The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – It Won’t Hurt None: A story of courage, healing and a return to wholeness by Rebecca E Chandler

Episode Date: April 26, 2023

It Won't Hurt None: A story of courage, healing and a return to wholeness by Rebecca E Chandler What sort of life does a girl from a small town live while carrying the burden of abuse? A surprisingly rich, complicated, and unexpected one. With candor and vulnerability, Rebecca E. Chandler’s courageous memoir takes readers on a journey as she navigates relationships, her career, and self-discovery while living with trauma, complex PTSD, and multiple personality disorder. Through perseverance, Rebecca’s story is one of transformation as she moves beyond the yoke of “Rebecca the Survivor” and comes to accept and love herself. Overwhelmingly candid and revealing, “It Won’t Hurt None” brings a difficult and sensitive subject out of the darkness and reminds us that healing is rarely, if ever linear. "It Won't Hurt None" is a must-read for anyone seeking inspiration on the path to healing and wholeness. Rebecca E. Chandler is an avid storyteller and pursued a full-time writing career after retiring from thirty years of producing film, TV, and marketing content around the world. Please visit www.rebeccaechandler.com to learn more. Buy It Won’t Hurt None today and start your healing journey. Please also purchase Hurt No More - Grow a Foundation for Healing the companion journal to It Won’t Hurt None. Co-Authored by Rebecca E Chandler and Aparna Ramakrishnan, MSW, Hurt No More offers practical insights, steps, and encouragement to stand in your truth.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being here and being part to the big show my family friends we certainly appreciate you guys

being here and being part of the big uh show that we always put on as always we have the most amazing guests on the show and you know you want your friends neighbors and relatives to be smarter brighter be educated because i've you know i mean we've seen some of your relatives right uh yeah you know what i'm talking about thanksgiving dinner. I'm sure you guys have wonderful relatives, and no family ever has that one person that says weird. So if you don't, all the better. Send in the Chris Voss Show. Go to YouTube.com forward slash Chris Voss.

Goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. The big LinkedIn group, LinkedIn newsletter, all that great stuff that we do over there. Today we have another amazing author on the show. We have the most brilliant minds that come before us, and none of them are me. That's why we have guests on the show. We have the most brilliant minds that come before us, and none of them are me. That's why we have guests on the show. See how that works?

I'm smart. Well, let's not push it. She is the author of the newest book that just recently came out, January 2nd, 2023, It Won't Hurt None, A Story of Courage, Healing, and a Return to Wholeness. Rebecca E. Chandler is on the show with us today she's the author of a multi uh amount of books we'll find out what multi amount of books means actually in numbers here in a second and i just made up multi amount is that like a thing i don't know i take poetic license and everything i do which hides my stupidity people so there you go uh so we're going to be talking to her in a second, but these are the stories that I love,

stories of triumph, stories of overcoming adversity. And these are the real life lessons we learned in the story of life because I didn't get an owner's manual. Maybe you did for life, but I didn't. And I'm still very hurt about it. You can tell. I'm writing a book about how I'm really upset that no one gave me an owner's manual. And I'm just going to rant in it.

So there you go. Rebecca E. Chandler is an author, survivor, and advocate. Her memoir, It Won't Hurt None, a story of courage, healing, and return to wholeness. It details her journey from the depths of trauma to a place of hope and healing. It offers a roadmap for others who are struggling with similar issues. She lived with DID, dissociative identity disorder, and complex PTSD for most of her life and was often misdiagnosed by medical professionals. However, through therapy and self-reflection, which I think everyone needs at this point,

Rebecca was able to heal and reclaim her voice and power. Of course, my psychiatrist just recommends a full lobotomy of frontal. Welcome to the show, Rebecca. How are you? I'm great. How are you? I am good. It's a wonderful morning and I'm engaging a wonderful discussion with you. So give us your dot coms so people can find you on the interwebages. The most important dot com is Rebecca E Chandler dot com. Don't forget the E in the middle. And from there, you can find me across all the social platforms and on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, all that good stuff.

There you go. And I think you have two books, don't you? I do. I have my memoir and then I also co-authored a Journal to start your own Healing journey, it's called Hurt No More Damn, I'm giving that to everybody I know

Because I know a lot of people are hurt That or they just be hit over the head with a book That would work too I think it's important just to start I think that's the point, right? Start hitting people over the head with a book. When you're done hitting people over the head, just start healing.

There you go. And so we don't get banned on YouTube. We don't advocate violence. That is a metaphor? I don't know. Yes. It's a strong metaphor. Just verbally hit them over the head with the book. So there you go. Just send them a link to her book on Amazon.

So what motivated you on to write this book and tell us more about your origin story? So I went through a bit of a medical disaster in 2017. I was living in Kenya, sought some help in Dubai, and that surgical procedure went terribly wrong for lots of reasons. And as a result of that surgery, I slipped into metabolic syndrome, which means my entire metabolic system just decided to check out. Wow. And one of the things that came about as part of that collapse was that my mental health really took a dive and I slid into a pretty dark,

dangerous depression, which was not uncommon for me. I'd been depressed plenty of times before. But in that moment, all of my early childhood sexual trauma came back at me, meaning a lot of stuff that I had repressed or I thought I had dealt with just started flooding into my mind. And I just, at one point I was really losing my mind and I just thought, you know what, I should sit down and write something. And I wrote about 30, 40,000 words in a couple of days. And that was the start of it. Nice. Had you dealt with your childhood trauma before this point? Had you addressed it or gone to psychiatry?

So, yeah, I put myself into therapy when I was 19. That was the first time that I went into therapy. Then again, I tried different modalities. But back in the day, I'm 53 53 so it's quite a while ago um talk therapy was the most uh available form of therapy and then a few years later i went back into talk therapy and did some more talking uh which is i think interesting to talk to talk about at some point was the fact that talk therapy it's very event-based, and you talk about things. You don't necessarily heal them. Yeah.

And then as I got older and I tried family celestial work, I tried EMDR. What's EMDR? EMDR is rapid eye movement-based therapy. Since I would, you know, I'll call it sensation-based therapy. When you, your eye movement, through your eye movement and some coaching and stuff like that, you can actually kind of retrain how your brain processes things. There you go.

I just wanted to clarify that for the audience because EMDR sounds like something you'd take at a rave. Yeah. Maybe it should be something you'd take at a rave. It's really, it's very similar to tapping if you do any kind of tapping work emdr is associated with tapping is that where you tap your forehead like this yeah and you tap your shoulders you do all kinds of things and it just reprograms your your mind to send signals differently i'm'm not a doctor, so I can't really get into the specifics of how it works, but it's as a layer to healing, I think I thought it was really profound.

And people that are on Molly at a rave concert probably do the same thing. So I think they tap before they start sucking on their pacifiers, but I couldn't tell you we decided to really beat on ravers today there you go yeah we just uh wow i don't know people are like chris really has issues with people at coachella i know just i don't know i just worked in as a joke people we just riff off what comes out. So you go through that. And let me ask you this, because I'm curious about this. When you were in therapy, did you really address the issues?

Or, you know, sometimes, and I'm not accusing you of this, but sometimes people go into therapy, and they really just kind of run the game on the psychiatrist, where they don't really get into the issues, and they don't really do self-accountability sort of thing. Or, you know, there's different issues. There's games you can play with therapists, because I know, because I've done it. Oh, yeah.

I think the first six months of therapy, you're probably lying a good 30% of the time. Wow. I know I was. That's probably a book right there yeah oh because i if you're coming out of the kinds of trauma that i'm talking about physical trauma sexual trauma that kind of thing trust is obviously an enormous issue so it's one thing for me to sit in the room with a good therapist and have a solid conversation but

for me to actually tell you how i'm feeling or actually tell you about the demons running around in my mind that takes a lot of trust and i if i don't have trust when i walk in the room i have to build it it takes time so i did talk about my abuse and i talked about my parents divorce when i was quite young and that was um it's interesting that that feels like it probably consumed as much time as my abuse. When I first put myself into therapy, I was 19, 20. I wasn't really ready to talk about the details of the abuse. And I think I was just too kryptonite.

It was too much. And then later when I went back to the same therapist who I talked about in my book called Dr. D, he's really great. And we talked a little bit more about the details. But I think there were a couple of things happening. Trauma was still a new conversation. Certainly dissociative identity disorder, which used to be called multiple personality disorder, was not common. So I was labeled bipolar at one point because bipolar disorder and trauma

share a lot of the same symptoms. And unfortunately, I think people of a certain age, before trauma became this kind of household conversation and PTSD became much more on the tip of everyone's tongue, a lot of people were put into this box of bipolar disorder. And if you're bipolar, your therapy, in my opinion, changes from deep exploration to how do I manage my, how do I regulate? So the therapy didn't quite, the therapy didn't get into the details until quite a bit later. Now you entitled the book, It Won't Hurt None. Where does that come from?

When you're the first person to ask me that question, it's so interesting. That's what we do here at the show. I love that question. I mean, there's a power to it as to why people choose their titles. And so it's important. When I was, I was being sexually assaulted by my maternal grandfather from the age of five.

And when I was 13, there was one evening at my grandparents' house and I was, we'd had dinner, everyone else had gone to bed and I was talking to my grandfather and I got up to go to bed like a normal. And I thought that the assault had ended because it had it had been a couple of months since the last assault and um he reached at me and he grabbed me very aggressively very violently and as i was trying to get away from him he said um let's go out to the trailer it won't hurt none wow and i fought back and that night i fought back hard enough that the violence ended that night. Great for you. Yeah.

I mean, to finally make that stand. I know what that feels like at age 16. I wasn't being sexually assaulted by my father, but there was a time where the beatings had to stop. And there was that fight back moment. I know what that is. And so that title, It Won't H't hurt none has a lot of power for you because that's the time you took back your your power and your freedom yeah and it's the last it's the last phrase he ever uttered to me and that meant that even that that was an avenue to

sexual violence that was the end of it the last sentence he ever said to me that even that was an avenue to sexual violence. That was the last sentence he ever said to me that even remotely came close to there's going to be violence. So, yeah. Yeah. And I'm sorry that happened to you. This is a tragic thing to happen to anybody. I mean, the one thing that's interesting about the show that I've learned over the years is childhood trauma, especially sexual childhood trauma, can impact a lifetime like

nothing else like i've often said that um childhood sexual assault should be held to a higher punishment than murder uh and it should invoke the death penalty because you know the the damage it does over a lifetime and lives with is huge and we've had a lot of authors that have come on the show and talked about childhood trauma and overcoming it, whether it was sexual or just maybe abuse of some type or, you know, you're not set up as a child to deal with the realities of life. You don't understand sexuality. You don't understand, you know, a lot of things.

You're just not built to process it. That's why we don't allow people to make certain decisions until they're 18. And so this is tragic, but I like the power behind what you wrote there because it's freeing. Did one of the struggles you had over the years, just admitting that you were a victim and coming to grips with that did were you able to grasp that early on at 19 i mean at least you had the foresight to go into therapy at 19 yeah i mean i knew i never forgot the abuse i didn't repress it and bury it um instead my mind created four personalities to deal with it that was my mind's response. And they were called five, six,

seven, and 13, and they're named for their ages. Five was my fear. That was the first time I was assaulted. Six was my shame, which was I didn't discover until I was in my fifties. Seven was my sadness. My parents got divorced when I was around seven. So in addition to sexual violence, it was just upside down inside the house. And then 13 was my anger. It was when I fought back. So I knew I, this is how my mind worked at the time.

I'm, I'm being abused. This is wrong. I'm going to have to go see a doctor someday. That's kind of how I thought about it as a teenager. And then when I was in high school, I identified my personalities. But I didn't know that they were, I didn't know what it was. I didn't know what to do with it.

I just knew that they existed. And when I was 19, I became incredibly depressed and I became, I came really close to following through with self-harm and I thought this can't be it. This can't be, this can't be all that my life is supposed to be. So I put myself into therapy. And that's when that healing journey started. But it's so complicated. You talk about kids aren't really prepared to deal with things. It's more than that for me. It's the fact that from age five to seven, let's say, is when you build your fundamental understanding of trust. The foundation for trust is built. So the fact that I didn't have a foundation for trust means that my entire adult life, including through today,

I have enormous trust issues and that bleeds across professional and private parts of my life. So certainly trauma and sexual abuse. You're right. It's a permanent, it's a legacy that you have to live with. And I just posted that on Tik TOK is that I just am coming to terms with the fact that I will carry this forever. You know? And that's why I believe that it should be the death penalty because it's

almost, it's almost worse than just killing a person, I think, in my mind from everything I've read and seen over the course of my life. I've known. And I think it's harder on women because it's such an emotional scar. Like men can process a lot of their logic and reason, and it does make us emotional and hits emotionally. But I think it's harder on women. It's harder for them to reconcile it. I think it's harder on women it's it's harder for them to reconcile it i think it's a scar they always carry i think men carry it too but one of the

interesting things was i watched uh leaving nevermore with oprah and if you remember that story and there was a there was a after the show aired there was a you mean leaving neverland or neverland neverland yeah neverland which should have been nevermore must have been a slip there of what i thought but um the uh oprah show that she did afterwards she talked to the the two boys um and there was a guy who got up in the show and he'd written a book on uh being assaulted sexually by the local police officer yeah his town. It was kind of like one of those, what was that one movie? But he talked about how the poison inside you is the thing that kills you because you can't admit to it or deal with it or process it. And until you release the poison and talk about it and get it out there. And the reason I'm talking about this is hopefully if someone in the audience is listening,

they've been through this experience and they haven't reconciled it, maybe they can get some help and maybe they can realize that sometimes admitting that something happened to you and dealing with it and processing it and talking to other human beings about it, you realize you're not alone. And that's the sick thing about how this whole thing works. As a child, you're alone. You don't know who you can talk to. People who trust you are betraying that. And off you go. So as we go through the book, it's a story of courage, healing, and return to wholeness. Do you talk about your journey? Tell us how that works. Yeah, I do. I mean, it's been a funny life right so I I got in I got a job in marketing

when this is all going on in my early 20s um and then I moved from LA to DC to New York and I became a producer and so my career um built pretty quickly um and it was going really well and it's interesting that a lot of the reasons why i'm a good producer is because i like to be in control and i have the ability to survive so it's it's just perverse that the fact that i'm so resilient and so agile and i can pivot immediately and i can read the room which is if you're a good producer, if you spend 60 seconds on set, I can tell you where the problems are. I don't even have to talk to people. I can tell you where the energy is off over there.

This is not going on, whatever, whatever. And it's just a little bit perverse that I where you can live and survive and and get on with life and that's what i did for most of my life right it's just get on with it um and it's uh yeah and you can it's actually i mean it's it's weird to say but it's actually a little bit empowering because it gives you skills that you know are not only survival but can you can excel with you know yeah the trick with it though is that all of that resilience people learn begin to count on it with you and so the so the softness you may need to share with people the vulnerability to use the new the new word of the day right the vulnerability that you may need to

share with people to get help, to be in relationships, to do all those other things, it doesn't exist. The softness doesn't exist. So if you do ask for help and if you aren't being as resilient as you normally are, people don't know what to do with you because you've always been resilient. And I think that it's been difficult lately for me to realize that it's going to take a long time for me to convince people that I've known for decades that the person I was as a survivor no longer really exists. And I am vulnerable and I am soft and I am all these other things. I just didn't know how to share them until now. You know, there's a,

there's an essence too, between how people behave in both the masculine and the feminine. And the feminine usually has to have that softer person you're talking about. Usually has to have a very safe space to exist in. And if it doesn't have that, then it goes to masculine. And it's interesting to me because like you mentioned earlier in the show, it's hard for people to trust that have been assaulted and had childhood abuse

because they can't. The people that they were supposed to trust the most, that were supposed to be in charge of giving them the best protection, failed. And if those people can't do their job right, then it's a little hard to trust anybody else in this world, especially with the way humans behave. Yeah, yeah, it becomes very difficult. And so you kind of go, I went through life kind of,

well, living my life through trauma's lens is how I describe it. That's interesting. And it's, you know, every, every aspect of my life was lived through trauma's lens. So not just relationships, but my finances, I'm not particularly great with money. I'm better now than I was before, but that compulsive need to spend and, and, and gifts were my love language. Like if I buy this for you, will you please love me? All that stuff. Right. And compulsive eating was also a problem for me. And it's still something I'm working on. And so it's not that trauma just affected my relationships or just affected one

aspect of my life. Trauma bleeds across every part of your life and you might not even notice it. You might not become self-aware about it until you've done quite a bit of healing work. And then it's like, Oh, you know, I think about myself in this way because of shame. I think about this in my finances because of not feeling worthy of love.

So it's, it's so multi-layered and complex. And it's, it can be, feel like a lot lot sometimes you can feel like you know what i just like a break from all of this i just like to wake up and not have that lens yeah it's an emotional scar i mean it really is yeah uh and i don't think uh i don't know if it ever fully heals me i'm not a psychiatrist clearly i, you know, worked through people's stuff. But I think, well, you tell me, what do you think about that?

Does it fully heal? I don't, in my own journey, I would say that I no longer experience DID. I no longer have multiple personality disorder. So there's huge amounts of healing that you can accomplish, which I, and I would just say to everybody, you can accomplish which i'm which i and i would just say to everyone you can heal quite a bit of yourself but i do think that's always going to be some legacy some remnants um but i do think you can diminish your triggers you can heal quite a few pieces of yourself that make life brighter and fuller and happier.

But it's going to take some work. Let me ask you this, just telling your story, helping you feel healed, writing a book. Yeah, the book definitely felt like a full stop at the end of a very long paragraph. What I'm finding now is that I,

I wrote the book, the books are there and now my body and my mind are kind of like okay let's go let's what's next there you go yeah so i so there's something about me not needing to sit in it and and kind of simmer in it anymore um uh yeah that which is interesting i didn't really know what to expect from writing the book i didn't know how to necessarily receive other survivors who reach out to me which has been really interesting um but yeah i think it's it's it's all movement hopefully it's forward at this point. There you go. You know, there's an old thing I learned a long time ago about, uh,

like I, I had ADHD. Maybe I still have it, but I had it really bad. Hey squirrel. Uh, that's a joke. People,

uh, squirrel. Um, I'm glad you love that. I get that joke. I steal stuff off the internet. That's where I write all my material. I just steal memes.

No, but one thing I found was with an ADHD brain, I would sit at night thinking about and worrying about all the stuff that I had to do the next day, especially in business. Someone said, you need to write it down because what your brain's doing is trying to remind you to deal with it and you're thinking about it constantly because it doesn't want you to forget um and so i found that writing stuff down the night before ended up closing out a lot of that brain activity that's like hey make sure you wake up at 8 a.m or you know make sure you make that call or whatever and so by writing it, it's like my brain would go, okay, idiot boy, he's got it written down. So he probably won't forget or forget that, you know, he wrote it down on the note.

But, you know, it's kind of like that same sort of thing where maybe people deal with trauma where they're constantly remembering it. And once you can put it down on paper and set it and say and say okay that's there it's done maybe that can give you some closure what do you think yeah i think i think that anytime that you can express your trauma outside of your mind you know you're probably going to benefit from that i also think that like my hamster wheel i know what your hamster wheel sounds like in your head. My hamster wheel, when I finally asked my somatic healer about it, I said, I can't stop this loop in my head. It will not stop. It was relentless.

And it was about food. It was, don't eat that. Eat that. What are you doing? And what's interesting is that it was revealed to me through a lot of work that it was shame. And shame is a really pernicious, destructive voice because shame is you have to do this, you have to do that. What about this? Why did you do that?

You, you, you, you, you. For me, it was the you voice in my head. You made this decision. You made that decision. And once I was able to identify that the you in my head was not me, it was shame. Then I was able to actually go into a somatic experience, a meditation, basically, and talk to shame directly. There you go. What are you doing?

Why are you doing this to me? And shame, it's like, well, I'm hurting. I have to share my hurt with you. Yes, but you're destroying me. Yeah. So we're going to have to find some kind of reconciliation. So I think when your mind races like that, for me, it's just a reminder that there's something unresolved. And you hit a wall, I think, at 50-50, did you say, when you got injured in Kenya or you had the issues, medical issues in Kenya,

what reopened that wound or what do you think caused that to reopen? So I was 47 and I was living in Kenya and I had to go to Dubai to have a fibroid tumor removed, which is not a big deal. Women get them all the time, right? It's pretty normal stuff. And as a part of the conversation with the surgeon who I call the cutter in my book, because she's a wretched human, it was, we discussed whether or not I should have hysterectomy. And it was the removal of my uterus, my womb, that sparked this enormous wave of guilt and sadness about not being able to have children. And I knew I couldn't have children. I tried to have children.

My womb was so traumatized that I was not able to conceive. But I didn't put all that together until the surgery and then all of a sudden my mind went what have you done and i just was i was overcome by the amount of sadness and grief that that surgery sparked yeah and it and i and the connection back to my abuse and the connection back to my infertility and all those things it was all about my womb uh it was absolutely overwhelming at the time i can imagine so i mean a woman you know uh in her biological self is her makeup her identity uh i had a uh i had a business partner who's uh whose girlfriend had been traumatized at an early age, sexually, at three, and couldn't have children because of it. And it's so hard because women have that innate nature that keeps the species alive to reproduce and the biological clock and all that stuff.

So it sounds like, yeah, it was the closing and reconciling of all that. So how did you deal with it? I mean, you mentioned you write about this in the book. I sought out a somatic practitioner in Kenya. And for those who don't know what somatic is, somatic is the fundamental belief that trauma starts in your flesh and then it connects with your mind. And so if you experience any kind of sexual trauma, physical trauma, whatever, that if you

don't fundamentally deal with the traumatized energy that's actually in your flesh, and if you want to read a book called, I can talk now, a book called the body keeps the score um that book explains powerfully that trauma begins in your flesh and the message that's received in your flesh then gets shared with your mind now your flesh can't rewrite that memory it can't say oh it wasn't that bad or that's okay your Your mind, however, can do a lot with it. And like, for example, my mind said, you know what, we're going to split this off, create a personality to hold onto that because it's too much. So I went through a somatic, a series of somatic coachings in Kenya, and then it would be Singapore and then back to LA,

where you address the trauma in your flesh and reconcile with your mind so that the two are no longer at odds with each other. Because if my flesh is saying we were traumatized and this happened, and my mind is saying, no, it didn't, or it wasn't that bad, or let's not remember it. There's a disconnect between your mind and body and it creates friction. And in that friction, you get depression, you get physical health issues, you get all kinds of things because your mind and your body are not in sync. And somatic work essentially is a series of really deep meditations, visualizations that are guided by your healer, where I, in my experience, I confronted my personalities. I got to know them. I talked to them, reconciled with them,

and integrated them. I also confronted my grandfather in those meditations. Wow. And we beat the hell out of him in one particular meditation and so these these these confrontations and these uh in these moments they're very real to your mind and to your body whether the fact that it's all happening in your head is kind of irrelevant they're they're real for your mind and your body and they were very healing and at the end of it, my personalities were released. They were. Yeah.

So it's really profound healing. And I think that it's a great layer to all the other kinds of healing you can do. I'm going to have to check out this book. The Body Keeps Score, Brain, Mind and Body and the Healing of Trauma. It is the definitive book on trauma and PTSD and what it does inside your body. Yeah. I'm going to have to check that out. You know, I've seen, I've been single and dated all my life.

I've seen, I've heard so many women's stories of their childhood trauma. I could write five books and it's horrific. It's just extraordinary to the amount that i've seen uh and and the poor choices of parents that they that they make um there's i mean there's a lot of data on this if you pull it up but uh uh i've seen what i've seen or what i'm trying to uh communicate is is i've seen you know not only the stories of of what happened as a child but what it's done in the damage to their lives and how they've gone through it so do you do you think like the the this the therapy you had uh at 47 plus is is was maybe the therapy you needed at 19? Oh, yeah, I wish.

I wish when I, in 1990, which is what we're talking about, I wish that the understanding of trauma had been where it's at today. I wish that the understanding of PTSD, you know, complex PTSD, all of that had been available back when when i started i wasn't diagnosed to having did until it's in my 40s so i lived a life through a traumatized lens with a label of bipolar and at one point was heavily medicated for it so um yeah it's it's difficult not to get caught up in the woulda coulda shoulda kind of thing in your head right because it's difficult not to get caught up in the woulda, coulda, shoulda kind of thing in your head, right? Because it's...

You're just beating yourself up. You can't change the past. Yeah. Yeah, and I think the most complicated part of healing for me are those family relationships. I am still struggling with finding my feet and having a relationship with my parents, I still struggle with that because I think that my parents, ultimately I was five years old and wasn't protected. And there's not, there's nowhere to go from there, right? I can't.

What do you say about that? Yeah. Your choice is taken away from you. A lot of people get a choice. You don't get a choice. And I think that's why people have trust issues. Let me ask you this. Has there been any family therapy or has there been any interests or any of that maybe gone on? No, my family, unfortunately, I think like a lot of families

are largely disinterested. At the time when I was 20 and I revealed my abuse to everyone, it was a topic of discussion for about a minute and a half. And certainly for the rest of my life, it hasn't really been a welcome topic of discussion. So, and that's not, that's not uncommon. Uh,

it's very isolating and sad and disappointing. So one of the things I've had to figure out is how to deal with that. There you go. Um, and so the book's been out for a little while. What's been the response that you found? Have you had other, I think you might've mentioned there might be, you know,

people that have suffered abuse have reached out to you. People have reached out to me through social media and they've just, they've kind of championed the idea that I was brave enough to tell my story, which I find them. So I still find it kind of unusualed the idea that I was brave enough to tell my story, which I find them. So I still find it kind of unusual that the word brave is attached to it. Um, but it, so,

but I find that a lot of survivors reach out and they really just want someone to share with that understands. And that's what I find most of all is that people just want to, this one woman on Tik TOK the other day said, I made a post about something and she's like, you know, I don't feel like I'm alone anymore because I've watched this video and I tried to reassure her you're never alone. Unfortunately, the statistics are there. You're not alone. You know, you're never really alone. And that may be, I don't know, I can't speak for you, but that may be one of the most empowering things that you will do with your life story and the book and your journey is sharing it to people

that aren't alone. Because people that feel they're alone, they tend to do very bad things to themselves. Sometimes it's drinking sometimes it's drugs a lot of people in rehab uh had childhood trauma and that was a surprise i think it was like 90 percent yeah it's a crazy number people that are usually largely overweight uh were sexually abused as a child because they're what they're doing is they're trying to make it so they're not attractive to abusers anymore and so they eat and don't take care of themselves. And they're doing that for, it's self-destructive, but they're doing it as a way to protect themselves. But, you know, one thing that was interesting to me, I went through a journey years ago with when my dog died.

And I didn't always share a lot of personal stuff on on facebook or my other things but uh it was really traumatizing because it was immediate like within 30 minutes she went into a seizure and and it was gone uh and uh it it hit me like a brick um and uh i remember drinking most of a bottle of vodka pouring out my emotions about it onto a Facebook post, and then spending a half an hour trying to decide if I was going to post it. Because I just thought it was, oh, this is too poor as me. This is too all about me. And I'm just being selfish and whatever. I'm just being emotional and whatever.

But it was almost a suicide note because I drank a lot of vodka and i really didn't want to wake up the next morning and uh and so i hit send and then i passed out uh and the next morning i woke up to calls and i woke up to people talking to me about stuff and what was interesting to me in processing it was it it it it impacted in a way that really wasn't about me. There were so many people that it helped that went through, oh, my God, I didn't process my father's death. I didn't process my dog's death. I mean, it became this cathartic thing for a lot of people. People shared their feelings and opened up to me.

People wrote me about how it helped them with their thing. And I know that journeys like yours, because we've had a few people on the show that have written about this and talked about childhood trauma, including psychiatrists that have dealt with it. And one of the things that comes out of this that you may find is a beautiful thing is that you help other people. I mean,

I've had people on my Twitter that told me they were going to commit suicide that day. And something I said that was positive made them not do it. That's crazy to think about that. You would have that sort of impact without really that intention, but you know, helping people sometimes that's what we do in life. We share our stories and helps other people because that's the life manual

for life. Yeah. I think it's i i hope that my story inspires other people mostly i really hope this story inspires people to get help help to really and i try to describe people i think by and large people are afraid to go into therapy because they're not quite sure what happens in that environment they don't really trust the environment right trust? Trust is a big deal. But I would just encourage people to consider the fact that therapy is the one environment you're going to go into where you actually control the narrative. You control your story. No one's going to replace the words you use. No one's going to tell you it's not true. That's not going to happen. And so I think that for survivors, it's really important to know that you've probably never felt like your narrative was ever fully in your control. Because you've got family who have an opinion or friends who have an opinion or whatever.

But in therapy, you're actually totally in control. And I know from my experience, it was like the first time my shoulders actually relaxed. It was the first, yeah. Cause I actually felt like I'm in a completely objective space that I control. And if my, you know, I went in and the first time I met my first therapist, Dr. D, he said, tell me why you're here. And I said, I was abused by my grandpa. And I started crying. That's all I said. I didn't go into the details. I didn't get into the nitty gritty of it for a very long time. And I think that people sometimes think that, well, the therapist is going to make me talk about this, or the therapist is going to make me do

that. No, you're totally in control of that environment. And there's lots of times I'm in therapy now. And once in a while, my therapist will say, well, ask a question or something. And I'll say, you know what? I'm not going to talk about that today because I'm in control. And it's pretty liberating when you realize, wait a minute, this is my story and I get to tell it exactly the way I want to. Yes. And it's really freeing. So I just hope that people get help. There you go.

Now, you've made a journal, a guided companion journal. Tell us about that, that people can get on Amazon as well. When I finished my book, I felt like things were incomplete. And I thought, you know, if you read my book and you want to know how do I get help, I felt responsible to leave a tool behind. So I reached out to my very good friend, Aparna Ramakrishnan, who has a master's in social work, and she works a lot with the CDC and other groups. And we put together this journal called Hurt No More, and it's really the fundamental first steps to starting your healing journey. And it guides you through some exercises, gives you some things to think about. And the first exercise or the first step is just write it down. You don't have to say it.

You don't have to tell anybody else. Whatever your trauma is, it could be medical trauma, a traffic accident, abuse, violence, verbal abuse, whatever it is, just write it down. And sometimes in just writing it down, a lot of people haven't been able to do that and it's just that first step of admitting and acknowledging that you have some trauma to deal with it can be an enormous first step and a really positive first step and that's why we developed the book that's why we wrote it that's I mean, it's great that people can have a guided journal. So when it says guided journal, what sort of, do you give suggestions or tips or self-help exercises? All of the above. Yeah. So the, the, every chapter will start with,

you know, let's start here. Let's start, write your story down and I'll encourage you to write about it. And then I'll go into a kind of introspective from me about what it took to first acknowledge my abuse and write it down. And then we'll offer you some, an exercise to help move to the next step. There's a lot of references in there to meditation. I think that meditation is really key to really centering your mind and feeling good. So there's references to meditation, there's references to talking to your bed partner. There's some really helpful resources in the back. How do you talk to your kids? How do you talk to your bed partner? How do you find a good therapist? And it's really just hopefully a tool for people to get started. There you go. I love the idea.

It helps adults reflect, reframe, and gain control of their lives and voices. Reframing is really important. I've heard people discuss about that. How does it work for you? In my own experience, and again, this wasn't something i was aware of for quite some time there's a enormous layer of shame that gets spread quite thickly across my story and shame shame is kind of that horrible voice in your head that tells me you know for me it's like well you're fat and you're this and you're lazy and you didn't do this and you spent too much money and all the things that shame can say to me.

And everyone's shame voice is different. And I think what's really important is that if you're able to create enough space for yourself where you can step away from that voice and look at it a bit more objectively and say, you know what, that's just rubbish. That's just nonsense. That's just nonsense. I'm not this and I'm not that. Then you're reframing the way that you think about yourself. And the further away you can get from your shameful, shame-driven voice and your trauma centered voice into a more objective and self-loving voice, then that's an enormous part of your healing. Because I think shame by far leaves the deepest scars. And even I thought myself, I thought I never blamed myself for my sexual assault. I was very clear. It had nothing to do with me, I still carried a lot of shame about it. And to be able to reframe and get away from

the shame of abuse is an enormous journey. I think that the people hopefully can engage and just know that it's going to take a lot of time. Shame is the worst. Shame is the most lasting and the most complicated, I think. Let me ask you this. I was having problems with my ADHD and my obsessive compulsive things. And I was out of tune to a point that I just, my dogs would come to me and I just wasn't, I was just like, I don't know, I was in this haze of life. And someone suggested to me Eckhart Tolle's book, Being Present. You ever check that out?

I have not checked that out. It talks about basically how being present, ascribing that you can't change the past. It is what it is. And you can't change the future either, really. I mean, you can change the future, actually. But you can't spend your time, well, I'll be happy when the future happens, i mean you can't change the future actually but you can't spend your time you know well i'll be happy when the future happens you know sort of thing you've got your your moment is now the future is technically now and and how you deal with now determines that

future so you can't just sit there and wish into you know i'm well i'm not going to do anything today i'm going to sit around eating doritositos and I'm going to be a millionaire next week. So, you know, like that, you've got to actually do something now. Yeah. Momentum is required. Yeah, exactly. And in the present, you have to let go. You have to, you know, because my mind was playing all that, you know, crap ADHD does.

And, and you're spending all this time. I remember when I, when I first went in for depression and was put on Zoloft, which is, I think, a form of Prozac, my therapist says, you think about the same things every day at the same time every day. And I go, no, I don't. Fuck you. You're crazy. You're stupid.

He's like, why don't you go home and journal it? He goes, I know you do. And I go, you're full of shit. And so I went home and journal it and i was like in like 11 o'clock i had topic uh same up on deck every single day 10 a.m 11 a.m whatever i think i had a whole freaking agenda of of rotating uh anxieties i suppose you call them so uh therapy helps and this is why i like discussions like this because uh hopefully we can help some people and help everyone get the story out and tell you story which is your story

which is empowering and you're taking your control back i think it's interesting um there's a lot of science out there about gut health and how it affects mental health and i wonder if your digestion notice the cat your digestion had anything to do with the timing of those rapid cycles those mini cycles and um i think it's something that people need to consider is what you're eating feeds your mind and it feeds if you're if if you have uh if you have a lot of things in your diet that have a lot of sugar for example everyone knows at this point sugar is pretty evil um you get these rapid ups and downs well your mind will follow it right because because the nourishment that it's receiving is erratic um

and so i think it's healing is complicated and it comes in layers. You can't ignore the physical while you focus on the mental. You really need to heal both. I personally believe that you process trauma. I don't like the phrase of getting over things because I don't think that that's necessarily healthy. I think you get through them and what i learned the biggest lesson i've learned in healing over the past few years particularly with somatic work is that trauma is energy and it comes at you and you can either deflect it and push it away which means it's going to come back at you even harder and heavier than ever before or you can for me I visualize it as a ball of light, let's say,

and I catch it and I control it. And then as I push it away from me, so I receive it and I push it away from me and I just say no. So I'm not fighting against it anymore. I'm not asking trauma to go back, double down and come back at me again. I'm receiving it. I'm not asking trauma to go back double down and come back at me again I'm receiving it. I'm letting it pass through me And then it leaves me and the more that I visualize If I get a voice in my head that's unkind Or impatient or whatever I literally stop Visualize it as energy coming at me And I catch it, stop it and release it.

And I, and I move on and there's an enormously helpful book called the expectation hangover, which after you read the body keeps the score. I highly recommend that book. And it talks about, if you want to talk about living life in the present, I didn't live life in the present until about nine months ago because I was either living through, I was living through a traumatized lens.

So I was always living one foot in the past, one foot in the present. And that's just creates conflict in your body and in your mind and i had to become a whole person again and not have multiple personality disorder and not have all these other things going on before i could actually be in the present and not tethered to my past and it's it's it's it's something to write a book and talk about being living your life in the present but i i don't know what the book talks about. But certainly, there are layers you have to go through to get to the point where you're no longer responding to your past. Yeah, definitely, definitely. And it's an interesting journey.

You brought up gut health. We've had authors on the show, at least two authors on the show that are psychiatrists or medical people and they found gut health uh affects brain swelling and uh and uh you know there's even one we had on who claimed it tempered a little bit of autism we didn't resolve it but it helped reduce some of the effects of autism yeah i thought that was kind of interesting um and uh this is a doctor who's been doing this for 25 to 30 years, so we don't really put quacks on the show. So we had some interesting data, and it was an interesting conversation. But, yeah, the gut health, there's something in your gut

that can directly affect swelling in the brain, which probably doesn't help other things. And, yeah, I mean, much of my life i ate very badly i'm still wearing some of it today and uh it probably didn't help the rest of me going on so that's uh that's why it's important to fix that uh square that hole too as well but it's you know you make these i make these choices and i made choices about what to eat what to spend where to live who to date what you know all those choices were made through a very sharp uh kind of shattered lens that's called trauma and so it's what's what's complicated now and i'm 53 and i'm figuring stuff out is i now have to convince my body

that got used to a set of vibrations that it was comfortable in, right? Not healthy vibrations, but just that's what we're used to. And I now have to convince my body that those vibrations are unhealthy and I want a new vibration. And it's very complicated to convince my mind and body, no, we actually don't want McDonald's. No, we actually want to go to the gym because my body is so comfortable being in this other space anything new that's introduced to it it goes wait a minute this is this is kind of what this crap come on let's go back to where we feel good and it's hard it's hard to explain to people how it's just not a matter of willpower yeah it's it's it's got nothing to do with willpower

your body's actually designed to keep you on a temperate balance with yeah it's it's it's got nothing to do with willpower your body's actually designed to keep you on a temperate balance with what it's used to it's actually yes it's actually designed that way for a reason yes it's not always healthy but that's not the way the robot was built so you know you've got to hack the robot but yeah you know what i found is you know since i turned 50 i gave up drinking i didn't give it up i never had a problem but i definitely abused it i i was i never needed it or jonesed it but i was abusing it and and for a long time it was a fuel it was the sugar of it i think it was a fuel that was like hey i need to work a little bit harder on my entrepreneurial business and i need to cut a few more hours of work here

and if i drink i'll relax or you know I think I relax and I can do more work. And so it was kind of that, you know, I mean, it was one of those things. I mean, if I were drinking, I could party all night long when I was young and, uh, we'd go to Sundance and we'd go to house parties all night long. And, and, uh, you know, as long as the booze

was flowing, it was like a sugar basically for me. It was a crack, but I didn't drink in the morning. I have a problem with it, but, uh, you know, I just realized I was using it for a crutch and I've also done the same thing with my diet where I've lost weight. I've learned to eat better. Now we eat one to two salads a day. I buy all my, uh, salad stuff from a local farm that grows a lot of hydroponic stuff. And I've kind of reached this thing that i think it's been a journey since about 45 that i've been on i didn't realize i was on basically it was a way to try and find to love

myself better and in doing so treat myself better and well i see drinking and i would love to enjoy it but i know that you know a couple hours of fun means three hours of dehydration and body bloating and hell um you know and i've and i you know the other night i think i went out and ate something badly that i don't normally oh i ate chicken nuggets at this place i used to eat when i used to work out and it's really fatty and the sauce is bad it's so delicious right and i was like i'll just have a small one and one of my promises to you my body will take anything like protein and turn it into muscle and then I'll gain five pounds. But it's usually muscle.

And, but, you know, and so now I've had to go back to, okay, back to the salads, but don't eat the big fatty stuff. You know, my body is built to where if I eat that crap, it immediately goes, aha, fat. Ah, turn that right in there. That's the good stuff. That's a whole other conversation. Yeah.

And so, but technically, the whole journey I've been on lately is loving myself. Yeah. And so I wake up now and I don't have a hangover. I don't, I don't, I'm not sitting there going, oh, God, what did I eat last night? You know, I recently journaled on Facebook about how

i went to see a movie i went to see the big lebowski which did a 25 year anniversary and ate like a whole thing of popcorn nasty industrial butter whatever so good i think that's uh i think part of it's some sort of toxic waste maybe some uh the best toxic waste ever technically but the next morning man my gut was like fuck you fuck you and you're gonna feel this all day long so fuck you and i wrote about it on facebook but no i think i think one of the most important things that we can go on this journey is just learning to love ourself you know and say hey you know what no one no one else in this damn ass world loves us like you know maybe

my dogs love me i think um that or i'm just keep riding with the retreats and they love me but you know it's a relationship uh but but you know this self-love sort of thing is what i've been into and so i love waking up without a hangover i love not being dehydrated i love feeling good throughout the day you were never going to get me away from my coffee Someone on LinkedIn found what we just said Very funny, so there you go You can't write something? Wait, that's a new emoji, but thank you

Words bad, smiley good Maybe that's the journey That you and other people Are on to try and see if we can't love each other and take care of ourselves better. Because that's the one thing we found in our lives is these fucking people, the rest of these people on this planet don't love us. So we might as well take care of ourselves and give us some self-love. Well, I think if you want to attract healthy love, it has to start with you loving yourself in a healthy way first, right? And then you set the vibration for what you're going to attract. So I practice self-love every day. I meditate

every morning. I practice gratitude as part of that meditation. And I pick one thing about myself that I love. And this used to be really difficult for me. I gained 80 pounds as a result of my surgery and all that stuff. And I'm not happy with the way i look but i started picking one thing about me that i loved and that's what i practice every day and that it makes a huge difference yeah and is that incorporated into the journal yes there's a whole chapter there you go you may sell more books to the journal than you will of your story i doubt that great i yeah whatever no i mean i'm glad you've given people not only a book about your story, you've told your story,

it empowers you. It gives you control back. It becomes your story and not what, you know, somebody else's story of what they did to you. And there, there's empowerment there. And then also you've given people tools to help themselves.

And this is how we learned. I mean, the one thing I've learned about all the authors and people we have on the show is that there is no life user manual, owner's manual. And so stories, you know, movies, TV, books, all these things that we learn from are the ways that we kind of learn life, learn about being and behaving in life. We also learn that we're not alone. And that's an important aspect that I hope people listen to the show. And if they know people who have trauma, make sure they don't feel alone. Because that's the worst thing, is when you

feel like you're the only person in the world and your head's all messed up in that way where it's going, you know, I don't matter. I don't have value. And that's not the right place to be. That's when you lose people. Yeah.

You do. And we certainly don't want that to happen. So a great journey we've been through with you on the show. Anything more you want to tease about the book before we go? No, just know that there's hope at the end. In life and in my book, there's hope at the end. I love that message. There's hope. And that's hope at the end. So I love that message. There's hope.

And that's, uh, what's the old saying? Life springs eternal from hope. So there you go. I see what you did there. There you go. Get it.

Rebecca. It's been wonderful. You have it on the show. Thank you for coming on. Thank you so much. There you go. And let's get a plug out for your.com. So people can find you on the interwebs too as well uh rebeccaechandler.com don't forget the e in the middle and you can take it from there there you go and uh folks order up the

book wherever fine books are sold in the journal uh the story is it won't hurt none a story of courage healing and return to wholeness and if you're suffering from issues and stuff reach out talk to a psychotherapist and help or psychotherapist psychotherapist is there a difference between a psychotherapist and a psych therapist i think one's a word and one isn't but we'll leave that to the others to decide i met some psych psych psych therapists that were psycho but that's a different story. That's next time. I've got some stories about that from my channel. Oh, I have stories.

That's the next book. Order up wherever fine books are sold. Available January 2nd, folks. Thank you for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.