Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Truth, Trauma and Transformation with Dr. Frank Anderson

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

Ever feel emotions that don’t seem to belong to you? Like you're carrying pain that started long before you were born? What if the things you’re struggling with—sexual trauma, shame, fear of being seen—aren’t just yours... but inherited? In this  Language of Love Conversation, I sit down with Dr. Frank Anderson, a renowned trauma psychiatrist who’s helped countless people heal—but had to take his own journey first. Frank’s new book, To Be Loved: A Story of Truth, Trauma and Transformation, blends memoir with a trauma healing guide. But before he could write it, he had to live it. He grew up disconnected from his body, afraid to show who he really was, and deeply shaped by generations of silence and suppression. In this episode, we go deep into: How trauma hides in families for generations—and how to spot it in your own Why intellect and “having it all together” often hide emotional chaos How hiding his identity became a form of survival—and how he found the courage to be fully seen What it really means to feel inherited pain, not just analyze it Coming out, breaking patterns, and embracing truth—on every level The life-changing magic of combining IFS with somatic healing And how you can start breaking cycles, too This is more than a conversation. It’s an invitation—to feel, to face what’s been buried, and maybe, to be the one in your family who finally sets it all down. Learn more about Dr. Frank Anderson’s work, including his new book To Be Loved: A Story of Truth, Trauma and Transformation, on his website and socials and register for his events. Also make sure to check out the Grief Healing Collective for a community of like minded people, amazing resources on grief healing, and live healing sessions and events.  You can also check out my Good Grief Course. Have your own story about breaking the cycle? I’d love to hear it—email me at [e-mail] 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 love.

Dr. Frank Anderson, thank you so much for joining us on the Language of Love. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. So we're going to get into your newest book, To Be Loved. But it's part memoir, part guidebook on trauma. It's about resilience, self-discovery. But before we really get into your story, you've had two amazing mentors, which I think it was a really cool part of your background and your training. I mean, you're a psychiatrist, but what you've done is combine kind of trauma healing, somatic

healing, which we're going to get into, but we talk about a lot on this show, combine that with internal family systems. And what I thought was so cool about your story, because not everybody gets to do this, is that you've had two amazing mentors, Bessel van der Kolk, who is basically the father of really contextualized and for lack of a better word, founded, or was the father of somatic trauma therapy

and Richard Schwartz, who is basically the father of internal family systems. So that's kind of cool, first of all. I mean, I've had some amazing mentors in my life too, but to have both of them and to learn at their hips and to bring those two things together. I wanted to just start there and see if you could talk about that.

Yes, definitely. And I do feel fortunate to have been able to work with Bessel probably since 1992, honestly. You know, his trauma center was at my residency training program. And so I was fortunate enough to get to know him. And then I became the psychiatrist for his trauma center for many years

and have stayed on as a supervisor and a teacher. I'm in a long-term consultation group with him. So I've learned a ton about trauma through Bessel and my work with him. That's been the foundation, really. And I think I met Dick Schwartz in 2004. I was doing a workshop at Bessel's annual trauma conference, and so was Dick Schwartz. I went to his workshop, and I was like, wow. It was one of my Oprah aha moments of, oh my gosh, I've been working with parks forever,

But IFS had this unique way of doing it that I thought was really important and helpful. And so I dove in to everything IFS for a long time, level one, level two, level three. And then at some point became close with Vic Schwartz and he asked me to write the trauma curriculum for the IFS Institute. So I wrote the trauma curriculum. I combined IFS and my work with trauma and then wrote, I think that was my second book was transcending trauma, kind of combining IFS neuroscience and complex relational trauma. So those have been my kind of mainstays in a way of my work. And you feel really fortunate to have had both of them as mentors along the journey. Yeah. And so we've talked your approach and it kind of comes through in the book, which is really a memoir. But with this kind of context of informing and educating and inspiring us in our own healing, I think that's how I would describe it. I don't know. But that was the purpose. That was the purpose. So I'm glad it translated. Yeah, it was a great read. I mean, I read all the books of the people I interview, but normally like in bits and pieces. And it was a really beautiful. I read it in one day. I mean, it was really it was really beautiful. So thank you. Thank you. That means a lot. That means a lot. My purpose of writing this memoir was to show people the trauma healing is possible to be kind

of a trauma expert and surprise, have a trauma history. It's not shocking, right? But many people don't write about it. They don't write about their own trauma history. So I felt that was an important thing to do is to bridge that divide between the us and them, right? I'm the expert, you're the survivor. It's like, no, we're all survivors, you know, and I have to be an expert also. So it was a unique perspective to kind of be on both sides of the fence. And the thing, I did a ton of healing by writing the memoir. I had been in therapy forever. There was something different about writing all these moments in my life and putting them together. It was so incredibly healing for me. That was bonus. Yeah. Unexpected bonus.

Unexpected bonus was the healing that I did for writing the memoir. But I love how people are resonating and saying, oh my gosh, I can relate. They don't have the same exact stories, but the themes are the same. So it really is touching me deeply that people are resonating with my story. Yeah, I think that's so powerful. And I am a therapist who talks a lot about my own, I'm an open book too. And it happened by accident because I'm sure for you too, certainly in my training, you are not encouraged to talk about yourself. You have to be the quote unquote blank slate. When I sort of went into the public eye and was hosting television shows and doing all of that stuff, people started to learn and be interested in my personal life.

So I wasn't a blank slate anymore. And it was so liberating because then because I have I mean, I use myself in my work all the time. And I think there's so many benefits that both, like you said, people can relate to it, but also I feel, and you also said that they can see, okay, you're a teacher, a healer, a therapist, whoever you're going to be. And you've been through what I've been through. So like you can show it's possible. Right. But then I think it's also, there's this, which I'm so passionate about that there is no such thing as a quote unquote guru. And I feel like if, if healers and therapists can be humanized and like, I, you know, I get into the same argument with my husband that I'm talking to you about with yours,

that that can really go a long way in helping people become their own gurus, which is really what we are. Huge. You know, that is a big piece for me, honestly. It's the next phase of my work in bringing trauma healing to the world is bring people in charge of their own trauma treatment. Yeah. It's really important to me because, you know, I'm the expert, you're the client, is the power differential of trauma. Yes. Right.

So we perpetuate that if we have to stick in our guru mentality or the expert and you have the trauma history. So I really want to really break those barriers down and say, no, you're the expert of your own healing. And let me give you the tools you need to navigate your healing journey. So it's it is an important piece for me. And it is real that I already know that's what my next book is going to be. Yeah, I love that. I love that. And I'm right there behind you. I will be cheering you on. I'm doing that right now with our grief healing collective membership platform because I've gotten so passionate about helping people heal from loss. Right. And there was and to put all the resources together and to give people a supportive community where they can heal themselves is with support. I mean, obviously, with trauma, with loss, it's not easy. You know, you need support. You need help. You need resources. You need touchstones. You need guidance. But you don't need someone to take it over for you and to do it. You know, you don't need anyone else but yourself. And I think that's well. the other thing that's important in regards to that, Laura, is that people lose their connection

to their wisdom and their intuition as a result of trauma. So it's kind of taken away as a result of trauma. So to regain, I do know what's right. I've always known what's right, but I have been disconnected from it because of my trauma. So to regain connection to your wisdom is healing in of itself really important yeah you just gave me full-bodied chills we've got a as they say double click i had i was going to go in another direction but we just have to pause here for a moment because i feel like that is so important to highlight and it's something because a lot of what we talk about in this show and that i talk about in all of my work is that intuition that higher spiritual connection, that internal guidance system. And for all of us, and we're

going to get into this a little more, the big T and the little t trauma, the relational trauma, people think of trauma. A lot of my work with people who've experienced trauma is even in acknowledging that they've had trauma because they're like, I wasn't sexually raped. I wasn't beaten to a pulp and had to go to the hospital. There's a misconception and we're going to talk about that. But this idea of tapping in and tuning into your own guidance and really following that and the discernment, which is so important now more than ever, and like what feels like truth, what doesn't, you really do lose with all kinds of trauma. I mean, I am still at 50 something. It's only been over the past five to 10 years that I, and I still struggle with trusting myself

Because that's one of the wounds or the, I don't know, the shrapnel of trauma, big T, little T trauma. We're going to talk about what that is. That is one of the side effects that nobody talks about. What ends up happening in my experience with trauma and what I teach is that our self, our wisdom, the source within us, depending on whatever language you use, doesn't get traumatized. So there's a preservation of our source energy. And what that means then is there's a chasm that gets created between ourself and our parts. Ourself is protected and our parts are left carrying the bag.

The parts are what endure the trauma and the parts are what need to adapt to the trauma. So there is this internal disconnect that needs to be repaired in order to do healing. So we do repair that internal relationship between our wisdom and our parts so that we can be more connected and aligned, like self-awareness and self-connection is part of the healing process. So we do know what we feel. We do know what's right. We can kind of trust again. I'm really working on that right now. I really am.

It's like, I do know what's right. it's been hard to trust it because I disconnected from it for so long. And that is really a growing edge for me lately, like in all facets of my life. The other thing that happens with kids is kids can't trust their internal wisdom when they're in a dysfunctional family. They need to disconnect from themselves in order to maintain the attachment because they need it for survival. So that's another reason that we disconnect is that I need you in order to survive. So I'm going to disconnect from me and make you the dysfunctional or abusive parent, which has been a big part of my work. God. So instead of having a relationship with a higher power, spiritual connection, a connection to a higher self, we assign that to the abuser often because through a trauma bond and because that's who we have to make. We have to let their truth be the truth. You know, if I said the sky was blue, but my dad said it was yellow, I was like, OK, I must be wrong. The sky is yellow because I needed to do that to survive. Right.

So I think that's so important and I love what you're saying. And I also loved how, I was going to ask you about this later, but I'll talk about it now, how you really built that into your storytelling, your own. I so honor and celebrate that when clinicians or people who come from the sciences, and I'm making quote marks here, you know, let their quote unquote free flag fly around their spiritual beliefs, you know. and I'm really passionate about doing that because I feel like the more we normalize that every time I do, people come out of the workbook, they're like, you know, I'm the same way, but I don't talk about it because, you know, because it'll affect your credibility or whatever. But to me, it's like a core to our credibility to, to be tapped into that guidance system. So you give different examples with your son after he went through a really difficult situation that landed him in the hospital. And I mean, maybe you can speak to that for a minute. There were a couple of stories you shared in the book where you, even around writing this book, the day before you,

the publishers approached you about writing this book, you got a little message. I'll say it this way. As somebody who grew up relying on my intellect as my main protector, You know, being smart gave me value. Being smart would get me loved. Getting A's got me out of the house. So I really utilize intellect as my main salvation. Right. And what that did, what that did for me was disconnect me from my truth, my intuition and any outside help or resources. I was very cut off for a long time. And so the more I healed my trauma, the more I didn't only rely on my intellect and my ability to figure things out and understand them. And it really opened up this whole world for me of all the resources that are outside. right and i think everybody has access to this but we kind of shut it off and the more you pay attention and the more you listen in my experience the more that guidance is so helpful like yeah you know i and for the book for example like i had this weird dream like weird dream and i didn't know what they wanted to meet with me i thought they were going to give me the stats of transcending

trauma this is how much you're so transcending term i'm like great i thought it was like a follow-up for the book. And they're like, I had a dream that night, said, the moments that made me, the moments that made me. And they're like, we want you to write a memoir. I'm like, what? What? I'm like, it's me. And then I'm like, well, here's the moments that made me. It's a collection of the moments that made me. I got that information beforehand. It happened again when we were trying to have our first son. And being two men, it's really hard to make a baby, right? So you can't you get on your own, right? No matter how hard you try, it ain't going to happen. So I had to let go. And I was working with these surrogates, tracking their ovulation cycle, sending them

kits. And I needed to make this happen. And there was this moment I was like, I cannot do this. This is out of my control. And I just let go. I had this huge letting go. And surprise, surprise, surprise the next month she gets our surrogate gets pregnant and she just looked at me and she's like it's gonna happen i was like oh okay and it was that letting go yeah such an important lesson because i was a i needed to be in control in order to survive yeah i mean another side effect or having your control taken away you know yeah i get overly controlling so there there's been so many examples for me, and I keep getting reminded, trust and let go, trust and let go. It will show up for you in the ways that it needs to. It's nice, you know, as a doctor,

you're bludgeoned with, you're in charge, and if you don't, people will die. So to live my life now would be like, what a relief I don't have to know. What a relief I'm not in charge. I'll do everything I can, and I'm going to let go and let it unfold in the way that it's supposed to. That's been really a gift for me. Yeah, a gift and a blessing. And I'm going to chew on that a lot, I know, because that is something that's so up for me. And also this idea of, you know, which I've thought about and written a little about, but I think is so important that if you have a history of trauma, that there is a fracture between you and spirit, no matter who you are. So let's get into trauma. I mean, a lot, you share really beautifully the elements of your

trauma with your dad, who, I mean, this is my summary. Tell me if this is correct. We would say was definitely emotionally abusive and often physically abusive. Your mother was kind of the enabler. She sounded so similar to my mother, you know, beautiful, so beautiful, but so insecure, parentified me, you know, made me her friend and confidant and even protector for my father, although I needed protection from him too. It's that whole thing. But you said something really beautiful. I wrote it down. Let me see. Because I think this, I want you to talk about the trauma and this idea of like the different kinds of trauma, because, you know, especially around people who may not think that they have trauma or may not honor it.

But also you write, it boiled down to the fact that families are incredibly confusing. Ours had moments of greatness, even if it didn't always seem that way on the inside. It was also full of heartbreak and rage, tension and misunderstandings. And there was a lot of that that you touched on so beautifully in your story of all of the beautiful moments that none of our abusers, I mean, unless they are psychosociopathic criminals are all evil, you know, and there are really beautiful parts of them and beautiful, which makes it all the more confusing. A hundred percent. Yeah.

It's so, it was so confusing and, you know, kids don't have the capacity to hold that complexity. Yeah. That's what, you know, that's one of the things that's really difficult. And we also encode negative memory more potently than we encode positive memory. So we hold the negative more intensely, but we had some amazing times. We had so much fun in our family. We had a monkey growing up.

How many people have a monkey growing up? As a kid, that was the coolest thing ever. So we had these amazing, we had great vacations together as a family. We were out of the stress of home and it was so wonderful. I had a very ethnically beautiful upbringing with my cousins. So there was a lot of wonderful things. And, and, and, and, it was horrific and terrifying. And, you know, what happened behind closed doors was always so scary and nobody was allowed

to know. So that was so hard to hold that complexity. As a kid, I didn't really understand it. And what I learned is, again, disconnected from myself in order to survive the confusion of this life that I was living. Like, wait a minute, aren't they great? Everybody wants to be like us. Like, you know, wait a minute, this is the most horrific thing.

I feel like I'm going to die, right? It was really striking to me. I sent the book to my cousins before it got published. Like, hey, why don't you all just see, just so you know, what I'm going to be, you know, putting out in the world. And many of them were like, I had no idea. Like, we did not know. Oh, Frankie, if I only knew this was happening.

My one cousin was like, all I wanted to do was be your family. You guys look like you were always having so much fun. And in one hand we were, you know, and then until you weren't until we weren't. So I think that complexity, it was important for me. It was important for me. Two things. One is nothing's all good. Nothing's all bad.

Our world needs to learn that right now. Yeah. Amen. Right. And then the other thing is this is, and this piece is important for me that I don't think the world's ready for yet. everyone who's been victimized internalized perpetrator energy. If you are victimized, you also possess perpetrator energy. And that's another thing we are splitting in society. I'm

good, you're bad. I'm right, you're wrong. And the reality is we're all both. And this was so painful for me when I was the victim of my dad's rage. And then I became a perpetrator to my children in moments. And that was such a full circle moment that was so painful for me. How could I have done what was done to me? And it wasn't until acknowledging that Thou's perpetrator energy in me was a big piece of my ability to heal. My victimhood was also acknowledging my perpetration. And that's hard for people to do, but it's so important if we're really going to heal the world. Yeah. And I think that's so important. And you write about how your first instinct when you realized this was to just withdraw, to keep yourself away from your

kids and to hand it over to your husband because you were like, bad, I'm bad. I'm going to harm them. They're going to be better off without. Yeah. Yeah. And then you realize, no, it does not serve them to pull myself all the way out. And you did something different. Yeah. I've had to recognize that too. I remember a conversation. I mean, this is embarrassing, but I'm going to share it for others. This was probably when our eldest was, or no, our second one, because my eldest is not the biological child of my husband, although he raised him from the age of seven or eight. But, you know, we already had our patterns and my husband didn't really dive in deeply to interrupting. He didn't feel as entitled to interrupt those patterns as he did with the

other two that we had together. So it was with our second child. You know, he wasn't doing well in school. He was had some dyslexia and ADHD and it hadn't been diagnosed yet. We were trying to figure it out. But I was basically my M.O. was to be like a homework Nazi. You know, I was. Yes. And and my husband would confront me on it. And I remember we once had this conversation and I was like, look, I was pressured and pushed and shamed when I didn't do my work. And I turned out fine look i have a phd and two masters and i'm really successful like and he looked at me like i had three heads he's like do you hear yourself right now and would you really say you're okay yeah you've accomplished these things but at what cost like look at your anxiety levels look at your

is that what you want to do to our kids and i was like oh shit i can't believe that just came out of my mouth and i was ready and did with my eldest paying the shit out of them to get that when they you know there was this you're a slack ass i mean i wouldn't literally say that but that was the energy you got it so because that's what was done to me you got it yeah until i questioned it i i just assumed yeah it works yes it works well and the other thing is we when you're the recipient of it you know how effective it is yeah so then you use it when you're feeling in desperate times Yeah. And you also don't know anything else. Like that's what you know. Exactly. That's right. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think that's so important and such a beautiful part of your story. Most of us have no idea how to move through loss. There's no roadmap to follow when you're trying to navigate grief. And I realized this when I lost my son three years ago. As a therapist who understood grief, a whole new level of pain opened up to me when I lost my 16-year-old son. And since then, I have been building resources that have allowed me to navigate through loss, not only in a healthy way, but in a way that has transformed me for the better. We can move through the most terrible loss with grace. And that's why I have created the course, good grief healing from loss with love you can find it on my website drlauraberman.com

right there on the home page as well as free resources letting you know how to support others who are going through loss none of us has to do this alone well let's talk about sort of the range or the continuum of trauma and in particular relational trauma, because I don't think people understand the nuance. You know, like I said, they think of like it has to be this big, horrific thing. Yeah, it's one of the reasons I'm not a big fan, interestingly enough, of this like big T, little T trauma thing. And the reason I don't like it is because people downplay relational trauma. They're like, oh, my parent yelled at me. I didn't get beaten. I wasn't in a war. So therefore, it's not as significant, right?

Oh, I just got, you know, I was embarrassed because I wasn't in a large body, right? That's different than I didn't have any bruises. I never had broken bones. And I say there are many different types of trauma. There's acute trauma. There's a single incident, right? I was just, I mean, I lived, had a house in LA and I was just in the LA fires. Like that's a trauma. And the chief Then there is chronic trauma. When you have a couple of traumas, it's hard to recover from them. And so you develop chronic PTSD symptoms when you have a hard time recovering from one, two, three events, which is different than complex PTSD or what we call relational trauma.

And the reason this is so impactful is because it happens thousands of times. Yeah. Okay. It's like every time your father's drunk, you lose a safe parent. Every time your mother yells, you become frightened and you're all alone. So there's this, it doesn't happen once or twice or 10 times. It happens hundreds of times. And it's really hard to recover from relational trauma. It's really, you know, it has a whole different set of symptoms. And one of the things I want to bring awareness to people is relational trauma results in certain types of behaviors. So people say, I don't have a trauma history, but they're drinking, they're overworking, they're yelling

at their kids, they're doing whatever they're doing, and they're not seeing that these behaviors are adaptation to their unresolved childhood trauma. And I really want to bring awareness to people around that level of, oh, you mean my having to get an A or my obsessing about everything is related to my trauma? That'd be right. So I really want to bring awareness, you know, and then there's family legacy trauma, like the trauma we get from the family we grew up in and the ethnic things that are passed down, the cultural trauma, the institutional trauma, whatever organizations or institutions

you're in, right? And then global trauma. There's so many different types of trauma, right? They're not all treated equally. And I think the one that goes under the radar, which is getting more and more attention, is the complex or relational trauma. So is cultural and systemic trauma. Like, hey, there's something here if you're in a marginalized group, whether it's neurodivergent or a person of color or gender orientation. There is a lot of things that happen in our world as a result of being part of these marginalized groups. So I'm really here to educate as much as I can and to have people be like, oh,

oh, I didn't. I never thought about that before. I never thought of that. Yeah. And so, you know, since there's so many directions we can go, but let's dig a little deeper into the relational trauma complex btsd you talked a little bit about this idea you know it's it's from our childhood usually our family of origin it was insidious it doesn't have to be like a huge event or physically hitting i mean i went through this he's open about it he's i'm he's not a client of mine he's a friend of mine but nick cannon and i have talked about this publicly many times where I had to torture him and for not literally, but like, it took me so long to convince him that he had trauma because in his mind, I was never beaten.

You know, my parents were never nice to me, but yeah, I remember endless times that I sat crying on the curb because my dad who was supposed to come visit me never showed up and all the times, yeah, there were those times I was just left with my grandmother and my mom just disappeared for a while, you know, so, but that's not trauma, you know? And so I think that's such a good example of relational trauma. But for my peeps here, like, what are some of the ways I want to get into some of the healing aspects, you know, or things to explore that help? Because, you know, you talk about how releasing trauma and loving the person that you truly are which is basically healing right is really finding that source of self-love are

really the path and i 100 like will put that red hundred thing around this is the path to receiving authentic love from others so if someone's listening they're like oh wait a second you know maybe i do have some of this going on what would you say is the place to start well so the place to start is the awareness honestly that you know people are aware that trauma exists in the world like okay out there out yeah there trauma exists but bringing like and i use this word now instead of trauma because it's a little bit easier for people to relate to have you had an overwhelming life experience oh you know who hasn't had some form of overwhelming life experience so have people think about it that way. And I also like, where are you struggling in relationships?

Where are you feeling dissatisfied with in your life? Are your relationships with your kids the way you want them to be? What are the quality of your relationships? And that's where people get an inroad and an awareness because they're replicating their patterns of their relational history or they're trying the absolute opposite or they're going to do the 180 degree right or they're going to replicate it so it's always like how do you feel like what is your friend group like what is your intimate relationships like how are your relationship with your kids your co-workers because it is in the relational realm that people are struggling the most and they don't understand again that the behaviors that they're doing to try to fix it

actually perpetuate it yeah and are part of the old cope dysfunctional coping skills you yeah yeah so so it's having that awareness that's important the second thing is this shift from external solution to internal solution that's hard for people we are so externally focused right and it's like okay can i go inside and the reason we're so externally focused is because all the pain is inside, right? And so moving toward the pain, going inside is really challenging for people. I want to have like this regular test.

Sit with yourself in silence for five minutes a day. Don't do anything. Then maybe increase it to 10 minutes or 15 minutes. Like, can you be with yourself or journal? Can you write for 10 minutes a day or start that internal curiosity? I don't want people to relive their experience. I want people to be with their experience. There's enough science that shows us reliving reinforces the trauma neural networks. Being with, with love and compassion is part of the antidote, right? And so when you start learning to love my, be compassionate about the part of me that

wants to kill myself, be compassionate about the part of me that drinks a fifth of vodka every night or that yells at my kid. Yes. Be compassionate towards these protective behaviors and learn about their intention is super important. The other thing I'll say, once you start doing that, there is this, and there's three steps to healing i would say and a lot of people don't focus on healing as much as you know how do i manage this or how do i get a bit how do i get beyond it you know the five things to get over

anxiety i'm like no good sorry band-aid band-aid exactly you know it's like you have to witness the part that holds the pain the part that holds the pain has to share its experience Now, that can happen internally or it can happen relationally. And it's not just the story. It's the thoughts, the feelings, and the physical sensations. So there needs to be a sharing of, this is what I went through. This is what it was like for me, from the part that holds the overwhelming experience. Second is there needs to be a corrective experience.

you need to give it what it needed and wanted and never got your partner you're somebody else it can happen relationally you have a corrective experience like i am love i am seen you know it's not making up for your childhood it's having a corrective experience after you've shared what you've been through so the part then gets what it needed and wanted oftentimes we have that happen internally i now as an adult can love little frankie and the way that he wasn't loved okay i can give him that corrective experience now and then release as possible once the part shares its experience and has a corrective experience it says i don't have to hold this anymore so that's where the release can occur. The flow of the feelings, the thoughts, the physical beliefs,

the blaming yourself, the shame, all the pain that you're carrying can be released after those components. And I really want people to know that there's a way to heal. Yeah. You know, there is a way to heal. And you said, my next book is going to be that one. I just am clear about it. Yeah, I love this. And you know, the words you're using, I mean, I'm clear because I'm wearing my therapist hat and listening to you. But what you're talking about is the internal family systems. They are parts of you. It's not the true you. They're traumatized parts of you

that are the ones that are acting out, numbing out, creating these dysfunctional relationships and repeating these trauma bonds. And when we can be with those parts, help give them what they needed at the time, either internally or through relationship, and when we can build in the somatic release. So the key about somatic release is not about just retelling what happened again and again. It's about going into the physical embodiment of those traumatized parts and allowing them to feel and release from the body what was held there. I bet that's a good summary. A hundred percent. Yes. One. Yeah. I love that so much. And that's really I mean, I love this also because this is what I just intuitively do and have done with myself in my own healing journey and with the people that I help. And even just like I've started this new practice with my husband, who's been one of my greatest and most important relational healers. I finally decided to out to him something that I'd been kind of pushing aside and like,

you're so silly, whatever. But I realized I had this traumatized part from my childhood where love was so conditional. And one of the ways that I was controlled was through the threat of withdrawing love, which was death back then. I mean, literally, they told me and my dad told me once when I challenged him, well, what would you do if I just said no? He's like, well, I'll just leave you on the side of the road at this gas station. And I really believed him, but there's so many layers to that. But I've started this practice because I noticed I would get this thought come into my head. He doesn't really love you. And I would just talk myself out of it and like, where is this coming from? Okay. Or I try to analyze it. And I finally was like, hey,

would you help me with something? I've never told you this, but I sometimes have this thought that you don't love me. And he's like, what? What are you talking about? Of course. I was like, I know, I know you love me, but it's this younger part of me that doesn't trust that I'm lovable and doesn't trust love. And you're not even doing anything to make me think that. So would it be okay if I just out it when I'm having the thought and you come and give me a hug and just reassure me? And it's been amazing. So out of the blue, I'll be like, I'm having the thought you don't love me. And he's like, oh, honey, he gets up and he comes over and gives me a hug and tells me he And it's really not only healing, but it's interesting because now that it's kind of

more externalized, I'm noticing, A, how often I have that. Yes. Yes. And B, when it comes up, you know, like what's been happening that I suddenly, you know, because it's usually that I'm feeling inadequate about something or worried about something or anxious about something. And so then that's where I get. So it's just a silly, not silly, but a small example of a way to use relationships if it's a healthy, supportive relationship with someone who can give you that.

Well, you mentioned a couple of things, Laura, that are important. I mean, one is you're having these, first of all, you're naming the feeling, which is great, and you're having a corrective experience, and you're curious about, oh, I wonder why now and what this is about, because we can't just have a corrective experience without kind of looking at the origin. So you're doing this mini little version of it all, you know, and one of the things I'm working on, as I said, bringing trauma healing to the world is I want to incorporate the best of psychotherapy, the best of neuroscience, because neuroscience can help us inform what we

do, and the best of coaching. And it's kind of visit the past, listen to the experience, release what you're carrying, and do something different in the future, right? We need to have the past, present, and future in order to change, because oftentimes psychotherapy focuses on the past and they don't have these, what are you going to do differently now? Yeah. Okay. So we've got to bring it into actionable things in the here and now so that we can change those patterns.

But you can't just change the patterns without looking at the origin and releasing what you're carrying. So for me, I'm calling it kind of fusion PNC, the fusion of psychotherapy, neuroscience, and coaching. So it includes all of it, right? It includes all of that. And what you're doing is you're kind of doing a mini version of that. Yeah, that's what I do. I just wouldn't have articulated it that way. But that's how I treat people. And that's what I do for myself. And I get really upset when I see on all the TikToker

coaches and even a lot of trauma healers saying psychotherapy is the worst thing you can do for trauma. I'm a psychotherapist, but I am not if traditional psychotherapy perhaps is just about talking about what happened and staying looping there. Yes, that is not helpful. And I think there is still many psychotherapists that do that. But most of the psychotherapists that I meet who work with trauma, they're building in somatics, they're building in future, they're building in, you know, release techniques and inner child work and the parts work and all of that so that's right and then there are all these coaches and the psychotherapists are saying you can't fix any you know you can't fix anything if you're not willing to look at the origin though it's like

there's been this division in the field so i don't this needs to be there exactly i'm like and everything and everything like put it together like we don't need gurus who think they know everything. And there's a way to put this stuff together because what works, works. And I don't care what it's called, right? And that's why people migrate toward these similar things because they actually work, right? And bringing it to people so that they can kind of do some of this healing on their own feels really important to me because more and more people have trauma and we have less and less resources available for it. Yes.

And I think, I mean, I think we've always had so much trauma, but it's only been in the past 10 years that we're actually openly understanding and acknowledging the degree to which the trauma we've had. Well, and everybody that's been through the pandemic, which is everybody, can no longer say, I don't have trauma. Yeah. Every single one of them. We've all been through a global trauma, and it did bring a different level of awareness.

Yeah. But I kept saying that. And not only that, I kept saying and I predicted it and I didn't take a rock of science to predict it, but it's turned out to be true that when we were forced, when we could no longer go out and stay on our hamster wheel and distract ourselves and use those all those different things that we use to numb ourselves, we were forced to go in. And then all kinds of shit surfaced that had nothing to do with COVID, but just the fact that we were stuck inside with ourselves. So I think that was a beautiful, I think about that a lot on the metaphysical level in terms of a divine plan. I just feel like as horrible as it was, and I'm not minimizing the trauma of COVID, it was a really beautiful catalyst of awakening. and it also is a collective grief as well that we're all you know people lost jobs relationships loved ones so there's all of that there too there's so many layers I have so many other things I mean I wanted to talk about your coming out journey and so many other things but I guess

one thought is coming to me now as I you know because a lot of what we talk about here is not only around love relationships but around parent-child relationships and you talk a lot about your relationship with your dad and your relationship with your own children. And I talk a lot about that kind of stuff here too. But one of the things that's come up recently with my now 28-year-old, which I'm so grateful for, because he has a real history of medical trauma. He was a leukemia survivor. Then he was abandoned by his biological father. Then he got adopted by my husband, who is a wonderful man. But back then, this was 20 years ago, we were not the healthy individuals, I think, that we are today, right? So I was severely, I'm a recovering

codependent for maybe 10 years now, maybe 15. But I was active codependent back then. My husband was dealing with his own stuff and was a first time dad of these young kids. There's just a lot of my and my oldest started really acting out so we like all parents did the best we could and he was acting out so badly that as a result we took the advice of these clinicians who were basically advising us to isolate him from the family and i'm simplifying but that's essentially what happened so he's gone through the trauma and then the trauma of how the trauma was handled And we've dealt with that. He's been suicidal off and on.

He's finally at a place, I hope, he seems to be, where he's really healing. And a lot of that has been doing what we're talking about. The somatic piece, the parts work. And he just came home for Christmas. And I'm using myself as an example, not just to talk about myself, but because parents reach out to me about this kind of thing all the time. He came home for a Christmas vacation, and he was really struggling. And he kept bringing up every single day, multiple things. Remember when you blah, blah, blah. Remember when he was having all of these flashbacks of, and in many ways, he's finally starting to remember a lot of the things that he couldn't even remember until recently as he's doing this work, which also makes sense.

And my commitment as his parent is to do what was never done to me, to allow him to bring these things to me, to hold them, to apologize to him, not to gaslight him, not to, oh, boy, did I want to say, could we just talk about some of the things I did right? you know like I wanted to say that so badly because I was being bombarded but at the end of the trip I forget what he said he said this has been really hard but and this is what just melted my heart he said I am learning not to hate myself like to move beyond self-loathing and the way that I have to do that is by really holding compassion for myself so in the past I would have a memory of something that happened and then I'd go immediately to self-blame and whatever else. Now I'm having memories of what happened. And he's essentially doing this parts work. I'm going back and I'm nurturing and I'm honoring. So I guess my question is for me and

for all the other parents who's, you know, we fucked. I always told them for the time they were little, despite all my best efforts, I know I'm messing you up. You know, I'm just know I'm doing the best I can. Right. But we all mess our kids up despite our best efforts because of our own wounds, right? And that's part of the journey. So what would you say, what advice can you give to parents, especially of adult children and even with younger children who are noticing some of these patterns and feeling the shame and the guilt or that, you know, and I have my middle son who died and I have so much self-blame, like what could I, should I, would I have done, right? So what do you say to parents who may be in retrospect or in the trenches who are feeling like despite their best efforts, they visited some relational trauma on their children?

I mean, first of all, sorry that you've been through all that you've been through. I can just feel it and hear it as you're talking about it. So I just kind of want to name that. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. You're welcome. And there is a way that I think transgenerational trauma is what we're here to learn and evolve from. This program I'm calling Cycle Breakers. Can we break the cycle? And when you as a parent lose it, we tend to normalize losing it. Yeah. Oh, everybody does it. Oh, everybody does it. And I think losing it is part of the human experience. But I think those are really what we call our trailheads to work on our history. You know, when it's intense, it's yours. And people have this tendency to say the kid is this, the kid is that. I think there's way too many books about children and not enough books about parents.

And really, I think we need to take responsibility. And I put myself in that category as someone who perpetuated, you know, I dedicated my book to my father and my kids, my greatest teachers. And it's true. And I took advantage of what am I doing here to perpetuate this problem? What am I doing to create problems in my kids? And I'll tell you, my reactivity and my husband's reactivity was really not good for our children. And there are studies that show people with trauma histories that one of the biggest complaints of children are parents' trauma histories getting in the way of parenting.

Okay? And so what I would say is do your work, do your work, do your work. Repair is important. We know that if parents don't take responsibility, kids will 100% of the time. We know that. So I am so sorry. I shouldn't have done this. I have to work on this. This is my responsibility. I think about getting out of the way so that your kids could be all of who they are. Getting out of the way. If you can be non-reactive and work on your history, you have the capacity to hold space for this kid so that they can be who they are.

My oldest son, 20 years old now, and I really take responsibility for this, is my husband and I both grew up with abusive, angry fathers. We could not tolerate anger in our children. We couldn't. We were too afraid of it and we were too reactive to it. It's taken me a long time to, first of all, apologize to him for my inability to allow him to be angry and then to hold space to teach him how to move through his anger. Because how is he going to learn how to move through his anger when I couldn't move through mine. So better late than never, honestly. I wish it would have happened earlier, but I really feel so good about the ways I've shortened the course of transgenerational trauma. And kids are resilient, especially when we take

ownership. One of the biggest transitions from an adult-child relationship to an adult-adult child relationship is for parents to take responsibility for what their kids say happened like there's so many things my kids my oldest is like you were this and you were this and you were this and some of them are shocking to me because i didn't even think about this behavior of mine having that kind of impact on him yeah you know my husband when my son would send me these texts He was at the gym and he'd be like, and you were this and you were this. And I'm like, you're right. I'm sorry.

And my husband's like, you're giving him too much power. I'm like, no, he's right. Because this is the experience he's holding. And I'm not going to tell him his experience is wrong. I apologize. I'm sorry. I did the best I could. And I really hear that this was not good for you.

And I want you to know I'm so sorry. And it's been so disarming for him. I bet. I get those texts, too. I'm going to try that. I mean, I do say I'm really sorry. But it's like you're right. Sometimes I'm like, what happened?

Exactly. I don't say that to him, but I really want to. It is what happened in their experience and perception. Right? And so I'm like, you are right. I am so sorry. This is what you're carrying. I am going to acknowledge that.

And, you know, he's been my kids are very appreciative. if you grew up in a critical family it's hard for you to take responsibility for so when you once you heal that dynamic i love saying i'm like what a relief to be wrong now i'm so happy to be i'm sorry i did it you're right like there's a right there's a freedom and not having to be right or needing to get it perfectly otherwise you're going to get beaten or young so there's a lot of acknowledgement and that's what helps in my view parents transitioning with their children to an adult child relationship is that acknowledgement of what you did wrong and the ability to take responsibility for it yeah even if you secretly

think that maybe you didn't because that's their experience 100 yeah i had a moment of healing like that with my dad at the end of his life when he was still compass mentis he I forget how it came up but I said you know dad you always say that I became a sex and love therapist you know because of your influence and you think it's because you were this surrealist and open sexually and that's all true but that's not really the reason I became a therapist and I went on to say what I'd always been too scared to say in a very calm way. But I was like, you know, these are the things that happened. This is what you did. And I led me to make all of these dysfunctional decisions and love. And but it also drove me to try to understand your constant infidelity and like,

how could sex be so important that you would abandon your family for it? And it led me to this career that has allowed me to be on a world stage and help thousands and thousands and thousands of people. And it led, even though it was to this horrible, abusive relationship, it led to me having Ethan, my eldest. And I can see now that not only do I forgive you for everything you put me through, but I thank you because I wouldn't be who I am today. You've got to know without what happened. And I will say for the first time in his entire life, with me, at least, he said, I'm sorry. I'd never heard of Apologize for Anything. And that was a huge moment of healing. And that was on his deathbed. So it's never too late, folks.

You got it. 100%. That's right. Never too late. And you had a similar experience you talked about with your dad. Yeah. So, so beautiful. Well, the book, there's several books, but the most recent book that you can check out by Frank Anderson is To Be Loved, A Story of Truth, Hope, and Healing. Such a beautiful book. I'm excited for the next one and for you, all the work that you're doing. I'm so appreciate who you are in the world and the work you do and the service you're being to the world. So thank you for that. Thank you. And thank you for having me. And thank you for

what you're doing because it takes a village and we're all doing our part to help move this needle forward in a way which is super important. So thank you. I know.