying so hard to be loved externally I didn't understand the internal love yes basically sadly ended up with such poor behaviors I ended up doing a stint in prison uh destroyed all of the good work that i've done around mental health for many many years kind of thing but that actually was the was the time when actually the first time i was able to sit back and go you know take a hard long look at yourself take some responsibility so i have been trying to do a lot of self and personal development every single day on self-love self-appreciation um i don't you know there are times that i do speak better about

myself than in the past the thing that I'm asking is even though I do all of this work every single day and I pour into so many people on here it's almost like when so my friends are I'm the guy that people are willing to be happy you know they're willing for me to find love and all these kind of things but again I understand that that has to come from within self I've looked so externally but I almost don't know what it looks like so I think my questions around I'm not sure what's solved it's like somebody asked me the day they said go go and chill out sam i'm like i don't know what chilling out is i'll gladly go and do it so you might understand from my background yes of course the why's and the where's coming so even though i'm trying very hard every

day to do these things so so hard i don't know where i'm arriving at or where i'm going yeah new from nespresso blend wellness into your coffee routine with the coffee plus range infused with functional benefits choose the coffee you love with added b vitamins like coffee plus b12 to help support immune function and coffee plus b6 to keep your day moving or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight our new double espresso with ginseng extract whatever lies ahead don't change your morning let your morning change you discover coffee plus on espresso.com well i think it's also really telling and valuable i love what you said about how when you went to prison that was the first time that you really stopped and looked and what i i call

those things afges another fucking growth experience they are these big kahuna of disasters crises all hell breaks loose your life falls apart your partner leaves you in my case you know you get cancer, you're, you know, some horrible thing happens and it breaks you up. It makes you stop. I mean, that's what I say about the breast cancer I had 11 years ago. I was going, I was the same as you, you know, for different reasons, going, going, going, you know, and that people would say, you need to chill out, slow down. I was like, okay, I'll take another yoga class, you know, but it wasn't until I had breast cancer. I suddenly got a very rare form of breast cancer that I had to completely stop my life for the first time in my adult life and just everything

landed. And so often we're going, going, going that we can't stop to let things germinate and to let things build. So that was one thing I wanted to mention. And obviously we don't need an AFGE to get closer to opening our hearts and really connecting to what we're capable of and really being with ourselves. But I think for you, Simon, you're similar to JK and to me in that you do a lot. I mean, you're very loving and very kind. Obviously, I could tell by some of your first comments, but you are very much in your head and you had to be growing up because you had to be vigilant and you had to know when you walked into the house, is it safe to come in or am I going to be abused? Is it safe to say this or should I not? And so that's part of the reason

you're so empathic today because you had to cultivate those skills so early in life. But I think what happened with you, what happened with me, what happened with most of us who struggled or have struggled or do struggle with self-worth is that we accidentally understood our parents as being spirit, as being God, as being the all-powerful, as being the deliverers of approval, love, and it was flawed and it was conditional and it was complicated, right? And we never had, we were never taught and never had cultivated within us a practice of connecting with spirit, with our true essential selves, the part of ourselves that is the observer, the loving aspect of ourselves that is connected to all that is. And I think, you know, what you're

doing now is really effective, but it's in the category of what I would call fixing, managing, and controlling. You know, you're doing a lot and rather than being, and what I, and maybe you already do this, but, but what I would really encourage you to do is to really move more into the mindfulness practices, not to get somewhere or to do something, but just to go inside that flame in the center of your heart and sit with it to meditate, to create, you know, God, Jesus, Allah, goddess, you know, it doesn't matter, but really connecting to that higher power and the beautiful, for lack of a better term, golden umbilical cord that connects us to all that is.

And as you can start to really, that's such a huge part of self-love because as you start to tap into that and tune into that. And if you go on my website, I have a ton of meditations from my book, Quantum Love and other meditations that can help you start doing some of this on a basic level. But as you do that, you start to connect to a higher vibration and a higher knowing that is so unbelievably loving that it's hard not to love yourself. Do you see what I'm saying? yeah do you do any meditation yes I I'm not even going to use the word try yes and then I get so fidgety that I find it hard to get all yeah so you still have a lot of trauma in there and what you're doing is positive thinking it away and that's such an effort and so I think maybe

it's the combination of really practicing that mindfulness even if it's in guided meditations even if it's for five minutes a day, learning to sit with yourself, but it's also doing the trauma work. Because my guess is there's a shite ton of trauma in there that hasn't been processed with the childhood you had. And so somatic experiencing, if you go to, I think it's traumahealing.org is the website for the somatic experiencing organization. And you can find therapists, somatic experiencing therapists all over the world in the country. And it's my favorite form of trauma work, of really releasing the blocks to self-worth and the ways in which trauma affects us. I was just brushing away tears. I've been in tears once in a friend's

room after something happened, after I was triggered. And I tried to hold it back. And then she was like, no, you don't have to, Simon. So I didn't. But yeah, you've hit sweetly on the spot. and um I've started my training to become a healer and apparently I heal through through my voice yeah my heart so I can also feel where you are coming from which is probably why it bothers me more because you know there are people on here I can hear somebody who say things but I don't feel where it comes from I can feel where it's coming from so hence it's gone straight to my heart you've hit right on the spot and I you know I wanted to thank you for that because yes um yeah there's some complicated things going on in england and they've basically removed me from

the trauma therapy that we have over here going on with that because it's very complicated as you yeah it's very i mean i get diagnosed as severe complicated and complex you're just a trauma survivor you had severe trauma i would also encourage you to check out teal swan's work she works with a lot of like major trauma survivors and people who want to be who are healers and on the healing path and she wrote a beautiful book called the completion process which is a way to kind of work with your own trauma and healing it and it's really powerful i've had a lot of success with that and she has videos and courses and things like that but but she goes right into it in a really beautiful way but that's really i think what's being called

on and it's going to you're absolutely right that you are a healer and that your life purpose is to take this pain and trauma that you experienced it and transmute it to love and help other people move through their pain and you know this is all part of the process for you like it is for me of heal learn teach you know so you'll just keep doing that and it'll get easier and easier well can I say that I'm glad very very glad that you are still on this planet my mother is a big I I severed my relationship with her a year ago because my kids are two years oh my gosh two years sorry I have systemic lupus um the showroom overlap syndrome yeah and I have a feeling that I may have manifested that from years of stress yeah incredible stress yeah and

I have a feeling that I may have married my mother. Oh, no. Yeah. Nowhere near as bad. But anyway, she sent me a text. I'm having a really hard time getting over. Your mother sent you a text? Yeah.

And it was, the last part of it is what I can't get over. And I've been writing it over and over again to see if it'll lose its meaning after a while. What was it? But I can't. The last part was, you always wanted to be like me. but unfortunately you're just like your father pie in the sky aspirations and absolutely no ability to do so always picking something way out of your wheelhouse looks prestigious but not wisely picked then giving up on things you do well or sabotaging your efforts life coach really

oh my god you're delusional so bitch it is but i feel much better oh no wonder you cut off contact with her. And that's her doing her narcissistic thing of she's been rejected. She's furious. Nothing infuriates a narcissist more than no feedback and no contact, nothing. And so they will raise the stakes and say meaner and meaner things or scarier and scarier things. Yes. I'm trying to get you to come back, you know, even to get you to yell at them, any kind of contact. And so that's what she's doing. The problem is and the reason that you can't get it out of your head, writing it, I would not recommend because that's just cementing it more. But what's the reason it has so much power for you is because she is giving voice to what a part of you believes already. I do not think it's true that you are pie in the sky. I think given the traumas you've had and what you're having to overcome and move through, that you are perfectly positioned to help others heal as you heal yourself and as you train yourself and as you grow yourself. I think you would make an amazing healer. But because there's that little one in you, like I've been talking to other people who adapted and adopted this belief that I'm incapable, that I'm pie in the sky, that I'm a crock, that I can't really fulfill my life's vision and my passion.

And that's your mother's story about herself that she's projecting onto you and that you've internalized your whole life, which is why you've been struggling. I mean, this is probably the tip of the iceberg and sweetness and light compared to what you got growing up. And for you, really important anytime, same thing with, I think it was JK who had an immunosuppressive issue. Anytime there's a cancer or immunosuppressive or the body is rebelling in some way, it's trauma and it's disconnect from the body and it's leaving the body. And the healing comes with healing that.

And you, one of the things that's going to be in addition to everything else you're doing, and I'm sure you're doing a lot, doing trauma work is going to be super important for getting healthy again. And I've seen so many people with lupus repress it, live for the rest of their lives without any symptoms, really don't even have the diagnosis anymore, except that they once did when they do the trauma work. And so for you, too, I know I feel like a broken record, but we're talking to a lot of people with trauma, somatic experiencing. If you can do that, and in many cases, you can even do it remotely where you don't have to leave the house. But ideally, if you could go somewhere and work with a somatic experiencing therapist, just go to that traumahealing.org and find someone. I think it would be really, really important because somatic experiencing is getting right to the body. It's where it's, it's releasing where the trauma is in the body. It's getting you back into your body. It's, it's, uh, it helps with pain. It helps with chronic illness. It helps with chronic fatigue. It helps with immunosuppressive disorders. So much of which comes from the anxiety,

depression, and pain resulting from a traumatic childhood. So that's what I want you to do. And I'm so happy for you. You should be very proud of yourself that you took that first step today. What was that? What's that you said? Traumahealing.org. Good luck. We're thinking about you and sending you love. Thank you so much. Right now I am in the market for finding a therapist. And so my question is that primarily I've been using CBT as my form of therapy in the last years. so I just heard that you said somatic therapy and then I've also heard about EMDR yeah so I just want to know like how do you decide which therapy is best for you and if you could just sort of I know it might be too detailed uh to share all at once here so as brief as possible um to respect

the time that what are the differences and and which direction is best for yeah if you could give me an idea of that. I would so appreciate it. Yeah, that's a good question. And the other thing I want to say is just, I'm thinking about Danny and Simon in particular, who both still have a lot, a lot of trauma in their systems. You mentioned breath work, and that is another modality that I love, pranayama breath work. So if you too, I recommend that to everyone. I do it as much as possible. And boy, does that clear the pipes in your body. It's really powerful. So I just wanted to mention that. In terms of modalities of therapists, CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, very effective, very practical. It's more challenging your stories and your thoughts,

which of course, it's our thoughts and our stories and our beliefs that lead to our feelings, right? So if you can start challenging and recognizing your thoughts and stories, then you get more, you know, efficacy and control over your feelings and your reactivity. And it also teaches you techniques for alleviating the symptoms of stress, right? Belly breathing or the square breath or different things like that. And I think there's definitely a place for that, but it will only take you so far because as we've been talking over the course of this session, that especially when we're talking about anxiety, trauma and or worth, it's in the body first and foremost. And so for you, you know, you've done the first phase, which is cognitively shifting, you know, maybe your original beliefs about yourself and about gender and about women and about life and your role and your worth. And, you know, you've really worked on that piece. But what somatic experiencing does and, you know, and my kids, like their joke is that I'm a talking doctor.

When they were little, that's how they what they would say is I'm a talking doctor. You know, people say, oh, your mom's a doctor. Yeah, she's a talking doctor. And I'm a talk therapist, obviously. Right. But I happen to be a talk therapist who does less and less talking in her practice over the years because talking will only get you so far and it keeps you up in your head. And what somatic experiencing is, it's a body-oriented therapy that is applied in numerous different professional settings, all different kinds of coaches, therapists, whatever. But it's about accessing, it kind of bypasses the thinking brain and they use movement, art, all different forms of modalities that help you get out of your head and into your mind, that help you access and attune to the body and find the places where, because trauma stays in the body. That's what causes often illness, grief, loss, trauma, all of that. And so that's the somatic experiencing. And I found it unbelievably. I do it. I've been doing it every week since my son tragically passed away six months ago. And it's I mean, I do it every morning with myself, the process of tuning into my body and releasing the emotions that are coming up. I know when I have that density in my chest that tears want to come. I know when I have tightness in my stomach that I'm afraid and I need to shake a little

bit. It's very visceral and it's very physical and it's unbelievably powerful and effective. Other one you mentioned is EMDR. EMDR is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. So basically, they'll use sound, sometimes they have headphones on you and light or something to focus on, and you go back to a traumatic event. And they are trying to help your brain reprogram the knee jerk reaction to your triggers, basically. And it's been shown, you know, they use it a ton in the military, although they're also starting to use somatic experiencing. There's a ton of literature to support EMDR and its effectiveness for trauma and recovery. I think it is quite effective in kind of reprogramming those well-worn reactive pathways that we develop through trauma, but nothing in my, and this is just my practical and personal

opinion, is that nothing for trauma and healing has been as effective as somatic experiencing. And so for you, I would say, since you've done a ton of talking, which is great, and you'll still do a ton of talking, now it's time to get into the body. Great. Thank you so much for that, Dr. Laura. I really appreciate the distinctions between the three. And can they be used in conjunction? So could I do somatic and EMDR together? Yes. Yes, absolutely. Excellent. Good luck. Thank you. I think this has been such a beautiful session because it's only when we expose our pain and our shame to the light that it really evaporates. And what I love so much is how people were so honest about their struggles and their pain and their challenges and their triumphs. And the truth is, every single one of us there, if someone, you know, pretends that they're full of self-worth, you know, my guess is I don't think there's one of us who really hasn't or doesn't struggle with self-worth. and it is a lifelong practice because you can never have too much of it and it's and it's an

endless font that is available to us and i think that's the most important thing that i want to leave you with is that it's not about necessarily you know it's not about creating self-worth it's about letting go of releasing healing and removing the blocks that get built over time the self-love has been there since the beginning and always will be there for you. It's just about reconnecting to it. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Language of Love. I love all these questions from you and you remember that you can keep them coming. You just go to drlauraberman.com right there on the homepage. You can either leave a voicemail question or an email question. You can also go to speakpipe.com backslash language of love directly and leave a voicemail question as

well. But it's sometimes easier just to click on the link. I will meet you back here. A brand new podcast is coming out next Wednesday. So look for that. Make sure to subscribe if you like it. And I'll see you next time on the language of love. new from nespresso blend wellness into your coffee routine with the coffee plus range infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like Coffee Plus B12 to help support immune function and Coffee Plus B6 to keep your day moving.

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