Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - The Love Storm with AnnaLynne McCord

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

In today’s Language of Love Conversation, I have a very special guest with me, AnnaLynne McCord! AnnaLynne is not only a talented, well-known actress, but a passionate advocate for survivors of trauma and a fierce supporter in the fight against sex trafficking. She shares her personal experiences of trauma and how they affected her life (and sexuality), as well as her incredible work in supporting survivors. We also talk about the importance of mental health and self-love. AnnaLynne emphasizes the need to break the cycle of abuse and how crucial it is to address the root causes of mass violence and radicalized religion. One thing that stood out to me was her vision for a movement called Love Storm. It's all about spreading love and healing to those who have been through unimaginable pain. AnnaLynne also gives us some insight into her new film, "Condition of Return". It's a thought-provoking movie that explores the consequences of trauma and the dangers of blind faith. It's a must-watch for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of trauma and its long-lasting effects. I'm so grateful to have this conversation with AnnaLynne. Her passion and dedication to making a difference are truly inspiring. So, grab a cup of tea, sit back, and get ready to be moved by this incredible discussion. Let's dive in! In this episode, AnnaLyne and I explore:  The importance of embracing uniqueness and not being afraid to be different The power that can be found in recognizing and integrating the parts of ourselves that carry shame from the past.   Why true peace starts within ourselves and extends to our surroundings AnnaLynne's involvement in fighting human trafficking and modern-day slavery How to break the cycle of abuse and underreporting of sexual abuse The impact of trauma on sexual preferences You can connect with AnnaLynne on Instagram! Don't forget to explore The Love Storm website for guidance on ending sex slavery.  Check out The Map of Consciousness and Power vs. Force by David Hawkins for deep perspectives on consciousness and human behavior. Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score is also an essential read for understanding trauma's impact.  Lastly secure your tickets for Good Grief Day: Healing from Loss with Love happening in December at Hermosa Beach, CA for a day of profound healing, guided by me and some incredible healers and teachers! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love, and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman. And for the past 30 years, I've been helping people just like you learn to love and be loved better. Here on the Language of Love Conversations, I'm talking to some of the world's most influential and revolutionary experts, thought leaders, spiritual teachers, and celebrities about love, sex, and relationships from a mind, body, and spirit perspective. and that way my goal is to awaken your mind body and soul it's time to become fluent in the language of life annalyn mccord is an american actress writer director producer she's known for playing

those vixen and vamp roles usually of a darker nature she's been in all kinds of television shows you're familiar with and movies, has a new movie coming out right now called Condition of Return that we're going to get into. But what I'm most excited to talk to Annalyn about is what she's been doing in her free time, not just in her acting career. She is really invested in helping to bring awareness and healing to the sex slave industry and has been very vocal about her own healing from sexual abuse and trauma, what has worked for her and what hasn't. And I'm so impressed with her bravery and willingness to be a light that can guide all of us on our own healing journey. So I'm thrilled to introduce you to Anna Lynn McCord.

Anna Lynn McCord, thank you so much for joining us. I'm so excited to talk to you. I'm so happy to be here. We've been trying to make this happen for a while. So here we are, we did it. Here we are. And it's not, you know, everything's in divine timing. And we were talking right before we got on the air that we are both Georgia girls, right? You grew up in Georgia. So did I? All over Georgia, actually. So I'm, I'm take your pick. I'm kind of from all over the state. I grew up in St. Simon's Island, Georgia. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. Well, I'm in my Savannah house right now. So I'm actually in Georgia as we speak. And you still stay there. See, for me, I just, you know, no offense to the South, because I know a lot of my peeps are from the South,

But for me personally, we moved there when I was eight from New York City and we were like the only Jewish family and we weren't observant, but I guess we were culturally Jewish and my parents didn't think anything of putting on the school form that we were Jewish. And on the first day of school, it was like this crazy extravaganza where this girl came up to me and said, where's your horns and tail? And, you know, because all Jews have horns and tails and kids were throwing pennies at me. I was like, wait, what happened? And so the whole experience of that traumatized me so much that I went as far north as I could when I went to college and I never went back. I get you. I personally had my own Georgia trauma and went to New York too.

I actually spend most of my time in New York and I have investment properties here. So I'm grateful for that. But I was homeschooled. So I was completely sheltered from the entire situation. But it is still growing up here, or at least the experience that I had, was we were 50 years behind i mean my father was like women obey their husbands and it was i was like i'm never getting married that's the deal i'm not into any of this at 15 years old i couldn't get out enough fast i couldn't get out fast enough i moved to new york and that was a

culture shock for a girl literally born in georgia but i'm i'm grateful for the aspects that i do really love about the south which is some of that southern cooking honey and when you know the hospitality the concept of hospitality for sure but i do absolutely i can only imagine what that was like especially as an eight-year-old kids can be so mean but it's all programming and we're seeing that in our world right now the programming is absolutely terrifying what's going on. So I'm sorry that the little you had that experience, but I'm sure it's part of why you became the amazing woman warrior that you are. It's totally why. And I do have deep love for the South. And I do love going back there, like the smell of the low country and being in the

marshes and cast netting and crabbing. And I've brought my kids down there for the summers. There's so many beautiful parts of it, but that part, the anti-Semitic, xenophobic, homophobic. phobic, phobic, phobic, right. And, and I can't even imagine being homeschooled and being just like immersed in that, but you're right that it did. And I've talked about this before that going through that, being always kind of an outcast and never quite fitting in unless I accepted Jesus as my savior, which as my mother told me when I considered it just to fit in, she's like, that's fine. But if the Nazis come again, you're still Jewish, whatever you accept. And I remember that she's like, and you think you're going to do this to be accepted, but you'll always be the Jewish girl that's now converted. And that really, really changed the way I looked at it. And I decided to just embrace my weird. And then fast forward as I went into like a very strange profession at the time I did, no one else was a sex therapist.

and some of the things that I did where people were like, aren't you worried that people will strange, think you're strange or weird. And I was like, strange or weird. I'm not afraid of, you know, so I don't need to. So there is freedom in that. But anyway, enough about me. Let's talk about you. Well, I will say one thing to that point. And those individuals who, you know, who say those things and do those things, they fail to remember that Yeshua, a Hebrew name to the man that they call Jesus is actually Jewish. Jesus was a Jew, everybody. Hello. I know. And they publish in the Brunswick News and I would dread it every year because the next day it was in the ether and the kids were saying stuff, but they would publish this huge story

of Easter every year at Easter in the Brunswick News. And the story would go, you know, the usual story of the resurrection. But the part about the Jews was very explicit, which was that it wasn't just an individual or certain people or whatever. It was the Jews. The Jews told the Caesar that if you basically that if you don't kill Jesus, you're not a friend of the Romans or something. I mean, I don't remember. But basically, the Jews were the reason that Christ was killed right so that was the common understanding in my little hometown which is misguided and not very and you know i'm i'm one of the lucky ones because i for whatever reason my father like he it was his great dream to be jewish so he had his bumper stick like a

bumper sticker on the car i'm a messianic jew so you're not so he was a jew for jesus I've heard of that. He doesn't have, you know, Jewish ancestry, though, which is the part, but I did get to make his dream come true. And about 11 years ago, I surprised him with a trip to Israel and landed and we did a midnight bike ride through Jerusalem. And it was, you know, the dream of his life. And that was beautiful. Thankfully gave me the more appropriate view of what the history is that Jesus wasn't white and he didn't speak English and his real name is a Hebrew name, Yeshua. All true. All true. And he was unbelievably powerful and brilliant and an amazing prophet. An amazing prophet indeed. Yeah. Okay. So we have so much to talk about and I've

followed you for some time. And one of the reasons that I was so excited to share you with my peeps here is we spend so much time talking about love, about sex, about relationships, and interwoven into all of that is this idea of healing, right? And how we are always going to attract in and be attracted to love and people and circumstances and individuals that reflect our level of healing, right? So that the more that we heal, not only the deeper and more profound and more satisfying our relationships with everyone can be, the better our lives can be. But it's something that is so fundamental. And I feel like it's being called for more than ever before, because when we do heal, whatever those big T or little t traumas are, and I know this is a huge area of

work for you that you're very public about in terms of your personal life, but also in the work you do in the world. But when we do that, then we can become friends with our shadows, Right. Then we can like face those parts of ourselves we don't want to see. And then that creates an openness to let go of judgment of other people as well as we let go of the judgment of ourselves as we heal those parts of ourselves that we don't want to be with. And so my absolute belief, I don't even think I wouldn't even call it a theory, is that the more that we heal ourselves, the more we become friends with our shadows, the less strife, conflict, division, pointing the finger of blame, war, you know, take it all the way up the flagpole, there will be. oh i couldn't agree more and i would i would only say that i i believe we get to a point where we dance with judgment we dance that it is and i talk to people a lot about that that notion of dancing with the shadow because you will have an infiltration of thoughts that are not yours until the moment you attach to them and that's the dance right the dance is it allows you to

hear the thoughts like what is she wearing Anna Lynn stop that you know that's okay attaching to it like seriously where did she buy that does she not know how to like you know you following the person and then like excuse me ma'am do you need a mirror like where did you get that horrible outfit you clearly didn't see yourself when you look that's then going all the way into the shadow but there there is still once integration with the light and the shadow has thankfully begun to take root, there's still all this cacophony of vibrational thoughts in the world that pop into our minds and we don't even want it to happen. And I think that to your point about going all the way up the levels of being able to integrate our shadows so that we don't be a part of creating

war and everywhere in between from judging someone walking by to creating a war and everywhere in between. It goes back to my favorite, favorite, favorite, favorite philosopher, favorite quote from my favorite philosopher, Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher. If we want peace in the world, we must have peace in the nations. If we want peace in the nations, we must have peace in the cities. If we want peace in the cities, we must have peace in the neighborhoods. If we want peace in the neighborhoods, we have to have peace in the homes. And if we want peace in the homes, we must have peace in the heart. We love to skip a lot of those steps. Yeah, we do. And then we point a bunch of fingers talking about blame. Well, they shouldn't be doing that over there. Yeah. And what part do we play in the vibration of war, of conflict, of hurt and harm and judgment and blame and shame?

If we're doing it in our own heart to ourselves, we will do it in our home to our families. They and we will do it in our neighborhoods to our community and so on and so forth. And then we'll see there's no peace in the world and we'll throw our hands in the air so confused as to why there's war. No, honey, you've been warring all day in your mind. That doesn't count. I'm so sorry to tell you it's as much your personal war as it is a war going on in Eastern Europe, in obviously the Middle East and in all of these places and things that we're seeing right

now, this is a projection of the nastiness that is unconscious in our minds. And it has come into the world. You don't build a house without a blueprint and you can't create a blueprint without a thought in your mind that originates the idea and the vision. Someone had a war thought yeah and from fights and arguments in their house to the streets to all-out war in our countries in our world that is how it starts and it trickles down from the mind everything originates in the it does and and the opposite so does love exactly in fact i was just sharing this the other day that i'm a huge fan of david hawkins who's a scientist and wrote this book called the map of consciousness or he created the map map of consciousness his book is power versus force

where he kind of introduces it but he you could geek out on his science guys and i talk about this all the time but one of the things that i love that he calculated and figured out because one of the pieces of genius of works he did that this map of consciousness is that he figured out with all these different scientists and modalities how to calibrate the energetic frequency of different emotional states and in our bodies, right? So what frequency that creates in our body, because we're all vibrating atoms and our bodies hold a vibration. And he and lots of other scientists at the HeartMath Institute and everywhere else are demonstrating how our individual vibration, our body's energetic frequency affects everything and everyone

around us. Like that's quantum love, which I'm always talking about. But here's the cool thing, that one person holding a state of love and reverence compensates energetically for 750,000 people who are living in shame and hate. Isn't that amazing? I get chills all over my body. Oh my God. It's beautiful. Yeah. I found Dr. David Hawkins and power versus force several years ago, and it blew my mind open. Obviously, you know him, but he did 30 years of study to calibrate these emotions. He did not take this lightly. And he would, you know, even with, he would do kinesiology body testing, the body cannot lie. And that's kind of what I found with my trauma was how, you know, the body keeps the score by Bessel van der Kolk,

another great book that just talks about how the body tells the truth, even when the mind and the words coming out of your mouth can say a whole bunch of stuff. The body doesn't lie. So with kinesiology, which David Hawkins was Mr. Expertise on, he calibrated these emotions with tens of thousands of people all over the world. All different races, all different ages, all different types. Yeah. Because we're made of energy. Emotions are energy. Feelings are energy. My couch right here has an energetic resonance. If you measure it with a bio well device, you will get the EMF you know and determine and it's it's made of linen and i've heard that linen is apparently

a really high vibrational form so good good for the body to wear linen not so much the satin that i'm rocking right now but whatever it looks great thank you but yeah that was huge for me the really big part of it for me was the the low vibrations that he calibrates and i would talk i talk a lot about this, but the low emotions that he calibrates, the most profound thing to me was that right above death calibrates shame. Yes. That's the lowest frequency emotion that blew my mind when I first learned that ages ago too, that shame then comes guilt, but shame is the above death is like the lowest vibration you can hold. And I think that's so relevant, both that And this idea of moving toward love in service, not only to your own healing, but the healing

of the world, both the shame and the love, I think really applied to the work that you do with Love Storm, right? And the crossover point that he talks about is at 150, the highest low vibration energy is pride, but all you need is an ounce of courage to tip over into the love vibration. And that's the other part that I love so much is, is courage is the turning point. Yes. And getting to curiosity and openness, all you have to be is like open. And then that is where you move into what I call the quantum love zone.

And if you can spend 51% of your time and just curiosity, openness, and courage and above joy, forgiveness, love, acceptance, all those yummier states of being, if you could spend 51% of the time in those vibrations authentically. I don't mean bypassing and pretending that everything's perfect when you're feeling like shit. We'll talk about that in a minute. But when you can do that, when you can do this though, your entire world changes for the better individually, like in your little universe. But also, as I was saying earlier, you're positively affecting everyone and everything around you. So I want to talk, I had no order. I have all these topics I want to talk to you, no order in which I want to talk about

them. So they're just kind of coming up naturally. But one of them is, is, is love storm, which is this project you started in support of ending the sex slavery. So I first it's relevant to what we were just talking about and you'll see why guys in a minute, but first I want to know if you'll share a little bit of your history and what brought you to this particular population to serve, which I'm so grateful you are. We need more and more warriors for the victims of the sex slave trade.

And I want you to share some of the statistics too, which will blow your mind. But I'm wondering if you can share that, some of the history of your history, and then what this is about, what the agenda of the love storm is and how you're doing it. Absolutely. Well, thank you, first of all. You'll have to shut me up. So you can just do one of these, like wrap it up, girl, because I get so passionate. I will go on and on.

But I, about 15 years ago, got involved by the human trafficking, modern day slavery. I was enlisted to do this by my very, very, very close forever friend since I was 17. And I was in a moment in my career where I thought that I'd made a mistake. I didn't want to be an actress anymore. I was having what I call my young life crisis. I got the midlife crisis out of the way early is what I always say. And my friend was like, she's my friend from New York, actually in my New York acting school. And she was like, no, you have such an opportunity to have a platform. Are you crazy? You have to do this. And we went to Cambodia together and I met, actually, this is one of my little girls. I have a picture on my phone of one of our girls, but these survivors blew my mind at their joy, at their love, at their capacity for compassion and forgiveness. And I don't know exactly what I expected, but I certainly didn't expect that. I didn't expect

the overwhelming, and it was literally overwhelming, the overwhelming love that was poured into me when I thought I was going there to help or do some good. And you went to Cambodia to work with victims of sex trafficking, trafficking, survivors of sex trafficking, and those made vulnerable to it. So we also work in prevention. Our program on the ground works to do what we call our little four, basically our four pillars is like rescue, three pillars, excuse me, rescue, rehabilitation, reintegration into society. The idea of being a fully well rounded process where we're not just getting kids out of a bad situation. And then what do you do? This is someone's life on their own, right? Exactly. So we create sustainability. We have

vocational skill training opportunities we have higher learning and college options so our kids are ours forever it's an open door policy one of the things i love about the program personally being an actress is we have art therapy and it's the first thing we introduce our little bubba's to when they come in and we've rescued them we immediately put them into art therapy so you have to understand if you're not familiar with this this particular issue or issues surrounding really severe trauma, it's very hard for survivors to speak. So voice has been shut down, but especially when they're little and they're children, they haven't even gotten their voice and it's already been shut down. So we work really hard in the beginning just to get them to talk. So instead

of any kind of forced energy of like asking questions, we just give them crayons. We give them looms to weave on. We teach them dance. We teach them acting and singing. Some of the girls both write and sing their stories, write poetry about their stories, dance out their stories. And I mean, one of our girls, she, I remember she was six years old and she wanted to do a skit and she wanted to perform her story. I can imagine how horrific this was to be a part of. This is safe in a safe setting of a safe center, but the six-year-old is Oscar worthy performance. acting out what happened acting out begging in the streets for money to help her little siblings who and her mother who needs to go to the hospital not making any money then being shamed by her

family for not bringing home money at six years old and then as a result being sold into the slavery and she literally she goes behind a curtain when the point when she's sold and then it implies what's happening to her and she screams. And that scream is seared in my cells, the memory of it. And I thank her for her bravery and her courage to not just survive what she survived, but to be able to use her full instrument, her full, wonderful body to eradicate that trauma from her cells where it was trapped. So that was kind of that soul I was in. I was like, whatever these children need, whatever the, whatever needs to happen, I'm here for this. I didn't know why I cared so much.

And for 10 years, I didn't know. And five years ago, so 15-year-long journey, five years ago, I was having surmounting, building, building, building PTSD symptoms that got to an all-time high where I blacked out in a restaurant, ended up in a stall in a bathroom, have no recollection of how I got there. The general manager had come in to try to help me. I was in the corner screaming, arms wrapped around my knees, didn't know where I was, what was going on, completely lost in space and time.

And I realized I needed help. And up until this point, I'd read every single self-help book there was in the world. I have listened to every single podcast. You know, I was actively going after healing from things that I knew that had happened to me. I experienced domestic abuse as a child in my own home. I experienced sexual assault when I was a teenager in my apartment in Los Angeles. So I knew there were things that had happened to me that justified me having certain behaviors,

but it hadn't gotten better, it had gotten worse. And that was what sent me into a PTSD treatment called EMDR, movement desensitization and reprocessing. And this is literally the treatment that war veterans go through. And it's become popular and really helpful for survivors of sexual and domestic abuses. I sat down across my doctor. I was like, okay, listen, lady, I have fixed myself from here to here. My head is clear. My mind is clear. My neck to head. It's all good. Like I've got some body stuff going on, but can we just make this go away as soon as possible? I've got to go. And she was

like, oh, bless her heart as much. She must, if she was Southern, she's not, but if she was Southern, she would have been thinking, bless her heart. Because I had all the signs of someone who had no, no idea what had actually happened to her. And two weeks of intake and my very first EMDR session later, I found out that I have been sexually abused as a child for years and my mind had blocked it out. So suddenly I knew why this issue of fighting sexual slavery was so important to me. And I had always taken the stance, which became the amalgamation of my journey and the work that I was doing into the love storm, which we then created. But I had always taken the stance that slavery is the one issue in our world that affects all of us. We live in prisons of our own

making all the time. We constantly are subject to a taskmaster mind that is just there dangling the keys saying, you ain't never going to get this, honey, because you're never, ever, ever going to be worthy enough. You're never going to be good enough, wealthy enough, smart enough, beautiful enough, whatever the narrative is. And that originates from noise. Talk about infiltration of thoughts that aren't yours and don't belong in your mind. Noise from parents, teachers, peers, the social media that's not social at all, news media, my media, entertainment media, everything, all of this language. So the combination of the idea that 8 billion people will be affected by a form of slavery in their own mind. Right. At the very least.

At the very least. Yeah. Then how that affected me, how I was so enslaved and yet I was working with survivors of slavery who were so free. And then the actual work and the need for the work that we do fighting human trafficking. All of those kind of came together and culminated in 2019 after I had been in treatment, pretty intensive, like IOP, intensive outpatient for two years. And for the trauma you recovered. The trauma that I had remembered for childhood sexual abuse. And this idea, this, I have to call it a vision now, because it was coming to me during meditation and breath work and these different, I was getting this image of mass groups of people meditating together to clear their own mind with the idea of ending slavery

from the inside out, clear the shackles, those invisible chains on your brain for yourself, doing what Lao Tzu says, healing yourself in your heart and then seeing healing come to fruition in the world. And so the love storm became the idea. And I was like, okay, I had been cynical and jaded for so long. And I was like, I can't do some hippie tree hugging love shit. Like I can't do that. Like the name can't be like, people are so cynical about love. It's crazy. They will talk to you about hate all day long and you go miserate with them all day long, but you start bringing love up and it's like, that's cheesy. That's corny. Yeah. It's like, oh, I'm so sorry. The single most important vibrational resonance in all of existence that literally makes existence

actually exist, but yeah, corny, no cheesy, totally, totally. So it was late. I was talking to the, my co-founder and I was like, seek she's Cambodian and her father, they survived the genocide in Cambodia and her father, she didn't know until we were actually doing the work that we were doing, that he had gone back eight times and rescued 40 people, 45 people from eight different families. We were wanting to do something, kind of launching something that would originate with Cambodia and the love and care that she had personally from her own heritage. And I have because I'm a blonde Cambodian. Don't let the blonde Cambodian. An honorary Cambodian.

I'm totally honorary. Yes. But we need this to be bigger than just our hearts for Cambodia. This is a global issue. It's in every country of the world. We don't want little waves on the ocean. we want a tsunami. We want to come together, create a network of organizations that are fighting human trafficking, link them so that we can actually end this shit. You know what I mean? And that was kind of the concept behind it. And I kept seeing this vision of just groups of people meditating together and that being the feature point of the event. And that if you only ever come to our events or our retreats for the love storm, and you only ever set yourself free, That's okay. We're okay with that. We're so happy about that. But also if you get involved,

amazing. And here's how you can get involved, whether it's with our organization in Cambodia or a local organization here in the town we're in. So we created a 22 city long tour that we launched in 2020 and then so did COVID. It launched itself all over our planet and wouldn't let any of us travel. So we made two of the cities. We did LA and New York. And then obviously we're forced to wait. And we've been able to do sporadic events since then. Unfortunately, we haven't gotten the whole group together for the tour as of yet, because our world has become something very different, as you know. But it's still happening. It's still happening. But the idea of the love storm is come out, get educated on the issue of modern day slavery. It's in your

backyard. It's in every country of the world. This is what's happening. This is what's happening to our kids, especially in disasters and war, the children become so vulnerable to being trafficked. It just, it's hard to believe you're seeing 2 million children a year being trafficked into sexual slavery and forced labor. So let's just pause on that. Cause I want to talk about, I want to really highlight some of these statistics of people because I don't think people really understand. I mean, I understand cause I'm, I work with a lot of the victims and i'm a sex therapist among many other things but so say again how many people how many children around the world are being trafficked in the sex slave trade two million two million it's really

hard to wrap your mind around numbers bigger than like a couple thousand you actually your mind can't understand numbers it's what is two million that's half the population of atlanta this like the biggest city in the South, the biggest metropolis city in the South. This is an unfathomable amount of little baby humans who have just arrived on earth, who then become what you become when that torture and that treatment happens to you. And I will tell you from personal experience, you become a victim, you become a perpetrator. And I've been both. I haven't done things that are obviously what were done to me, but I have been energetically abusive. I've been psychologically and verbally abusive. I was a pathological liar. I developed all kinds

of mechanisms and machinations and all these different things. And I was very like, the world is out to get me, so I'll get them first. And that was what it made me into. And I've had to live with that i've had to make amends for that this is individual like when you think of two million it's it's a number that just throws out there but every single lifetime is 80 90 100 years who and all the people those people touch or everyone they talk to everyone impact everyone they meet exactly hurt people hurt people so yes so as we have two million poor little things that Not only do they just in and of themselves don't deserve, nobody deserves this kind of trauma, right? Like this is horrific to even think about, but then to think of the societal implications of that, right?

And the energetic implications of that, not only for them, but everyone they touch, right? And I work with a lot of really powerful men who talk to me and confide in me because I'm so open and vocal about this. And they say, I'm either the only person they've ever told or one of very few who will ever know. And they'll never tell anyone. And the people that they did tell was a mistake and they never should have said anything. And what is very common with these men is so much rage, so much anger. And I'm grateful that they're beautiful men that are channeling that anger and rage into protective energy in our world. But my heart for them is that they heal.

My heart for them is that they be the protective, wonderful men that they are without that shadow on their shoulder just shooting them constantly. And if you think about the other side, the men who don't tell, and then all that rage and anger isn't turned into protection and their power isn't used for that, who do they become? Hamas. They become Hamas. Exactly. I mean, it's not funny, but. No. No, but like, you're, you're right. The you're being candid. And it's exactly what I'm laughing

at my candidness, not the point. No, it's because you're laughing at the irony. The irony is that we create this, this radicalism is born out of rage. It's, and you know, what's interesting about David Hawkins, we were talking about that, that emotional scale, shame is at the baseline, right? So, so if you think about sexual abuse perpetration in our world, you can't fathom the numbers because people don't call up and say, Hey, I was abusing people this week. Just wanted to give you numbers for statistics. And victims don't report it very often too, at least not for decades. Underreported crime on earth is sexual abuse perpetration, especially when it's against children and 80% it's someone that, you know, so even our kids that are being sold into sex

trafficking, oftentimes it's a family member or, you know, an uncle and aunt, even parents, siblings cousins that sell their their family members into this atrocious sometimes unknowingly sometimes knowingly but sometimes it's like okay we're going to take her and she's going to work on a cruise ship or she's going to work in america for families and make all this money and send it back to you and so the family thinks a they're giving the child a better life and they can't provide for them and b maybe the child will be able to help support them and so they sell the child and they think that this is, and then of course the opposite happens. As most of you know, for the past several years, I've been on a pretty intense grief journey and

it's been a path of healing. I've shared lots of that healing with you and lots of the healing resources that I found. And I am so thrilled to announce that I am doing my first ever retreat for grieving mamas. So if you or someone you love is a mama who has lost a child in any way, at any stage, at any age, I would love for you to come join me at 1440 Multiversity in the Redwoods near Santa Cruz, California for four amazing days of beautiful, uplifting community and healing. We've got David Kessler. We've got Paul Selig. We've got Catherine Woodward thomas we've got me we've got body work we've got organic food beautiful rooms go to 1440.org check it out it's right there on the home page i really hope you can join us

the opposite happens absolutely it and i have a young woman that actually was adopted out of an asian country under those the idea that she was going to have a good parents in a life. And so there's so much, it's well beyond the trafficking of drugs. Trafficking of arms and humans are the two highest grossing, most lucrative forms of trafficking in our world now. Humans, unfortunately, are very attractive to traffic because you retain your supply and you can keep using a human being over and again. So this is why it's so pervasive. And I think the idea with the love storm is we invite you into this process at the level that you can be a part of it right because these are really heavy topics and not everybody can stomach it and that's okay

if you can't please honor that please do not get involved if you can't stomach it you will only bring more pain into our world because your experience in your body but if you can be a part of the process of shedding light and love i remember trying to talk about the issue of human trafficking 15 years ago in the press and I would do interviews and my heart was just like pouring out all of these things. I'm telling the stories and I think they mean so much. And then later it would be like, Oh, so we, um, yeah. So we cut the segment part about your, you know, your trafficking thing. It's just like super dark. And I'm like, what are you talking about? If you think it's super dark, how do you think it is to live with it? And I was the person who's being, yeah. I mean,

it's so sick. I've had similar experiences trying to talk about real issues in the media. They sometimes want it if it's a quick soundbite that they can engender fear or get ratings with. But if it's too painful or it's going to turn people off or make them too uncomfortable, then they don't care about the truth. And we're going to put in the show notes, guys, all the links to Anna Lynn's, to the love storm and where to find out more information. So you don't need to write anything down right now. But I do want to ask you, because I know so much of what you're really public about, not only in work to end this travesty. And I know right now you have a new film, a new movie that just got released where your character is someone who clearly has had

some significant trauma. But also, I feel like the part of the point of her character and the movie itself is that in an effort to not be with her trauma or to not know how to manage or how to heal herself, she turns to this essentially blind faith in something that she thinks can save her. And it brings her deeper into the darkness. The movie is called Condition of Return. So can you talk a little bit about that, first of all, and in particular, this whole idea, which I love, I had thought about it, but I just didn't really put a lot of attention on this. And I think it's so important that so many of the people who commit these mass murders are often that the school shootings, all of it is part of it is a suicide plan. Right. And that's often at the core of it.

So talk about the movie, talk about that. And then we're going to talk about all the stuff around healing. OK, amazing. Well, yes, I appreciate you highlighting this. And I'm grateful to SAG that we were actually allowed to talk about my film because the strike is ongoing and we received an interim waiver. but a lot of, you know, obviously we're otherwise not allowed to speak about our work at this moment because the studios need to do what they need to do to take care of us. But I think this film is unfortunately more relevant than it was even when I filmed it, because talk about the

things that make you massacre individuals. And we're seeing in our world, and one of them is is the blind faith part is religion radicalized religion and radicalized islam are the new kids on the block unfortunately we christian crusaders the catholic church's inquisition we've been massacring people in the name of a deity in the name of a godhead for centuries and it's it's we're doing something wrong because we haven't we haven't eradicated that from our world yet so that's i'll leave that little thing just to float into a little nugget that little turn in the little nugget there just that that super super super surface level done little conversation piece there let you think on that one but the blind faith this character her name is eve there's

an incredible amount of symbolism in this film so if you're kind of you know curious about the occult or anything like that you're definitely gonna enjoy the film because the writer is just like sprinkling stuff all over it. And I was like, Oh my God, John, I know exactly what you were trying to say here. I know what this moment was. And he's like, Oh, you got that. And I was like, Oh, you know, I read Eve Sullivan is the character. She has one traumatic incident after another happened to her. Technically she had a good childhood. According to her, there's always something there. My doctor said when someone's like, my parents were perfect. I never believe that either. I'm like, yeah, sure. They were like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. You told me 10 stories

where they were absolutely atrocious, but sure. Your parents are great anyway. So she has a decent relationship with her parents, but she actually has life situations one right after the other that would be severely traumatizing to anyone to have any single one of them happen. And then all of hers happened one right after the other. And what the, the national Institute of justice funded DOJ research says about mass shootings is that 100% of the 172 mass shootings that they researched, 100% of them, the shooter at the time of the shooting was in mental crisis. And when they were grade school, they were 90% suicidal. When they were college age, they were 100% suicidal. First of all, these percentages are insane. You get 48%, 57%. You don't get 90 and a hundred

percent of things. This is a mental health issue. The only conversation to be had about this is mental health. And my character's entire mental health situation deteriorated throughout the film. And she did what she did in the first scene. Everything else was flashback, but it was her life proceeding built up to what she did in the very first scene of the film, which was walked into a church with an AR-15 and shot all of her friends. And you have to ask yourself, or you're invited, I'll say, you're invited to ask yourself, who do you become? When life has smashed you in the face, one hit after the next, and you don't have, I'm grateful that I'm an actress and I have the money, the thousands of dollars and all the

modalities and the time to take off work to go pay for hundreds of hours of treatment aren't covered by insurance that aren't covered by insurance whatsoever. The only thing was a partial, I have some of the best insurance in the country. I got a partial coverage of my PTSD treatment. None of the other stuff that I was recommended that I needed to do was covered by insurance, but I'm in the lucky position. Most people can't even consider paying for something much less have the resources to find the modalities that might help or the clinicians that might help and then once you do to navigate all the intake and like you said have the money to pay out of pocket and if insurance does cover it they usually cover like four sessions that

barely breaks the surface of what's really going on they're like here 50 minutes you know once it's It doesn't. So, and my character, my character couldn't afford treatment at the end of her going, literally going postal. She couldn't take it anymore. And she, she fell prey to her faith that when one entity wasn't listening, she swung her faith all the way to the other side, like a pendulum and believed in whatever would give her what she wanted and needed. and that made her do what she did and the film plays back in flashback it's it's flashes of her memory and her mind so if you take it literal you can but i invite you to think of it more in themes of our conscious and unconscious interaction and we are the voice of satan and we are the voice

of god in our own minds and that is what was happening she she listened to the voice of satan In her mind, it was Satan that she turned to because God had betrayed her. Abandoned her, left her there. So yes, the film has a lot of themes that are relevant to right now. But specifically, who are we? Who do we become after we've been through all of that? Or like Oprah's book, What Happened to You? Yeah, the cake doesn't bake itself.

And so that is Streaming Guys, Condition of Return. And we'll put the link in the show notes or just tell you to look what I don't know what streaming platform it's on, but we'll put it on several. So, yeah, you might just look it up and do a good Google search. OK, so let's get into because I know you've shared not only and you shared here, not only some of the trauma you've experienced, but also that you have struggled or did struggle a great deal with suicidal thoughts and ideation and maybe even intention. I don't know. But that you and I'm with you 100 percent. I'm always like cheering you on when I see you talk about it online. You are a big believer in what I would call and what many would call somatic experiencing strategies for healing.

Obviously, like you were even saying about the Cambodian little girls who were victims of sex slavery that sometimes are especially with trauma, there's only either you can't talk because that part of you has been so shut down by the trauma or just talking is one more way of because when you've experienced trauma and I'm not only help heal trauma, but I'm open about being a trauma survivor myself. the strategy for surviving it is disassociation. And so for many of us, especially if you tend to be more of a brainiac, and I am that, and I think you are too, talking is a really yummy defense mechanism. I can talk about stuff all day long if I don't have to feel it, you know? So there's a certain point and, you know, my kids, you know, when they were little would call me a talking doctor. That was their term for therapist. And I like to say now that I'm a talking doctor that does a lot less talking in her work as a result, primarily of having gone through it myself, recovering those memories and healing them, somatic experiencing and working

with so many other people and guiding them through that. I'm a huge believer in not that talking isn't important, but there's a certain point at which, okay, you've said what happened, you've articulated it you've worked through it intellectually but that's just like the first third it's that right so with that preamble will you share some of the things that you found most helpful in healing absolutely and it speaks to that moment with doctor my doctor when i sat down and put my hands at my neck and my head fixing myself from here to here i had gone through all the mind processes. I had, and I had thankfully eradicated something that was, that is the single largest barrier to any healing process. And that's that bottom rung of the vibrational scale,

shame. So I told my doctor, I said, shame and I got a divorce. We stated irreconcilable differences and I have a restraining order against that bitch. So if you notice any pointed out and I will eradicate it immediately because that bitch ain't allowed anywhere near me. Okay. 500 feet, boo. So she was laughing and she was like, okay, this, this client is going to be, Oh, do you know the whole situation? But I, I told her things that had I not had the 10 years of working on my mind, I don't think I could have gotten the words out because they, they were things that I personally was sexually turned on by. And they were so embarrassing and so shameful and awful. And I felt this big teeny tiny at the idea that I would think those thoughts and

masturbate and get off to it. And, and I just felt so gross and disgusting. And then I would have to do it again because it wasn't a kink, which is something you're curious about, right? It was a fetish and I could not get an orgasm if I wasn't being physically harmed. Okay. We got to pause you right there because what you just said is so important. I know it wasn't the point. It was like a byproduct. Let's just pause at the side note here, because this is almost universal, I find, with rape victims, abuse victims, sexual abuse victims. When we're talking, I hear, because I hear people's deepest sexual fantasies all the time, right? So I'm sort of a strange, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, outlier in this, in terms

of what I've worked with and been exposed to. And it is almost, I would say almost universal, but certainly unbelievably common. And so I'm saying this to my peeps here because they're identifying with what you're saying. It's really normal. It's one of the ways that we adapt to the trauma, especially because often the trauma happened

as we were sexually developing. So it becomes, and even pre-sexual development, many researchers show that our love maps, as they, as we call it, like what turns us on is kind of imprinted in the first seven years of life. So for many of us who had early childhood sexual trauma, or if you had sexual trauma during your sexual development, it can kind of skew what turns you on. And so I'll have women say like the worst thing that ever happened to me was when I was raped. And yet I have these rape fantasies. And the only way I can get turned on with my partner is if I imagine that they're

raping me. And I'm so back to that lowest rung on the vibrational scale. I am so ashamed because this must mean that I wanted to be raped. This must mean that I liked being raped. This must mean that I enjoyed it. And I, so obviously a huge part of the treatment is helping them understand what you understood in therapy. Hopefully that that is not true. It does not mean you want, it's an adaptive mechanism that allows you to take the power back. Yes. And it was exactly that. And I was very, everything about me was about power. So this happening to me specifically, my wiring revolted strongly. And so I was never going to be the hides in the corner and never wants to have sex. That would, that would be to admit to giving up

my power in my psychology. So I was going to go in there, you know, like, I was going to go like a bull in a china shop sorry for the analogy and i was like let's go boys you know and my i would get off to they want me and i may or may not want them back yeah there's this power it was always about power and what is that quote everything in life is about sex except for sex and that's about power yeah there's thankfully i don't believe that anymore but for a long time i did and and it was It was the things that I would share with my doctor. I had a dungeon in my house. I had a custom design that I designed and built a 1500 steel cage dungeon bed with all

the hooks and chains. You had a whole red room. I had a whole red room and then some and every, you know, accessory to go along with it. And I, it was my favorite thing to just terrify the new guy in my life. Like, oh, come check out my meditation room. and it was like, this is how I meditate, honey. You better catch up. And you know what, if you're doing that with your partner and you both are trusting each other and you love each other. And it's coming from a place of, of clarity and health, you know,

wonderful. I'm so happy. What I found was that every single fetish I had directly related to something that had happened to me. And a big part of it was asphyxiation. I almost died a few times now that I've recalled my memories as a small child, because things were put around my neck and I have memories of white flashing, white flashing, almost losing my consciousness fully as six years old, as young as six years old. And these would then, I would have a man put my neck in the nook of his elbow. And if he didn't know what he was doing, I would tell him I knew how to do it. I would say, close off the blood to my brain, not my throat. So I can still get air and then fuck me back awake excuse my friend but literally these were ways that i would cope and

the poor beautiful wonderful men who i would literally just be like horrible to if they didn't do my bidding and it was like you know it wasn't like oh honey i want to try this cool thing it was like you don't do this then get the fuck out and it was like so horrible some of them were really like some guys were like i don't want to do this to you and i'd be like well you're clearly a novice it was just i would just really a wimp get the hell out of here yeah like oh i see who the gimp should be like oh yeah it was there was a nasty little side to aniline because of everything that i was trying so desperately to get my power back on and so because of all those things that not only happened to me to begin with i then perpetrated onto myself in under the guise of

in a cons in a consensual relationship and then i would go on to go into ptsd treatment and coincide that with sc i'm getting back to your original question byproduct has been fully satiated the somatic experience work that i did was the beginning of the rest of my life because all of that torture was trapped in myself and with pranayama breathwork holotropic breathwork wim hof yes i did everything plant medicine i did ayahuasca psilocybin journeys psilocybin with mdma i haven't tried but i hear is actually really gentle and beautiful for survivors of sexual abuse because it puts a love energy around the psilocybin that can kind of be intense when it's it's stuff okay so there's some beautiful wonderful ways in it and my doctor is like

fully trained and ready to administer dmt and psilocybin as soon as the fda stops being a dick but these are incredible modalities but breath work sound healing sound if you can't meditate if it's it's too much for you if breath work is too intense and it is in the beginning you will not want to do it because all of your demons come flying to the forefront at first but that's how you get them out but if you can't do any of those you if you can get into a sound healing sound bath your cells will thank you your heart will open it is the most profound way to step into this process and because i coincided this kundalini work with my doctor doing ptsd emdr treatment i was able to open these really deep, horrible, scary wounds that made me feel, talk about not feel like the

power issues. I felt shattered. I felt like I was four feet taller. That's not four feet. That's like four inches, but I was making a little sign on the camera. I felt so small. I felt so insignificant and I felt scared in the world when these memories started coming out. I used to be this tough chick. I was like, no, not scared of anything. And it was so confronting and I had to become so gentle and so self-compassionate and so patient with this process. And I remember seeing the parts of me because of all the disassociation and all the parts I would was co-conscious with very quickly because I had had, I had done so much with my mind in the 10 years preceding the last five years of the work that I've done on myself that when my memories came

to my conscious awareness, I would see the parts of me that I was interloping with, so to speak. And I had a strong sense of me. And then I would sense that I was with a part of me. And this as if I'm with you right now. And the little six year old version of me was the part of me that would run from me and disappear into my mind. And it was so painful. And I would talk to my doctor about it. And she said, you have to build trust with her. You've made her home very unsafe for a long time. She's got to have trust with you if she's going to take you on a journey into the memories that she holds. Because I kept telling my doctor, they're her memories, not mine. I don't have these memories. They are me. But she did that. That's what we talk about when we talk

about internal family systems or parts work or they're no bad parts. What you're talking about is so important because I always say that it went back to the original shadow friends with your shadow or dancing with your shadows thing. Like there are these parts of ourselves that traumatized, devastated, abused, disenfranchised, grieving, lost parts of ourselves that we all have. And we are scared as shit to go into the basement where they are all hiding. Like I remember being a little girl, most of us, we had this basement in our house, you know, and it was dark and danky and scary. And even just going by the door in the kitchen to the basement, I'd like zip by it, you know, walk a little faster. And like, we treat those parts. Like

if I turn on the light, I'm not even going near that basement. It will take me over. It will destroy me. It will, it is so fricking petrifying. But when you turn on the lights and you actually look at them. They are these sweet, innocent, lost, hurt, little angel parts of yourself that have just been cowering in shame and fear and grief and loss and just want to be safe enough to be held and reintegrated. And the scariest thing, I think, and you often do need support from this, is turning on the lights and being willing to go there. I'm willing to go there. And I love that analogy because it brings to mind Eckhart Tolle, who I love so much. But he says, Eckhart Tolle, the author of Power of Now and New Earth, he says, it can never be as dark as it was before you turned on the lights. and that the idea that even if you flip the light on

for half a second, you're suddenly gonna know like, oh, there's a big couch there. I won't stub my toe on that. Maybe you'll hit your toe on the coffee table, but you won't hit your toe on the big giant couch that you now see looming. So even a flicker of light is helpful. And I know that I had flickers for a decade.

I had flickers of light. And then when my body was actually in a place where it could remember. That is the point at which my memories came back. And it's interesting, Laura, because it came on the heels of me finishing my last spread too thin, tended to be a workaholic, agrees to everything and everyone and gets on a red eye after a hundred hour work week. It's part of myself. When I finished my last commitment outside of myself in June of 2018, two months later, my memories came back. Isn't that beautiful how we do that for ourselves. Those parts of you were like, okay, we'll just chill here. Can't come out right now

because she will stop functioning. Let's wait until all of the stuff is done. I love that about ourselves, how we do. I do too. I honor those parts of ourselves. It's such an intelligent design. Such an intelligent design. Yeah. Such a beautiful conversation. I was such a fan before, but I'm even more of a fan of your authenticity, your heart, your grace, your willingness to be raw and filterless like I am. I mean, I recognize a sister right there. You know, it's all in service to love. So I am so, so, so appreciative for who you are and what you do.

I'll put all the links in, guys, but you can check out The Love Storm. You can check out the new movie. You can learn more about Anna Lynn. there's so much to explore and I thank you for joining us. Thank you so much. And thank you for holding this forum for, for the men and women who listen. And I hope that, you know, if, if there's any takeaway, I would say the last thing I would say is my pain used to be something that I wore like a badge of honor. I had a high tolerance for pain and I could take pain. And I was always like to ask in these conversations, if you have a high tolerance for pain, you should ask yourself why

you should ask yourself, why, why did my body have to get to a point where it tolerates pain at this level? So honor your body, honor your pain, but don't wear it as a badge of honor. It is nothing to be held in a position of merit. It is something to be given grace and compassion to and hopefully to finally be something that you're able to to shed and return to what life is supposed to be which is what it is when we're first here at the very beginning and it's supposed to be love so thank you for this beautiful opportunity to speak with you and this beautiful platform love we started and ended with love yay I went to the doctor said I'm crazy for your love

wrote me a prescription but there's no cure for a cry