Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - You Built the Life… But You Can’t Outrun Your Past

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

You can do everything “right.” Build the career. Earn the recognition. Create a life that looks successful from the outside. And still feel like something inside never quite caught up. Like one version of you built the life…and another version is still waiting to be seen. In this episode, I sit down with Daria Burke, USA Today bestselling author of Of My Own Making and a business leader featured in Forbes, Vogue, and Women’s Wear Daily. On paper, she built an extraordinary life.But beneath it, she was carrying a childhood shaped by poverty, addiction, and loss…until a single moment cracked open everything she had spent decades holding together. We explore: Why success often amplifies unresolved emotional patterns instead of fixing them The hidden reason high performers feel disconnected even at the peak of achievement Why insight alone does not create real change and what actually does How trauma lives in the body long after the mind believes it has moved on The cost of becoming “the one who made it out” and why it rarely feels like freedom What it really takes to shift your relationship with your past without being overwhelmed by it How healing begins in small, grounded steps when everything feels shut down If you have ever thought, “I should be over this by now”…but something in you still feels stuck… this conversation will meet you there. Because healing is not about rewriting your past. It is about changing how it lives inside you now. And that changes everything. If this conversation resonates, Daria’s book Of My Own Making goes deeper into her story and the path she took to rebuild her relationship with her past. And if you want to apply these ideas in relationships, explore Quantum Love for practical tools to support that work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, and for more than 30 years, I've been helping people learn to love and be loved better across every kind of relationship. My intention on Language of Love Conversations is simple, to help you learn to love and be loved better, deepening your relationships, expanding your capacity for connection, and living with more presence, honesty, and love. Let's get fluent in the language of love together. Some people survive horrific things in childhood by disappearing inside themselves. Others survive by overcoming it, becoming exceptional.

Today's guest did both. From the outside, Daria Burke's life read like a success story. And it is a success story. She's an award-winning business leader, board director, advisor, recognized by Forbes, Vogue, and Women's Wear Daily. But her memoir, Of My Own Making, tells a deeper truth about growing up inside poverty, addiction, and fear, and the survival adaptations that shaped who she became. It is a powerful book that has actually become a USA Today bestseller. In this Language of Love conversation, we are talking about childhood trauma, emotional detachment and the cost of that, grief for the life you never had and the moments when you start to realize that success, getting to that pinnacle place you think you will arrive and everything will be okay, does not protect you from what still needs to be felt.

and healed. We're exploring how trauma lives in the nervous system, how it shows up in your life, and what healing looks like when you finally tell the truth. I'm so excited to share this Language of Love conversation with Daria Burke with you. Daria Burke, thank you so much for joining us on the Language of Love. Thank you for having me. I'm honestly thrilled to be here. I'm really excited to talk to you about this, as I am often discussing in my own stories and in so many of the stories of people that we interview and people who have the Language of Love sessions, trauma, in all of its beautiful forms, is a big topic of discussion and something that I feel, to differing degrees, affects everybody.

And that's really an underpinning of this beautiful memoir and this inspirational story that you are sharing about the trauma that you experienced. And so I'm really excited to get into not only your story of how you moved beyond what for many would have taken them down, but also how you healed and what we can learn, the rest of us, from your story, which I know is a big part of why you write this book. So we're going to get into all of that. But I want to start because when I was reading the book, and it's really beautiful storytelling, you really write beautifully. And there was this pivotal moment that you describe about 15 years before you actually wrote this book that was triggered because something made you seek out or look at a photograph of the accident that killed your grandmother. there. And all this, you describe how all this grief of trauma that you didn't even know was tamped down, bottled up, just kind of came to the surface. And it seems to me, and you tell me if I'm wrong, that that was a pivotal moment where it was like a catalyst for what ultimately began a really beautiful healing journey. It was. And I wish it were 15 years ago. It was recent. Yeah, it was in 2017, actually. Oh, okay. Now, I will say, though, I had been in therapy for a decade

before that event. But yeah, you know, my grandmother died in a very tragic car accident when I was seven years old. And for many years, I had told myself that was the catalyst for my mother's drug addiction, for the neglect that my sister and I experienced as a result of my mother's just inability to be present. I mean, she was deeply debilitated by her own grief and depression and then drug use. And I thought that by then, I was 37 at the time, I thought that I had sort of worked through the mechanics of that storyline and of that experience and of all the grief and all the things I had sort of had to let go of, right? The parents that I didn't have and the relationships that, the ways in which their drug abuse really halted a coalescence of bonding and

our ability to be family and to have loving relationships. The loss of my grandmother, who was very much like a parental figure. I thought I had sort of compartmentalized and packaged it all up and talked it all out in therapy. And I had a decade of reps of doing that, hard reps. And I did. I found a photograph one night. Something just sort of inspired me to look for, at the time I was looking for grandma's obituary. And I thought, well, maybe it's online. A lot of newspapers archive things. And so to imagine going back to 1987 felt difficult, but maybe I'd find it. And I didn't. But what I did find in that research was the actual article that covered her, the accident, her death.

And I had known that story forwards and backwards. I could recite it to you exactly the way, frankly, the way I tell it in the book. And I had never seen the photograph. And in the article was a picture of the wreckage of her car that had been, And that it stalled on the center lane of the freeway and was hit from behind by a driver going God knows how fast. Fast enough for the rear of her car to essentially be compressed into the front half and for her to be thrown out of the driver's seat and through the front windshield. and in that I just broke open is really the best way to describe what it felt like seeing that and being taken back 30 years to when it had actually happened it was like I was living it all over

again and so I opened the book with that story because it was catalytic for me both in that time in my childhood, but also in my healing journey. And it really was the thing that made me so curious about how trauma gets embedded in our bodies and in our brains and in our beliefs. And what I learned and what I write about really is that mix of, I think, the science and the soul work that could come together to inform a more holistic healing process. I still very much believe in talk therapy. But I really, in that time frame, the four years that I really did a lot of the research and the work was to understand what embodied healing actually could look like. Yeah, beautiful. And there's so much I want to unpack of what you just said, and we're going

to get into some of what you learned. And I 100% agree with you. I mean, as I always joke, I'm a talking doctor because that's what my kids used to call me when they were little. And they, you know, that was the best way they could understand a therapist. She's a talking doctor when people would ask what their mom did, not like a medical doctor. But I'm really, when it comes to trauma and including grief, which obviously I address a lot because grief is a kind of trauma, it definitely has to include that somatic, that body piece. And what I love about, there's so many things that is so important about this story you just told. First of all, As everybody heard in the introduction, here you are, this award-winning business leader.

People who are watching this on video will be able to see that you are drop-dead, gorgeous, stylish, sitting in front of your beautiful backdrop. For all intents and purposes, you are living the dream in a beautiful home, making tons of money, sought-after expert, fashion advisor. Have your shit together, and you do, and you did. and there was this whole history that you were working through it sounds like in talk therapy and making some progress with obviously of healing some of these early childhood traumas that you had just kind of kept in the dark and it sounds like until really writing this book was not for public consumption it was not something that most people knew about your history and even then doing all of this work, this moment, this catalyst that we're talking about that came in the form of a photograph

of the wreckage that killed and took this maternal figure that was really one of your only safe objects as a child, really took your healing to a whole new level. And I just think that's terrible beautiful, but also so important to recognize that we can, because it feels to me that, and I want to talk a little bit about your history, but it feels to me that sharing that history, you tell me, is not only freeing and clearing, right? But it sets you free and it also opens up a new level of healing. I mean, I'm someone who really believes in authenticity. That doesn't mean we have to air our dirty laundry everywhere. There's a time and a place for that. But that which you can't be with often runs your life. And so I was really heartened and inspired

by the honesty with which you describe how difficult and you were in a really traumatic environment growing up. I mean, lots of people grow up around addiction. Lots of people grow up with poverty. I mean, you you were getting it from all sides. Yeah. I mean, I'm wondering if you can share a little bit more about that. And also you were talking about the grief. And I know you describe this in the book, this idea that part of the evolution of your healing, especially after, as you kind of stepped into this deeper level, was realizing that the stuff with your mom started way before your grandmother died. It wasn't just, it was certainly exacerbated, made worse by grief, but also that your mother's grief and all of the trauma that you were living

through just trying to survive day to day made it impossible for you as a little girl to grieve. This loss of this amazing, powerful maternal figure who was your source of safety, you never got a chance to grieve yeah yeah oh my gosh you said so much I do think too it was important to draw or to illustrate kind of the gap between where I had grown up and where I was in my life and partially because that's how it happens I think it's so easy for us to think that once you've left an environment or you've attained a certain level of success or you have a certain level of material wealth, all of which matter. I want to be really clear that feeling safe and having security and stability matters deeply in our ability to heal. And I think it can also be

really easy to outsource our healing to those qualities. And so once you've achieved that, you think, oh, okay, well, I've done the hard work now. You should be happy. I'm all done. Yeah, I got out of Detroit and I went to university and then a top business school and I've kind of climbed the ranks at these companies and I have this really cool and enviable position in work and in life and I'm living in New York City and, you know, just sort of all the things. And at the time I was house hunting for my little house in the Hamptons. And then you get smacked in the head with this thing. And it becomes, I think, really important for us to be willing to sort of look in those rooms. And so I just realized I had all of these rooms with locked doors or the rooms themselves

were locked and I just wouldn't let myself access it. So I think, and for good reason, you know, to your question about my upbringing, as I mentioned, I grew up in Detroit in the 80s and 90s. I was born just on the heels of or around the time of the automotive industry collapse. And so jobs were becoming increasingly scarce. The crack epidemic had begun to ravage the city just like it had, you know, in Newark and New York City. I mean, we saw this in a lot of major metros. Detroit was no exception. And I think that combination of scarcity in terms of opportunity and the relief, I'm going to say air quote, relief of drugs that a lot of people could find in substance abuse, including my parents. You know, I was born in that, amidst that. So I had that sort of cultural context in terms of the city. And obviously not all parts of the city were ravaged in this way, but certainly it was deeply felt. And you could argue that 45 years later, you can still see and feel the remnants of that. the blast radius of that is certainly multi-generational and it lived in my house

my parents were not together they had separated when i was about two years old and so they were only really actively married i suppose for like three years and my mom was a young mom and had a lot of her own stuff her father had died by suicide she i think was really sort of lost in that. And she was a very, had a very promising future. She graduated high school at 15. And I think being sort of stuck in all of that, and I think rightfully, my grandmother didn't feel like she was ready to go away and to be on her own. And she probably had been already showing signs of getting into trouble and, you know, running with the wrong crowd and getting into drugs and things like that. And so it was a part of her life for all of my life. And it

predates me. So I was born into that. And her addiction, as I mentioned earlier, was so debilitating. She didn't work. She collected welfare. And so that, for the most part, kept us somewhat fed. But everything came second to the drugs. Yeah, of course. We would go without food. We would go without running water. Our lights would get turned off and we wouldn't have electricity. We almost never had a working telephone. The gas would get turned off. And if we had electricity, we'd try to heat the house with electric heaters and kerosene heaters. I mean, it was really, really difficult. And losing my grandmother just removed that buffer and, you know, the safeguarding around what had already, I think, been such a terrible problem

an addiction for my mom. But I think when grandma died, it just became unbearable for her to manage. And also, you know, we were no longer protected from it. And so my sister and I, we had a front row seat to her crack addiction up until into my 20s. Yeah. I have a lot of addiction in my family and I did not suffer the trauma that you did by any stretch of the imagination. But I just have this one memory at age maybe four where my parents, 70s, stupid, like would leave us with the most ridiculous, ill-equipped caretakers, including my uncle, who was a full-on addict, heroin addict. And I remember to this day watching him shoot up with his girlfriend while my parents were out. And it was so traumatizing to watch him go into that zone

and become someone who was no longer in the building. And, you know, better than I, right? You lived with it day in, day out. But like just that one instance is still had to be worked out of my body and is still in my mind. And I can't watch anyone snorting anything or shooting anything without going back there. So that one thing, right? And you lived with this day in, day out. And I love what you said. Well, a couple of things I want to kind of expand on. One is, and we'll get into this more with the somatic discussion we're going to have about somatic healing, but this idea of, and I always say this to people, like we have this, you're talking about these locked rooms. I'll often use the metaphor of the dark basement. Like we lived in this old

house for a while that where there was this door to the basement, it was this really dark, dank basement, scary basement, like you see in horror movies. And I would just zoom by that door. I was so freaking scared of that basement. And I always think about that because that's where our younger traumatized parts are. And we're so scared of it. And we don't want to go in the basement. We want to keep those doors. We do not want to open that door. But when you finally open the door or the doors to the room in your metaphor, and you turn on the lights, what you see are not scary evil goblins you see these like innocent younger parts of you that just want to be seen and held and integrated and understood and that's really what sets you free so it sounds like what

you were saying is that for so much of your life until you really started taking a deep dive into this which is what has ultimately resulted in the book is that you started to open those doors and so we're going to get to that but the other thing I want to talk about is this idea of you were in this horrific environment and yet you were this really smart kid you could find safety and connection and community almost to an extent it through your academic prowess and doing well in school and you also had an amazing imagination and this whole concept of the audacity of hope We talk so much on here about manifestation, right, and that the key to manifestation is not only being able to imagine the future that you desire, whether it's five minutes from now or five years from now, but to really embody that, like to be in the energy as if it's happening right here, right now. And I thought it was so beautiful how you described as a little girl that in one of your ways to escape what was happening in your home and to cope with it was not only to just dive all, I'm going to get the frick out of here and kick ass in school and end up in a prestigious business school and everything you accomplished.

And I'm also, you as a little girl didn't realize what you were doing, but you were living into your future in your imagination as a way of coping. Yes, deeply. And I've always been that way. And so it's so tempting, I think, sometimes to want to figure out where it comes from. And I could try to imagine four or five or 10 different places that that might come from. I think so much of that really is innate. And to my mother's credit, The two things that she always said to us as kids, she was dogged about school and grades. That was extremely important. And getting an education was always drilled into us. And I think part of that is just being the generation that we, you know, that we were coming up in and being a Black American, that mandate of being a good student and receiving a quality education that will always carry you somewhere, that you always have access to, that is yours.

I think that was so deeply instilled in us. And so school was a refuge, but because that was actually supported, it was easy to really lean into it. And I did well. And so having teachers that could validate and affirm me in ways that I wasn't always getting at home certainly was part of it. And it gave me a little bit of a break from the day-to-day of being at home. And then my imagination, I loved to read and I loved to draw. And as I got older, I loved magazines and anything that gave me a glimpse into this other world I would hold on to. And it allowed me to start to create these building blocks, these mental building blocks for a life that I might have. You know, now we would talk about the reticular activating system and the way the brain uses imagery and frequency and recency to sort of conceive of what's possible.

And I think I just really drew on any outside inspiration to be able to do that. And the other thing that my mom would say to us is you can do anything you want. You can do anything you put your mind to. And she believed it. I don't know that she believed it so much for her own ability to get out of the headspace that she was in and the place that she was in. But she certainly said that so much that I think it was natural to say, OK, well, then let me imagine what might be how how could this look like? And so from a really early age, I had an imagination for what my life could look like. And I did. I just head down, fully dissociative, but really focused on getting there.

My detriment eventually, but it really was, it saved my life at the same time. Yeah, well, that's how disassociation works, right? It saves our life in the short term. And you were doing it in a really functional, you know, a way that really served. And I don't think a lot, and I think I'm sure you know this better than I, that most kids, and certainly most Black and brown kids, in your situation, of which there are millions and millions and millions, do not have that, unless they see, which is what we're always trying to promote, unless they see a model for that, right, in the media, which we're slowly having more and more are out there, models of what that might look like. they just think that's not for me. I can't even conceive outside my reality. And so that's a blessing to some extent that your mother, I mean, to every extent that despite all the ways she wounded, she also really instilled those two variables of pursuing an education and pursuing

your dreams and having that audacity to dream that you talk about. And you being born with that innate creativity. You know, it was like a perfect storm for getting out. It was. I mean, I'm a naturally, I think I'm sort of wired for a little bit, you know, it is a blessing, but it made the healing journey really difficult, right? Yeah, of course. That idea of going into this dark room and turning on the lights and realizing that maybe it's not all scary, but some of it is scary or This version of myself that I don't know how to tend to. And I think it was more that it was being in contact with these versions of myself that I either didn't remember or that I didn't want to remember that I didn't know how to take care of when I was confronted with them. And it was like, I don't have the tools to sit with this. And I can talk about it all day, but I don't have the tools to actually sit with this. And what does that feel like? And it's kind of funny, even still people ask, well, what did it feel like to be in that environment? Or what did it feel like to grow up that way? And what did it feel like to try to navigate it? And I'm like, I don't know, it was fucking hard. Like, I can't tell you what it felt like. I can only tell you that it is, that our biology will, to the extent that it can safeguard us from being immersed in it, will do that. And so you kind of can't ever really relocate yourself fully into that space once you're safe.

I think it's also, though, when you're safe that you can actually look at you can now start to look at it. You can't fully locate there, but you can say, OK, I can now at least examine it a bit. And I'm sure when you went into those rooms and you connected with those younger parts of yourself that were experiencing those things, even if you were disassociating at the time and in your imagination and you were still experiencing it, it was impacting your nervous system and your body and your mind. when you went back there, even though you can't fully locate there and fully experience what you did there, I am sure I know for myself and also coaching as many people as I do through the process that you feel a lot. And for someone who had been raised and even to keep yourself safe first, kept the secrecy as much as you could. So DCSF didn't come in and your family got broken up. And then as you got older and had this whole reinvention of yourself where you're creating this whole life for yourself, that was the last thing, you know, it was still kind of this compartmentalized

part of yourself. So now when you're stepping into those rooms and really going to be with those parts of yourself that you've never been willing to be with, what was that like? Oh, devastating. I mean, and it still is. I think I know that healing is a practice and it requires showing up as much as you can and I don't want to say with discipline because sometimes you don't have the stamina sometimes you need to actually catch your breath if you are a distance runner you sort of learn you build up to being able to run longer and for more time and at a faster pace, but you can't do that out the gate. And even as you're training and you can get farther in your run, you have to stop sometimes maybe to catch your breath.

It's very much like that. And I, writing the book, I didn't fully appreciate what being in such close proximity to all these versions of myself simultaneously would do. You mean as you read the book you were in touch and I was writing because I have to be with my seven-year-old self and then I'm with my teenage self and I'm with my 26-year-old self and I'm with the version of me where the book begins and I was so raw and fragile it was so treacherous right that the work of getting really close and then realizing oh gosh I'm still figuring out how to sit here and be with this part of myself that feels really tender, that is asking me to maybe reach out to friends and loved ones and to be held, but I just want to hide. For all the ways it shows up for me,

even physically, nausea is something that I struggled with a lot as a kid and just all kinds of tummy issues. And to this day, that will be the sort of trigger for me, the indicator, oh, I'm not feeling great. But I tried to do it as much as I could. You go room by room. You sort of tend to what's coming up in that moment in time. And really, I do a lot of inner child sort of meditation work and a lot of that shadow work to really just that exposure but it was I think when you write a book like this you're sort of pulling it all up at once and then you have to sort of sift through it and look at it and you're rearranging it and it's it is it's a very strange kind of what I call remembering redash remembering of oneself and so it can feel

really, I think, disorganized for a while. And then you sort of start to eventually pull it all together and bit by bit, place by place. But I think that at least for me, you know, to be able to actually contextualize it all, it required that awareness. And I needed to sort of be able to look at it before I could figure out how do I integrate this? I don't, I don't know where this goes yet to be able to integrate it. So it takes a lot of commitment. It's, you know, it's a conscious effort to... It's so tempting to just close the freaking door to the room and not go in there and to not open it again tomorrow or the next day when something else starts showing you that you need to open it. That's right. So you're consciously intervening with feelings of despair or fear and

recognizing that they can exist while you still do that work and that you will be okay you know on the other end of it I think that's the fear is that you will look at something for so long or you look at the wrong thing and you're going to fall apart yeah and you'll never reach the bottom of the ocean of pain like oh the Pandora's box will open and then that's it you just get sucked in yeah and you kind of get lost in that and I think because I watched that happen to my mother that felt very much like a risk and that gosh if I just I you won't be able to pick me up off the floor if I allow myself to get too close to this but that didn't happen as painful as it was yeah and that's what I always try to say to people especially if you get support and obviously you

had a lot of support what was the most helpful to you in general in your healing but especially it sounds like as you were writing this book, which sounds like it was a healing exercise on steroids as well. You know, it's funny, the book, I didn't feel like it was particularly cathartic. I felt actually mostly traumatized, if I'm honest, writing at least the first part of the book, part one of the book. It was definitely more of a traumatic event than it was anything else. The rest of the book, I could feel a little bit more distance and it could feel a little bit almost like reporting that it was the reliving of it. But I think what's been really helpful, and I didn't really expect it, has been the conversations with people after the book has been out. It's been in the full release valve of it being in the world and being just encountering so many people who have come to me and said, me too, I have a similar story.

My parents were very much crippled by drug addiction or I had a lot of abuse and neglect in my life and we grew up in poverty in this way. And that has been so oddly healing. And it's not odd when you know the science of healing and when you understand sort of the ingredients for post-traumatic growth, which I write about. When you understand the mechanics of those things, then it makes sense that it would be in dialogue and conversation and community that I would also find a lot of healing. And then I think in terms of my own individual practice, there have been so many. I would give EMDR therapy, though, a lot of credit because it was the first time, one of the first times that I could that I chose to relocate myself to these events and do the work, the real time work of reframing and writing a new narrative, having a different relationship with those events. and what I told myself about them, and I could sort of then see, oh, there's a difference here between the set of facts of this moment, of this event, of this experience, and the story that I told myself about that set of facts. Oh, okay, well, that means I get to tell myself a new story, and I think that particular modality was really helpful in showing me how to do it and, again, And having the safe space to do it in a way that I felt like I could come back from.

Yeah, you talk a lot. I mean, it's not just this horrible story of your life, which is fortunately and unfortunately so beautifully told. But it's also about what helped you heal. And you talk a ton. I mean, you took a really deep dive into neuroscience and healing and integration. And so what for you, and I know you share all this in the book, so we don't have to go into tremendous detail. But like what were the I want to talk about the post-traumatic growth, but even just the trauma healing, what were the ingredients as you did? I think you call them ingredients that really contributed to you being able to begin to heal.

And I don't say heal because it's for all of us healing is a lifelong endeavor. But to really get to a place where you feel you can hold it, you're starting to integrate it, you're feeling in relationship with it. you know, I always say we become just like really good surfers. Yeah, that's right. Or rinsing the sponge. It's a medical. Yeah, that's a good one too. My very first therapist and she said, you know, as soon as you think that you've gotten all the soap out of it, you put it back under the water and more soap. So, you know, I think that rinsing the sponge, but I think for me, it was very much this process. And I think of it kind of as a loop or a cycle of the recognition. that this thing happened and being curious about it and saying okay I'm gonna go in and I'm going

to do some excavation here and usually for me anyway it's been inspired by something that triggered me and being curious about what was coming up in that moment because it would feel totally unrelated and you can pick a thing I cover several in the book but think about a time when something triggers you. And rather than sitting in the upsetness that emerges, I think if you can quickly get to a place of curiosity and recognize, oh, something just came up for me. What was that? That to me then allowed me to be able to sort of move to this place of radical acceptance that like this did happen to you. Yeah. It happened and it still lives with you and that's okay because then you can reframe it then you can rewrite the relationship that you have to that

event that actually to me is what healing looks like it's like does my relationship to this event change or look different yes it did from when it happened or a year ago or five years ago and so it doesn't mean that it doesn't still cause pain or hurt or sadness or i don't still have what we would want to name as negative feelings around it. It's like, okay, well, but I don't feel the way I did about it when it happened. And that's a win. And so that to me then is like, that's the resilience piece. That's the, that repetition is how you build resilience around it. Right. And I see that whole process as a loop of recognizing that this thing is coming up, radically accepting that it happened and it's still there and it may come up again and then being able to sort of

reframe it and recontextualize it and in resilience 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 homepage, 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. and then in between kind of recognizing it and reframing it are you also allowing yourself to be with it because I feel like that's an important piece too like a lot of people jump to bypass and be like oh no no this is the here this is great I'm not as bad I'm not I'm upset but I'm not as upset as I was versus being like wait a minute let me just stop and sit with what's happening in my body right now? What sensations am I feeling? What does my body want to release from this? What does it want to feel? How can I stay with myself? I know you describe that in the book, but I just want to highlight. Absolutely. And I'm glad you said that because I definitely

don't want it to sound like step one, step two. You know, people talk about like the stages of grief and I'm like, I don't know if that's quite how it works, but I absolutely, I have thought a lot more about grief than I had ever thought I would. And I've talked about it a lot over the past year and where I've landed right now anyway, is that the loss is the injury and that grief is actually the recovery process. Yeah. Yeah. We tend to think of grief as the injury. Yeah. And so we resent it and we fight it and we try to push against it. And so for me, I think because I can, if I can recognize that this loss happened and I can accept that this loss happened, then I can actually live with the grief that is the ongoing healing and recovery from it.

And so, yes, that just means that you're going to feel it. You're going to have to sit with it and you're going to have to recognize that, oh gosh, I'm feeling really sick about this, or I'm feeling the need to withdraw, I'm feeling and being able to understand when we do that, what sits under that, right? And so I typically know that when I'm very upset about something, I only, not only lose my appetite, I will feel nauseous. That is a very strong signal that if I'm recognizing that I don't really want to show up for anybody, it's because I'm feeling like I can't show up for myself. Yeah. That means that you need to let somebody show up for you because maybe you don't have, you don't have the stamina, you don't have the energy to run as fast and as

hard as you normally do. And you need, actually you need caregivers when that happens. That's when you allow yourself to slow down because you've built community around you and people can hold you through that process. Those, they seem so sometimes I think esoteric or easy to sort of throw out. But the truth is that that's what the recognition I think in the sitting with it really looks like. And so I am a better person to myself and to the people around me when I have my eyes open to how I'm feeling and what's coming up for me. And then frankly, when I'm just doing the things I need to do, like taking walks and getting air and oxygenating and letting my brain, you know, get new air and giving it sort of a wash of that and allowing myself to sit in meditation

or allowing myself to sort of move through my feelings and writing as I journal or whatever that might be. I'm better when I'm present for things in that way. I mean, that's what I think the healing process looks like an action in practice. Yeah, it's like emotional hygiene, basically. And you speak so much in the book or write so much in the book about some of the ways that we don't have to go too deeply into it because I have so many questions for you. But this idea of dating, all these patterns that emerge out of trauma that is unprocessed and unaddressed. So like in your case, dating, which believe me is one of the most common scenarios of dating emotionally unavailable partners, right? Or for many of us, it's choosing and being

attracted to friends and partners who are either hot messes or emotionally unavailable or going to abandon us. We sort of get into these unconscious patterns that then re-traumatize us. So one of the things that, and you mentioned post-traumatic growth and this whole idea also that I think is really beautiful of ending generational trauma. You know, I don't remember the exact saying that we always hear, but that trauma goes, passes through generation to generation until someone is willing to heal. And I think it's just so beautiful in your story. I know that you are one in your line of ancestors because trauma goes back generations, right? You mentioned your mother's trauma, but her parents had trauma, you know, her father dying by suicide was caused by

trauma, you know, it all goes all the way back, that you are changing that. And on a quantum level, right, where there is no time, when we heal, we are not only serving the healing of all the descendants that come after us, we are also simultaneously healing everyone that came before us, which I think is such a beautiful image to think about. But what is post-traumatic growth? Because we talk about post-traumatic stress or disorder from trauma. What does post-traumatic growth look like for you? I loved the phenomenon. I mean, I remember when I first started to read about it and learn about it. And I was like, wait, how is this not in the zeitgeist in the same way that PTSD is, it's a newer phenomenon that's been named, but nonetheless, I mean, we're

talking about at this point, 35 years or so, and in our sort of broader cultural language, or at least we've had access to it as an idea. And when I understood that we could go through a traumatic event and through community, through making meaning of what happened through, which is really hard to do, finding the benefit of what happened, we can actually find ourselves not in a state of distress or despair or experiencing PTSD symptoms, but actually we can experience a greater appreciation for life. Or maybe we have a stronger spiritual center. We just see possibility and our relationships improve, right? These are also manifestations, possible manifestations that fall under this idea of post-traumatic growth. And so

for me, I can actually see in many ways how all of them are somewhat true. I would argue that as a young person, I think I saw, I see glimpses in hindsight of post-traumatic growth, even as a child and losing my grandmother. I mean, I think in a lot of ways, because we were meant to be in the car when she got into the accident and she, for whatever reason, just brain blip. Sometimes you drive and you're on autopilot. I don't know what happened to her that day, but she didn't pick us up. And I remember thinking, even as a young person, oh, I was meant to be here for some reason, that I was maybe spared for some reason. I think so seeing possibility, great possibilities in life, I think was always there for me to be able to access. And as I've gotten older, I would

say certainly the willingness to confront and be vulnerable and be honest and to talk about things has deepened and strengthened my relationships with others. And absolutely, I think the sense of appreciation that I have for life has been heightened because I'm so much more aware and present and grateful. But I could, you know, think of so many ways that it's manifest. But I think that ultimately there's a bit of this happened without my knowing that I sort of pulled all those ingredients together on my own. The one thing I'll share, because we touched on it a little bit when you were talking about the challenges of, in particular, Black and brown folks who may grow up in poverty. You know, I sort of grew up on the third rail. I grew up poor,

Black, and female. And so there was no shortage of messages that told me that I should not believe that I should have anything. And that also said, by the way, you should be really grateful when you're invited. Separate conversation. But what really, I think, for me with post-traumatic growth the factors that make up for it still blow my mind because that means that we can scale it if we can actually articulate it and help people think through you can start to imagine a program that actually moves people through these stages again recognizing that it's not it's not linear but that there are component parts that if you understand them you can think about how to architect them in your own lives but who is most likely to experience post-traumatic growth is

actually what really got me lit up because it's people who come from poverty, impoverished backgrounds, tend to be more likely people of color, tend to be more likely, and women. That makes sense. That makes sense because if we think about generational trauma and the ways in which we inherit that and the ways in which we continue to navigate systems that make whatever permutation of your identities more or less difficult. In my case, kind of the third rail that I mentioned, having all of those dimensions, that means that we also have the propensity for that generational wisdom and that promise, that optimism, the hope that things can be different, that I can survive this thing you know this too will pass that I can make a way out of no way

and so I just am so inspired by the whole concept because I also think that it's really important for people who maybe feel extremely marginalized or especially marginalized in whatever way that shows up in your life that you understand that you also have that capacity right so you talked about how that, what that means for generational healing and sort of, and the quote, I think I write it in the book is that pain travels in families until someone is, is brave enough to feel it. And I think that's exactly right. It's so it's realizing that you know how to carry that pain. You inherited the capacity to carry that pain, but that means that you also have the capacity for growth and to thrive and for it to be transmuted into something else. And so that's,

I think, really how I've tried with intention now that I understand it to live my life. But I think it's always been the way I've shown up. And I do, I feel really grateful for the days that I can sort of look at all the evidence and say, oh, that's what that is. Yeah, it really is a making sense. And I face that. I mean, I didn't have the challenges that you have or had, but I also find that for me and for so many of the people of all different ethnicities and orientations that I work with, there is this common denominator of like, first of all, I think anyone is capable of post-traumatic growth, which I know you agree with, right? If you can just open your mind to the possibilities of unexpected silver linings or gifts, not that you wouldn't give them all back to have that not be the case, theoretically, like I would give all my gifts back to have my son back that came from his death. And I can also hold all of the grace and appreciation for all the ways that I have shifted and changed

for the better and all the skill sets and gifts that have come online as a result of going through the fire. And so I think what maybe is also up, because I do find what you're saying really beautiful and really true, is that when you've had a lot of hardship for generations and generations, and hardship is an understatement, right? The only ones that survive are those that can be, you know, to pass their genes on and to raise their children are the ones that can be resilient, you know, and the ones that can hold on to that mustard seed of faith and that mustard seed of hope. And that that is, I think that's really a beautiful image, a terrible, beautiful image, but a beautiful one. It is. I think that's right. And I think even recognizing that it's

terrible and that it's beautiful is an example of it in itself. And I think it also makes everything else, I don't want to say feel manageable because there are absolutely moments and reasons to feel despair, especially right now, but in general. But I think that there is, I am so clear on the difference between is this, am I uncomfortable or am I actually being, is this harm, right? And I think knowing the difference between those two, it matters, right? Because then you can, this is discomfort. I can live with the discomfort of the memory, even if the memory is brutal, I can live with that because I have all of these other things as a result. And that's why I always say, benefit finding is very hard to do, and it can very easily sound like a bypass kind of

statement. It's like, you just make sense of it, and you make meaning, and then you find the benefit. And it's like, well, no, that's not it. But I've shared in the past a story of a woman I know who grew up in foster care. And I remember talking to her just about it, and she works with a lot of children. A lot of us who go through these kinds of experiences, we often look to pay it forward or work the community another form of the post-traumatic growth it is yeah it is and I remember her saying you know that growing up in foster home different foster homes actually made her very discerning and that she was she could sort of like work a room and get along with anybody and and so that's a version of a benefit finding that sometimes we take for granted

But it was such a lovely, I think, way to just reframe it and think about it. But I do. I want to believe that if generational trauma is something that we can all inherit, that we can also inherit the promise of possibility. And one doesn't minimize the other. Just because you recognize the benefits or the gifts that might have developed out of your trauma doesn't mean that you aren't also acknowledging how that trauma should have never happened.

and that it was unbelievably horrific and is unfair and all the other things, both end, you know, to be true. That's right. Yeah. I remember at the, at the second retreat, we do this, we're now coming up on our third grieving mama retreat where I take this whole group of mamas who have lost children, usually around 70 to 75. Most of them come on scholarship into the Redwoods for five days to heal, to have this beautiful healing, multifaceted kind of healing experience. And so last year I did, you know, was the second retreat. And I, a mama came up to me not long after we had started this retreat, but she was coming back for the second time. And she came up to me and she was the first person to have ever said this to me. And it just

blew me apart, but it was so beautiful. She said, you know, I just really want to take a moment and tell you how grateful to Sammy I am. That's my son who passed. And I kind of looked at her and she's like, because if he hadn't died, you would have never created this. And when I came last year, I was ready to take my own life. And after I went through this retreat, not only did it set me on the path to healing, but my life is so much more beautiful now and so much better. And I've done this. She started telling me all these things that she'd started to create out of her pain and the healing she'd done. And she's like, and none of that. I don't even know if I would be here if Sammy hadn't died. That just was like, whoa. It's powerful because that's what

that first part, that first idea that there are people, there's a community, I have people around me and they may not be people that I see all the time. It may be a Facebook group, or it might be a retreat group that you're with once a year, but that you know that there is a community of people that exist where you can have that safe space. You can have community, you can be held, you can see each other, you can be enlightened witnesses for each other's experiences. You can actually sit with and understand what it means to say that nothing that is human is alien to me. It is only in that that I think we can actually find healing. I don't, making sense and making meaning are so important, but I don't think that we do that in a vacuum. I think that happens in

large part when we get to be with other people and you get to actually see, oh gosh, there are so many other possibilities for how this can live, how I can live with this and how I can move with this. And so I think that's beautiful. I felt that when we met at Greedtastic, I remember leaving that event and feeling that. And so you have the sort of overwhelm of the topic or the topics you're covering. And then you feel really full because you've just been able to be immersed and bathed in hope and inspiration and love and possibility at the same time. Yeah, and everyone you're talking,

she's talking about guys about this grief-tastic book fair that Megan Reardon, a trauma and grief specialist, puts on with all of these authors who have written grief-adjacent and grief-related books. And every single one of them has their book as an expression of post-traumatic growth. That's what it is. It's turning that pain into purpose.

And what that woman was saying to me she was highlighting for me a moment of post-traumatic growth because I hadn't even really been I mean I guess I knew I was creating purpose out of my pain by creating these retreats because I was recognizing that nobody knows how to grieve and and if mama's okay the whole family's okay and these mamas need support and that's how it started so that's an example of post-traumatic growth. Yeah. But I'm sure, were you at the time saying, okay, I'm going to turn my pain into purpose so that I may heal? No, but that moment with her was unbelievably healing. Yeah. And you're absolutely right about community. And I know that as you've shared some of the reactions

that people have had to your book, your book is a beautiful expression because that's resonating forward to support so many other people. I mean, I have so many other questions, but we're running out of time. The last thing I want to just ask you, and we're going to put your book and anything I'm going to ask you in a second where people can follow you and reach you, but we'll put it all in the show notes. But for someone who's listening right now and has their own traumatic past and maybe hasn't entered this terrain yet, is still has all those doors to those rooms shut. What is like a first step or gentle step that they might take read the book but besides that yeah I think it could be just sitting with that feeling of fear or not knowing what to do or where to look

and one of the exercises that I give a lot of people in different contexts is to ask why five times until you get to the root of it and so it might just be sitting there and saying I don't know where to start or I'm afraid to start why and then you you know can write it down or capture it however you want and then you'll you'll tell yourself something I promise yeah why and you'll tell yourself a little bit more why and I think that drilling down it's the beginning of the habit of excavation. And so if you can just suspend any judgment about what comes up and say, my job is just to witness this and to be curious, I think give yourself that permission and recognize that you have the choice. And you can always stop. You can always say, okay, and I'm done for now.

So I think that would be the invitation that I would extend to anyone feeling overwhelmed or not knowing where to begin or afraid to begin would just be to sit and figure out why that is. That's a beautiful offering. I love that idea. Daria Burke, thank you so much. Thank you for writing the book. Thank you for all you're doing in the world, for being so beautiful inside and out and honest and such a beautiful writer. The book is called Of My Own Making. And like I said, We'll put everything in the show notes. Thank you, thank you, thank you for being here. Thank you so much.

This was just a joy. I went to the doctor said I'm crazy for your love wrote me a prescription but there's no cure for